An elaborate and moving coming-of-age story about Eugene Gant, a restless and energetic character whose passion to experience life takes him from his small, rural hometown in North Carolina to Harvard University and the city of Boston. The novel's pattern is artfully simple--a small town, a large family, high school and college--yet the characters are monumental in their graphic individuality and personality.

Three sixth-grade boys get involved in a series of misadventures.

Set in a seaside town on the Italian Riviera, a young boy experiences an unforgettable summer. Luca shares his amazing adventures with his newfound friend Alberto, but their fun is threatened by a deeply held secret: they're sea monsters from another world just below the water's surface.

An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present day. The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy Afghan youth and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of...

Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer takes on a quest in this and a parallel world, the "Territories," to acquire a mystical talisman that will save the life of his dying mother and her "twinner," the Queen of the Territories. Jack "flips" back and forth between worlds during his journey, finding his way through and past representatives of good and evil in both.

The inspiration for the film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, this resonant story of a mother’s unsettling quest to understand her teenage son’s deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them remains terrifyingly prescient.
Eva never really wanted to be a mother. And certainly not the mother of a boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker,...

"In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, 'A Clockwork Orange' is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial...

"Peggy Orenstein's Girls & Sex broke ground, shattered taboos, and galvanized conversations about young women's right to pleasure and agency in sexual encounters. It also had an unintended effect on its author: Orenstein realized that talking about girls is only half the conversation. To understand girls and sex, we also need to talk about boys and sex. Today's young men are subject to the same cultural forces as their female peers. They are steeped...

Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928.

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new

...

A young boy living in the Florida backwoods is forced to decide the fate of a fawn he has lovingly raised as a pet.