Guy Burt's favorite literary fiction novels about coming of age in a broken world

I am in awe of the repressed, elegiac emotion that Ishiguro brings to his characters.

Never Let Me Go kept me in a state of constant tension between Kathy’s version of events (which is full of omissions and self-deception) and the version I was constructing in my own head (which was so often at odds with hers).

This is something Ishiguro also does brilliantly in other books, but here I was particularly drawn to the deft way he shows us a morally bankrupt adult world through the eyes of an adolescent protagonist – that’s exactly the territory I write.

Like the fish who doesn’t realise the water is there, Kathy struggles to understand the true nature of Hailsham until it’s far too late; and there’s real moral anger behind the quiet delivery.

What I love most about Atonement is the way McEwan commits so totally and convincingly to Briony’s perspective – even when that risks making her feel unsympathetic to the reader.

Authors writing young characters so often stray into arch irony or soft-edged nostalgia, but McEwan keeps Briony awkward and sometimes unlikeable and resolutely real, before allowing her to grow and understand and become appalled at what she’s done.

McEwan has written young characters brilliantly before, but Atonement is more grounded: richly observed, layered, full of living, breathing characters, and almost unbearably poignant at the end. It’s also a masterclass in the craft of novel-writing, with multiple perspectives, shifts of register, and striking use of free indirect style (which I just love).

I’ve always been fascinated by strange social enclaves and secretive, sealed-off, private worlds, and this book has both.

But in fact, the thing I admire most here is the sense of place and atmosphere. Tartt writes with a lush, immersive style which I found is increasingly compelling as the book went on.

Using a murder as the gateway drug to what’s really a literary fiction character study is both sneaky and brilliant: I was hooked by the story in the first chapter, but once I’d finished the book, it was Richard’s voice, those eerie characters, their strange insular co-dependency, and the biting Vermont winter landscape that really stayed with me.

Coming of age, to me, is in part about recognising that the adult world to which you’ve entrusted your childhood is not what it claimed to be: that adults can be fallible, weak, morally culpable, emotionally absent.

Giovanna in The Lying Life of Adults embarks on the same kind of desperate, determined effort to weld her family back together that Scott does in my book. The way she tries to navigate parental failure without letting it crush her is achingly sad at times, but the novel is also loud and raw and full of life.

Something I like hugely is that it’s a book which really trusts its readers: Giovanna gets no clear answers, no neat character arc. Nothing is tidy or comfortable. This is adolescence as it really feels. 

Fierce, direct, unashamedly intense, Ghost Wall hits the reader hard and fast and doesn’t let up and I am very much there for that.

For me, the great achievement here is Sylvie’s voice and how Moss keeps a dark undercurrent of fury running through the book. The theme of adult authority, and Silvie’s struggle against it, is central, and I found it extraordinary the way Moss brings us deep into the head of a girl who is always vigilant, always aware, always watching for danger.

It’s also a book which says something insidious about how violence can start to feel ordinary when you live close to it every day. In terms of adults failing their children, this is the one to beat.