Coming of age stories we know you’ll love!
THE HILL by Harriet Clark
9780374614546 | 5/5/26
Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates along with the other visiting children, each one dressed as if for celebration. Inside the gates are a nursery and a cemetery, watchful guards and distractable nuns, women counting down to release, and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released.
Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter’s crime and refuses to visit the prison. Her grandmother’s friends know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler–Stalin Pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it.
Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever, but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark’s THE HILL is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the story of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. THE HILL brings new music to American fiction.
LONG ISLAND GIRLS by Gabrielle Korn
9781250432223 | 6/23/26
The only thing Susan loves more than music is Eliza, and both keep breaking her heart.
The first time Susan and Eliza meet, it’s 2005, and Susan is barreling down the Long Island Expressway to an indie rock show. Eliza is a surprise addition to the backseat of friends, and she doesn’t quite fit in; she’s a little too pretty, and she doesn’t know anything about music, but Susan is drawn to her anyway. Their sparks lead to combustion when Susan recognizes Eliza as the girl from a nude photo boys have been sending around. They part ways, and Susan assumes that’s the end of it. She goes off to college and onto a career in Brooklyn’s indie music scene, where she navigates a toxic job at a small record label.
In 2015, in her twenties, Susan has a chance run-in with Eliza on a dating app, and they finally start a relationship. But Eliza is plagued by her traumatic past, which involves people Susan is still involved with, and everything falls apart again. Over the next few years, Susan’s career takes off, and she meets someone new who might actually be good for her. Yet she can’t stop thinking about Eliza. What might have been had things gone differently?
At once a hilarious-yet-tender coming-of-age story, a steamy, complicated romance, and an authentic celebration of queer joy, LONG ISLAND GIRLS is for anyone who has ever struggled to stop getting caught up in “what-ifs” and start appreciating what is.
HUNGERED by Amanda Rizkalla
9781250420756 | 5/19/26
Sofia’s mother promises that soon she’ll have her own bedroom to decorate. Soon, too, she’ll be able to see her friends, go back to school, and eat the colorful, tempting cakes in the grocery store’s display case. For now, though, twelve-year-old Sofia lives with her mother and younger brother in their car. For now, Sofia’s days are a blur of freeways and strip malls as her mother searches for a safe place to park for the night. For now, Sofia tries to carve out a space and an identity for herself while grappling with her family’s disintegration.
This haunting and lyrical novel captures the fault lines of an existence marked by economic insecurity, exploring what it means to come of age during a moment of displacement. Beautiful, evocative, and emotionally charged, Amanda Rizkalla’s HUNGERED is an indelible ode to survival, memory, and the search for home in its many forms.
THE GREAT WHEREVER by Shannon Sanders
9781250421678 | 7/7/26
At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling through adulthood. An underpaid gig worker in Washington, DC, she’s grieving the end of a serious relationship and the recent loss of her father. When Aubrey learns she has inherited his stake in a sizable Tennessee farm, she sees an opportunity to get out of the city—and to erase a mounting pile of debt.
Watching her arrival with great interest are four ghosts—Aubrey’s ancestors, who’ve staked their own claims to the farm and who never hesitate to pass judgment on the mistakes made by the living, whether romantic, financial, or sartorial. As Aubrey reconnects with her living family, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by Thomas, Aubrey’s great-grandfather and one of the first Black landowners in his community. Though Thomas hopes to give his children a homestead on which they could flourish, the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it turns the Lambs against one another, culminating in a catastrophic tragedy that splinters the family and echoes through the decades.
Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they’ve made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future.
An expansive family saga told with a wry and distinctly modern voice, THE GREAT WHEREVER is at once grand and intimate; it explores the ways we learn to define ourselves through and against our family, how we carry on after loss, and how the past lives on in all of us.
FREE GIRLS by Kristen McCallum
978125032026 | 7/7/26
Sixteen-year-old Jasmine Cooper is back after twelve months at Guiding Hearts Home for Troubled Girls, and nothing is the way it was. Her mom has remarried, and now there’s a big new house, a shiny new family, and a fancy new school. Jas feels completely out of place, and things only get more complicated when her mom insists that her “fresh start” include hiding the truth of where she’s been and cutting off people from her past.
As Jas settles into her new life, bonding with her seemingly perfect stepsister, making a close-knit group of besties, and maybe even falling for the cute girl in class, it starts to feel like her second chance might actually be real. But when a friend from the detention center reaches out to reconnect, Jas worries that everything she’s built could fall apart. How long can she keep her past a secret? And how many times can she spin the truth before she forgets who she really is?
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