Here are 100 books that Wolf-Boy fans have personally recommended if you like
Wolf-Boy.
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As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to exploring the teenage experience. Maybe that’s because my experiences in high school and college were rife with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows—everything was intensely beautiful and painful at once. That tension played a major role in my self-discovery process, and story-wise, it makes for a compelling character. But in a lot of literature, I find the depiction of teenage characters to be either sensationalized or infantilizing, melodramatic, or unconvincingly flat. When writing my own adolescent subjects in The Wayside, I turned often toward the rich, complex characters in the stories here.
Along with Anthropology of an American Girl, this is one of the books that made me want to become a writer. More specifically, it opened my eyes to what a writer can do with a teenage subject.
The story follows a prep-school student, Lee, but Sittenfeld handles her experience with all the nuance of “adult” subjects. I also admire how Sittenfeld captures the labyrinthine social politics of an elite boarding school and comments on class and race hierarchies without ever feeling didactic.
I think people mistake this book as YA—I certainly did when I first picked it up as a thirteen-year-old—but don’t be fooled by that candy-colored ribbon belt on the cover. This is as complex a novel as they come.
An insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I am a tumbleweed writer—one who moves from town to town every few years—and I have learned to adapt to new communities and break into new friend groups. In a sense, one could say I reinvented parts of myself as I moved from place to place, and I changed hats regarding what job I would get. Although challenging at times, the scope of this atypical lifestyle has provided me with a wealth of experiences to draw on when drafting a story, not only in setting and career, but also the psychological rollercoaster that comes with blowing with the wind.
Not only is it loaded with suspenseful moments, but the heartache, Pi’s incredible journey, and the masterful metaphor make it one of those books that will always be near the top of my reading pile. Even the side story of why Pi changed his name is written with humor and heart.
I am a fan of survival stories, and I’m also an animal lover, so the combination of animals playing such a huge role, coupled with Pi struggling to survive when the odds are against him, makes this a great read.
After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi Patel, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger, Richard Parker, for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his…
I came out as a gay man later in life (at age 24) just as the AIDS crisis was beginning, and the deaths and societal backlash during that time almost pushed me back in the closet. The books I listed here were instrumental in helping me find my author’s “voice” while I struggled to fully accept my identity. I feel passionate about the list because the books contain elements essential for every decent fiction author: humour, pathos, grief, joy, empathy, love, and understanding of the human condition. In developing this list of books, I’m reminded of how crucial it is for writers to read and often study the work and style of other authors.
This book affected me profoundly as a teenager who was questioning his own sexual identity in the early 1970s.
The novel is a study of friendship between two teenage boys at a boarding school after World War II. They’re co-dependent, and the elements of suppression and the threat of violence between the two mirrored my own confusion with close male friends “in real life” at the same time.
This is a book that shaped my early understanding of sexuality, even though the author denied any homoerotic undertones in the story.
'A novel that made such a deep impression on me at sixteen that I can still conjure the atmosphere in my fifties: of yearning, infatuation mingled indistinguishably with envy, and remorse' Lionel Shriver
An American coming-of-age tale during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to the second world war.
Set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual.…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
After completing the first draft of Monday Rent Boy, I was taken aback to discover a common theme running through all of my books: a focus on children in adverse situations. A Secret Music. The Ghost Garden. And now Monday Rent Boy. What holds paramount importance for me… is tracing the trajectory of the injured child as he or she navigates the journey toward adulthood…And…what does that path look like… what are the factors that help a person rise versus the ones that crush another? The more urgent answer to the question of why write? I came to see that certain subjects need to be written. And hopefully, read.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows Theo Decker, a young man grappling with trauma, loss, and guilt. Themes of friendship, mentorship (through his relationship with Hobie), and the search for redemption are central to the story.
This book has the best opening scene of any book I’ve ever read. No matter what, I needed to be on this journey with the characters Tartt had drawn so evocatively.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the…
I grew up a closeted gay in a very straight world. I enjoy reading both true and fictional stories about how others grew up and came out. I decided to write about coming-out and coming-of-age because this mixture of topics just didn’t exist when I was a teen. The books that I have listed here are ones that I feel capture both the realism of what is, what we wished had been, and the hope of what could be—a world where "coming out" wouldn’t be necessary.
I loved the mixture of third and first person that this story is told in. The main character Dillon is both fun, sad, and imminently well-drawn. His harrowing dash from Perth to Sydney, his relationships with Amy, Pastor Pete, wonderful Dixie, and Stephen, and his sheer will to be his authentic self, had me both scared and happy for him.
I loved the mixture of coming-out and coming-of-age with some thriller elements thrown in, not something that I see a lot of in coming-of-age novels.
A teenager's quest for freedom leads him on the streets and into the path of a local serial killer.
15-year-old Dillon is on the run.
Until recently he enjoyed friends, family, and the safe confines of a religious cult. But when a confession ignites the wrath of his church Dillon escapes ... and he's about to discover a vast world beyond the private walls of his former life.
Once in Sydney he faces a bustling city full of dreams and nightmares. Desperate to survive, Dillon is lured to the red-light district where strangers pay for pretty boys.
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen sometimes: you start a book only to find you simply can’t put it down. This was the case for me with Lonely Castle in the Mirror, a coming-of-age story.
At first glance the book seems like an entertainment novel with a fantasy element. Six teenagers slip through their respective bedroom mirrors and find themselves in a surreal castle with a mission to complete. Only at second glance does it become clear what this book is really about.
It is about loneliness and friendship, and about the painful process of growing up. None of the teenagers are really any good at forming relationships. And yet: by taking the risk and accepting commitments, the sense of responsibility within them grows, and they surpass themselves.
A magical parable. And who actually says that good literature can’t also be entertaining? It’s ideal when both happen at…
For fans of BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD, fairy tale and magic are weaved together in sparse language that belies a flooring emotional punch.
'Strange and beautiful. Imagine the offspring of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle with The Virgin Suicides' GUARDIAN 'Genuinely affecting. A story of empathy, collaboration and sharing truths' FINANCIAL TIMES
Translated by Philip Gabriel, a translator of Murakami _______________________________
Would you share your deepest secrets to save a friend?
In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining.
At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives to a…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
My novel Venice Beach—like the five books I recommend here—has been classified as a “coming-of-age” novel, a classification that I have no quarrels with as long as it’s understood that coming-of-age is not regarded simply as a synonym for “adolescence” or “being a teenager.” The coming-of-age years—generally defined as between ages 12 and 18—are so much more than a period of life wedged between childhood and adulthood. Coming of age is a process, not a block of time; it is a hot emotional forge in which we experience so many “firsts” and are hammered, usually painfully, into the shapes that will last a lifetime.
Bruiser is only nine years old, younger than most “coming of age” protagonists, but his anxiety-ridden family life in a Manhattan apartment has aged him. His father is a philanderer who rarely is home and often physically abusive when he is; his mother is a deeply depressed poet. Bruiser spends most of his time running around his Upper West Side neighborhood with a make-shift gang of older boys—and has the bruises to show for it, hence his nickname—or hiding at the bottom of the clothes hamper when his parents are going at it. He befriends a 10-year-old girl, Darla, who lives across the courtyard with her drug-addled mother and who convinces him to run away with her. Their journey, which takes them first to West Virginia in search of Darla’s father and eventually to North Carolina, is the book’s magic. Both kids are pre-puberty, so it’s…
After spending another morning hiding in the clothes hamper eavesdropping on his miserable parents, Bruiser realizes it's time to change his life. It's New York City during the late 1970s, and in the middle of a chilly autumn night he takes to the open road with Darla, a kindred spirit who lives across the alleyway. Their flight from the mounting tensions of home -- an adventure dotted with frightening episodes and surprising revelations -- is a journey in search of liberation and emotional truth.
This is Bruiser's tale in his own words, captured by first-time novelist Ian Chorao with uncanny…
I'm a contemporary romance writer with two novels: No Hard Feelings and Crushing, stories about complex, messy women making mistakes and learning from them. As I work on my third novel, I'm remembering how hard it is to write when you're in a reading rut. Sometimes every book I pick up is disappointing, and reading feels like a chore, and I risk losing momentum. Sometimes I need something familiar to get back on track and remember why I love my job. These books feel like a long exhale. I can come to them with an overloaded brain, bad moods and doubt and discontent, and turn the last page restored.
What comfort library would be complete without Emily Henry?
I’ll read anything she writes, but Poppy and Alex’s love story is the stuff of my dreams. Friends to lovers, split timelines, and more yearning than I know what to do with Seamlessly blending humour and heart and set between Palm Springs, New York, Italy, and somewhere in the sedate American midwest, You and Me on Vacation was the antidote to my mid-lockdown claustrophobia.
I like to read my fluff on the treadmill – it keeps my brain more occupied than music or podcasts, so I’m less likely to remember how much I hate working out – and it was so delicious I found myself looking forward to time at the gym. A true feat.
Two friends. Ten trips. Their last chance to fall in love...
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'One of my favourite authors' Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us 'A gorgeous romance' Beth O'Leary, The No-Show 'Loveable characters, hilarious wit and steamy sexual chemistry' Laura Jane Williams, Our Stop
*Also known as People We Meet On Vacation*
12 YEARS AGO: Poppy and Alex meet. They hate each other, and are pretty confident they'll never speak again.
11 YEARS AGO: They're forced to share a ride home from college and by the end of it a friendship is formed. And a pact: every year, one vacation together.…
I don’t think I’m alone in considering cults and those who join cults fascinating, but I’ve also always found it frustrating when non-fiction accounts or documentaries focus on the logistics of how the communes operate rather than finding out the why. Why do people join a cult, why do they stay, why do they follow increasingly erratic and dangerous instruction? For me, researching cults for my new novel The Sleepless – about a commune whose disciples believe that sleep is a social construct – was about finding out about the characters, the individuals, who are drawn into organisations which often ask you to relinquish that self-same sense of individuality.
This is a novel about a young woman, the titular Nina, escaping from a Maoist cult and it’s a terrifically absorbing and engrossing tale.
What makes it unique is that it’s as much about the protagonist reclaiming, or even forming, her own identity as it is about the cult that she’s wrestling herself free from. Both the storyline and the form of the book itself involves the reader in that journey into freedom. An excellent and under-rated book.
Winner of the Saltire Literary Award Fiction Book of the Year
'Literary gold . . . Morrison has published his masterpiece' Sunday Times
'Sensational. Like nothing I've ever read. A tour de force' Ian Rankin
Nina X has never been outside. She has never met another child. Nina X has no books, no toys and no privacy. Nina X has no idea what the outside world is like. Nina X has a lot to learn.
Nina X has no mother and no father; she has Comrade Chen, and Comrades Uma, Jeni and Ruth. Her closest emotional connection is with the…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I have always loved reading about individuals and the ways they behave in extraordinary or unusual circumstances. Stories that are about a person growing up and coming to an understanding that the world around them is deeply flawed, and that they themselves are patched-up, imperfect creatures, fascinate me. I find myself observing people and the words they say. Those are the kinds of stories I write, about regular people stumbling along and discovering some truths about themselves.
The protagonist is a Pakistani girl moving from the urban city of Rawalpindi to a rural city in the US, as part of a program that places students abroad for a year in high school.
There were so many instances when I completely understood Hira, the way she talked about the US, about growing up in Pakistan, about language. Her adjusting to life far from home is complicated by her illness, a disease the perception of which further makes us question our prejudices about a place and its people.
'Prose that dances with charge and potency' LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
WINNER OF A 2023 ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE
On a year-long exchange programme, sixteen-year-old Hira must swap the bustle of urban Pakistan for church and volleyball practice in rural Oregon.
Stuck between two worlds, her experience of America is sometimes freeing, sometimes painful, often quite painful. And while she faces racism and Islamophobia, she also makes new friends and has her first kiss.
But when her new life is blown apart by a shocking health crisis, Hira's sense of belonging is overturned once…
