bildungsromane

Provides a portrait of English provincial life in the nineteenth century, focusing on Dorothea Brooks and her two marriages, Dr. Lydgate, and the Vincy family.

Lonnie grows up caught in the middle of his beloved grandfather Homer Bannon, an old-time cattleman dedicated to the values of honesty and decency, and Hud, Homer's unscrupulous stepson.

The experiences of a teenager growing up in a small town in New Mexico are, at various times, funny, sad, and poignant.

One day in 1905, eleven-year-old Lucius is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck to "borrow" his grandfather's automobile. Ned McCaslin, a Negro, stows away in the car and the three embark on an odyssey which ends at Miss Reba's bordello.

David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend James Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble, yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora Spenlow; and the magnificently impecunious Wilkins Micawber, one of literature's great comic creations. In David Copperfield - the novel he described as his 'favourite child' - Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of the most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure. This edition uses the text of the first volume publication of 1850, and includes updated suggestions for further reading, original illustrations by 'Phiz', a revised chronology and expanded notes. In his new introduction, Jeremy Tambling discusses the novel's autobiographical elements, and its central themes of memory and identity.

Seventeen-year-old Kate, feeling alone in the wake of her mother's death and her father's preoccupation with his new girlfriend, prepares, with the help of her younger sister, to give birth to her baby in secret.

A fictional account of a young girl's coming of age in Antigua, from a doted upon childhood to an adolescence fraught with events and alliances leading her away from mutual complacent acceptance.

A deaf mute who has lost his only friend to a hospital for the insane becomes the recipient of the confidences of several other town residents.