Themes
Books About Growing Up
The transition from child to adult — the books that map that territory best.
20 books · ranked
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1
Sophie's World
A teenager receives mysterious lessons that walk through the whole history of Western philosophy; a story and a course in one.
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2
The Fault in Our Stars
Two teenagers with cancer fall in love; funny and heartbreaking without ever being saccharine.
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3
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
An orphan learns he is a wizard and finds a home at a school of magic; the book that made a generation read.
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4
Born a Crime
Growing up mixed-race under and after apartheid; funny, sharp and genuinely moving.
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5
The Hate U Give
A teenager witnesses a police shooting and finds her voice; urgent, powerful and humane.
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6
Becoming
Michelle Obama's memoir traces her journey from the South Side of Chicago through Princeton, Harvard Law School, a career in public service and eight years in the White House. Intimate, politically engaged and carefully crafted, it is one of the bestselling memoirs ever published.
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7
The Diary of a Young Girl
A teenage girl's diary while hiding from the Nazis; one of the most important and human documents of the century.
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8
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou's memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the American South and in California — the racism, the trauma and the gradual emergence of her voice through literature. One of the most widely assigned and most challenged memoirs in American education, it announces one of the great literary voices of the 20th century.
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9
Never Let Me Go
Three friends at a strange English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for; restrained and heartbreaking.
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10
The Silence of the Lambs
A young FBI trainee bargains with a brilliant killer to catch another; a flawless, terrifying thriller.
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11
A Wizard of Earthsea
A gifted boy at a school of wizardry must face the darkness he unleashed; spare, wise coming-of-age fantasy.
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12
Just Mercy
Bryan Stevenson, a young lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, recounts his early career defending death row prisoners in Alabama — including Walter McMillian, a Black man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Stevenson's memoir is one of the most important accounts of the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor, the mentally ill and people of colour.
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13
Americanah
Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, moves to the United States for university and spends fifteen years discovering what it means to be Black in America — a category she did not inhabit in Nigeria. Meanwhile Obinze, her first love, tries and fails to build a life in England and returns to Lagos. Adichie's richly observed novel is about race, class and the specific discovery of race-consciousness that comes from leaving home.
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14
Black Boy
Richard Wright's autobiographical account of his childhood and youth in the Jim Crow South — the hunger, the violence, the white employer who takes him to a library, the reading that opens a world while making life in Mississippi impossible. One of the great American memoirs and one of the founding texts of the 20th-century Black literary tradition.
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15
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff's memoir of his adolescence in 1950s America — moving with his mother from town to town, enduring a cruel stepfather named Dwight, petty criminality and an elaborate scheme to escape to a school he has no right to attend. A foundational American memoir and a study in the complicated relationship between the person you were and the writer you became.
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16
Little Women
Four sisters growing up in Civil War New England; warm, wise and quietly radical about what a woman's life can be.
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17
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
As told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography follows Malcolm's journey from a troubled childhood in Michigan through criminal activity, prison, conversion to Islam and transformation into one of America's most electrifying and controversial political figures — ending with his shift toward a more universal view of human rights before his assassination in 1965.
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18
We Begin at the End
Walk, a small-town California police chief, releases his childhood best friend Vincent from prison thirty years after Vincent killed Walk's sister — and the return sets off a chain of events involving Vincent's niece Duchess, a self-declared outlaw raising her younger brother. Whitaker's CWA Gold Dagger-winning novel is both a literary character study and a propulsive thriller about guilt, loyalty and the children paying for adults' worst days.
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19
Romeo and Juliet
Two young people from feuding families fall instantly in love and secretly marry, only to be destroyed by the conflict they cannot escape. Shakespeare's tragedy of speed and fate asks what separates love from obsession and whether the world ever had room for what Romeo and Juliet were.
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20
A Song for a New Day
In a near-future America where mass gatherings have been banned after a wave of attacks and a pandemic, a touring musician who refuses to stop performing live encounters a young scout for a tech company that has built an empire on virtual concerts. Pinsker's Nebula Award-winning novel — written before COVID-19 but eerily predictive — is about live music, isolation and what gets lost when everything moves online.