Books about coming of age

Tells the story of a seventeen-year-old dropout who has been kicked out of his fourth school. This novel dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.

Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, this work explores with humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the thirties.

Secret Life of Bees is a novel.

Francie Nolan is a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. Her family are brave, devoted immigrants, struggling to survive and rise above the squalor, poverty and violence that surround their tenement home.

Dolores Price is the wry and overweight, sensitive and pained, cynical heroine of this novel. The story follows her from four to 40, from her shattered family life through the hellish circles of sexual and food abuse to her gradual recovery and her fight to love again.

Lee Fiora is an intelligent fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. As Lee soon learns, Ault is quite unlike anything she has previously experienced. She eventually finds her own place in the pecking order - until a single act of spontaneous folly shatters her carefully honed identity.

Cassandra Mortmain records the characters of her unconventional family and the transformation of all their lives when a handsome American landlord arrives. This comedy romance was the first novel of the author who became best known for A Hundred and One Dalmatians .

Created and edited by Justin Kestler and Ben Florman, SparkNotes Literature Guides provide analysis of (currently) 175 classic works of English and foreign language literature - novels, biographies, plays and poetry - that most commonly appear on examination syllabuses. These books provide the insights that today's students need to know.

The remarkable debut novel from Khaled Hosseini, now out in paperback in a stunning new package

The shocking thing about the girls was how nearly normal they seemed when their mother let them out for the one and only date of their lives. Twenty years on, their enigmatic personalities are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who recall their shared adolescence.

This story is the first in K.M. Peyton's Flambards quartet, and was the runner-up for the Carnegie medal. Readership age 11+.

A novel that is as beautiful and as dangerous as the Oleander Chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her booclub Over a million copies in print

The Sunday Times bestseller that is David Mitchell's most enjoyable novel yet

Carmen, Tibby, Lena and Bridget have been best friends all their lives. They live in the same small American town and usually spend every moment of their long summer holidays together. Tibby buys a pair of jeans in a second-hand shop and the girls discover that the trousers fit each of them perfectly, despite their different figures and heights.

Life isn't easy for Margaret. She's moved away from her childhood home, she's starting a new school, finding new friends - and she's convinced she's not normal. For a start, she hasn't got a clue whether she wants to be Jewish like her father or Christian like her mother. Everyone else seems really sure of who they are.