Listen to Best Full Audiobooks in Fiction, Coming of Age

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/544000 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Welcome to the School by the Sea: The First School by the Sea Novel

Series: #1 of School by the Sea

Author: Jenny Colgan

Narrator: Jilly Bond

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Release date: March 29, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 5

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

The first book of Jenny Colgan’s delightful new four-part series, set at a charming English boarding school on the sea. Maggie went to the window and opened it wide, inhaling the lovely salt air off the sea. Why had she never lived by the sea before? Why had she always looked out on housing estates and not the little white hulls of trawlers bobbing off in the distance? It’s gloriously sunny in Cornwall as the school year starts at the little boarding school by the sea. Maggie, the newest teacher at Downey House, is determined to make her mark. She’s delighted by her new teaching job, but will it come at the expense of her relationship with her safe, dependable boyfriend Stan? Simone is excited and nervous: she’s won a scholarship to the prestigious boarding school and wants to make her parents proud. Forced to share a room with the glossy, posh girls of Downey House, she needs to find a friend, fast. Fliss is furious. She’s never wanted to go to boarding school and hates being sent away from her home. As Simone tries desperately to fit in, Fliss tries desperately to get out. Over the course of one year, friendships will bloom and lives will be changed forever. Life at the Little School by the Sea is never dull…

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/524615 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Stepping Up

Author: Sarah Turner

Narrator: Jaye Jacobs

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Release date: March 17, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin. FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE UNMUMSY MUM The joyful and emotional Sunday Times bestseller and Richard and Judy Book Club pick. Beth has never stuck at anything. She's quit more jobs and relationships than she can remember and she still sleeps in her childhood bedroom. It's not that she hasn't tried to grow up, it's just that so far, the only commitment she's held down is Friday drinks at the village pub. Then, in the space of a morning, her world changes. An unspeakable tragedy turns Beth's life upside down, and she finds herself guardian to her teenage niece and toddler nephew, catapulted into an unfamiliar world of bedtime stories, parents' evenings and cuddly elephants. Having never been responsible for anyone - or anything - it's not long before she feels seriously out of her depth. What if she's simply not up to the job? With a little help from her best friend Jory (purely platonic, of course ...) and her lovely, lonely next-door neighbour, Albert, Beth is determined that this time she's not giving up. It's time to step up. This is a story about digging deep for strength you never knew you had and finding magic in things that were there all along. 'Humour and heart are everywhere in this book, and I went from laughter to tears in the turn of a page. Wise, joyful and very, very funny - this is a book to devour, a book to share and a book to savour. I loved it' Katie Marsh, author of UNBREAK YOUR HEART © Sarah Turner 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/516560 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Little Boxes

Author: Cecilia Knapp

Narrator: Amie Francis

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 36 minutes

Release date: March 17, 2022

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

‘Cecilia Knapp is a great writer. I love her’ KAE TEMPEST ‘Unmissable’ STYLIST ‘A really gripping read’ TIMES RADIO ‘Little Boxes is a powerful, vivid and enchanting debut’ SALENA GODDEN ‘Cecilia Knapp is a rare, rare talent. The sort of writer you get excited to have found and then look forward to devouring more of their work. This book in particular is a work of craft, heart and beauty and I envy new readers their first opportunity to meet these characters and spend time in this world’ KERRY HUDSON ‘Stunning… Knapp, a spectacularly talented writer, observes her characters past and present, their inside and out, in forensic detail’ DAILY MAIL –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– A story of sacrifice, violence and growing up different – told against the heat and claustrophobia of a seaside city in summer. After Matthew’s grandfather dies suddenly, four friends struggle to face the trauma of their pasts in the wake of this fresh tragedy. Leah and Jay, a couple since their school days, find their relationship tested, while Nathan deals with a vast and unrequited love, and Matthew grapples with his sexuality. In the days that follow, Matthew begins to unearth his grandfather’s past. He finds a different life, full of secrets, and discovers that he and his grandfather may have had more in common than he once thought. Little Boxes is a coming-of-age story about friendship and love, loss and survival.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/499072 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Lonely Orphan

Series: #4 of Button Street Orphans

Author: Cathy Sharp

Narrator: Antonia Beamish

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

Release date: March 17, 2022

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

The emotional, heartrending story from the bestselling author of The Orphans of Halfpenny Street and An Orphan’s Dream Can he find a new family? Schoolboy Luke runs away to London, far from the abusive orphanage where he grew up. Desperate not to end up as a petty criminal, forced to beg for scraps on the street. Luke wanders the East End docks searching for honest employment and a morsel of food. Longing to be a part of the close-knit community, Luke volunteers to work with the local doctor and his wife. Their welcoming home is all he’s ever wished for. But not everyone wants the best for Luke and his new friends. A dangerous man is looking for revenge, and Luke risks being pulled into the dark criminal underworld of the docks. Will he be forced to sacrifice the life he’s built for himself in order to protect those he’s grown to love? Reader’s love Cathy Sharp ‘A brilliant book!’ 5* Amazon reviewer ‘Enjoyed every page’ 5* Goodreads reviewer

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/547628 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Promise Broken

Series: #1 of The Promises Series

Author: K’wan

Narrator: Honey Jones

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 27 minutes

Release date: March 15, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.86 of Total 7

Ratings of Narrator: 3.67 of Total 3

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

Beware of the company you keep. K’wan’s urban fiction coming-of-age novel, Promise Broken, is set in the gritty streets of Newark, New Jersey. The story follows seventeen-year-old Promise Mohammed as she attempts to uphold friendships and new relationships—even if they lead to her demise. After Promise’s mother dies in a tragic car accident, it leaves a void in Promise’s life that she is yearning to fill. This titular novel finds Promise spiraling into a life of crime and drug affiliation by the company she chooses to keep. Also coping with abandonment and a lifelong broken commitment from her biological father, Promise ultimately has two goals: to graduate from high school and to be loved. But can she find the love that she seeks from her aunt Dell, two best friends, Mouse and Keys, or drug-dealer Asher—the man who captivates her—despite the fact that each relationship will lead to life-altering events? Only time will tell.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/532070 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Arab Boy Delivered: A Novel

Author: Paul Aziz Zarou

Narrator: Peter Ganim

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 4 minutes

Release date: March 15, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

As Michael maneuvers through his working-class neighborhood delivering groceries, he enters the homes and lives of his customers. He’s confronted by the school yard and street corner violence of local thugs. With the 1967 Arab-Israeli War fresh in public memory, he passes for Greek or Italian and never summons the courage to explain, exactly, who he is or where his parents came from. Michael weighs his obligations to his tight knit family and sees before him a life of constricted ambitions. Then he falls for a radical college coed, returned to the neighborhood after two years of college. She teaches Michael about sex, love, the obligation to protest injustice. His life is buffeted by the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr and the death, two months later, of Bobby Kennedy. His girlfriend opens his eyes to the ongoing national struggle to test national ideals against the growing diversity of America. Michael grieves with a mother whose only son died in the Vietnam War and is embraced by the first black couple who move into the neighborhood. The people he meets shape him. His mind is a potpourri of his experiences: hatred, kindness, his own sexual awakening. Michael struggles to figure out who this dutiful son of an immigrant family is becoming in a rapidly emerging modern world, epitomized by the big, brash, obnoxious city on the other side of the East River.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/538414 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The World Cannot Give

Author: Tara Isabella Burton

Narrator: Sarah Beth Pfeifer

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 8 minutes

Release date: March 8, 2022

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

“The Secret History meets The Price of Salt” (Vogue) in this “equal parts dangerous and delicious” (Entertainment Weekly) novel about queer desire, religious zealotry, and the hunger for transcendence among the members of a cultic chapel choir at a Maine boarding school—and the ambitious, terrifyingly charismatic girl that rules over them. When shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan’s Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic “prep school prophet” (and St. Dunstan’s alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at nineteen, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school’s chapel choir, which is presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss. Virginia is as fanatical about her newfound Christian faith as she is about the miles she runs every morning before dawn. She expects nothing short of perfection from herself—and from the member of the choir. Virginia inducts the besotted Laura into a world of transcendent music and arcane ritual, illicit cliff-diving and midnight crypt visits: a world that, like Webster’s novels, finally seems to Laura to be full of meaning. But when a new school chaplain challenges Virginia’s hold on the “family” she has created, and Virginia’s efforts to wield her power become increasingly dangerous, Laura must decide how far she will let her devotion to Virginia go. The World Cannot Give is a “hypnotic and intense” (Shondaland) meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more from the world.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/525821 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Scarlet in Blue: A Novel

Author: Jennifer Murphy

Narrator: Stephen Graybill, Justis Bolding, Rebecca Lowman, Jennifer Van Dyck

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 10 minutes

Release date: March 8, 2022

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

A 2023 MICHIGAN NOTABLE BOOK A beautiful and gripping psychological novel about a mother and daughter who, after a lifetime on the run from a dark and dangerous past, land in a small Michigan town that may hold the key to ending their fugitive lifestyle. For Blue Lake’s entire life, she and her mother, Scarlet, have been on the run from HIM—the man who Scarlet, a talented and enigmatic painter, insists is chasing them. But now, at fifteen years old, Blue has begun to resent the nomadic life that once seemed like an adventure, increasingly unsure what to make of the phantom pursuer she’s never seen. She only yearns to settle down in one place, to live a normal life.   When Scarlet and Blue arrive in the beachfront town of South Haven, Michigan, it seems that Blue’s wishes might finally come true. She makes a good friend, is falling in love for the first time, and has found a piano teacher who recognizes her budding talent. But even as Blue thrives, she cannot shake her worry about her mother, whose eccentricities and art are only becoming increasingly difficult to understand. Scarlet, meanwhile, has very different intentions for their stay in South Haven. It was no accident that she brought them there and, with the help of the psychoanalyst she’s sought out, Henry, she is determined to find a way to finally escape the shadow of her traumatic past, no matter the cost.   Told through the alternating voices of Blue, Scarlet, and Henry, Scarlet in Blue is a page-turning story about the ramifications of past trauma, the way art can hold our lives together, and, most of all, the enduring bond between mother and child.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/512806 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Good Intentions

Author: Kasim Ali

Narrator: Nathaniel Curtis

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 58 minutes

Release date: March 3, 2022

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

‘Captivating and heartbreaking’ Stylist ‘Brought me close to tears’ Beth O’Leary, author of The Flatshare ‘A romantic, bittersweet debut … an incredibly powerful read’ Daily Mirror ‘Expect to be heartbroken’ Elle An unforgettable debut novel about first love, family obligation and finding your way. In the wake of first heartbreak, Nur somehow meets his perfect woman. Yasmina is bright, beautiful and, what’s most remarkable, she’s into him too. Before long, they are inseparable. But no relationship is perfect. For Yasmina, the complexities of family and cultural expectation are something she wants to navigate with Nur by her side. For Nur, the pressures of being the ‘good son’ are suffocating, and soon threaten everything he wants for his future with Yasmina. Can he find a way to offer her everything she deserves? ‘Addictive in every sense’ Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch ‘A clever novel … that subtly subverts the reader’s expectations’ Sunday Times

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/536633 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Tobacco Wives: A Novel

Author: Adele Myers

Narrator: Shannon Mcmanus, Janet Metzger

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Release date: March 1, 2022

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.79 of Total 19

Ratings of Narrator: 4.29 of Total 7

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

Most anticipated by USA Today, W Magazine, New York Post, Parade, Bustle, Buzzfeed, Reader's Digest, and PopSugar and named one of the best historical fiction books of the year by Cosmopolitan! ''A beautifully rendered portrait of a young woman finding her courage and her voice.''—Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author North Carolina, 1946. One woman. A discovery that could rewrite history. Maddie Sykes is a burgeoning seamstress who’s just arrived in Bright Leaf, North Carolina—the tobacco capital of the South—where her aunt has a thriving sewing business. After years of war rations and shortages, Bright Leaf is a prosperous wonderland in full technicolor bloom, and Maddie is dazzled by the bustle of the crisply uniformed female factory workers, the palatial homes, and, most of all, her aunt’s glossiest clientele: the wives of the powerful tobacco executives. But she soon learns that Bright Leaf isn’t quite the carefree paradise that it seems. A trail of misfortune follows many of the women, including substantial health problems, and although Maddie is quick to believe that this is a coincidence, she inadvertently uncovers evidence that suggests otherwise. Maddie wants to report what she knows, but in a town where everyone depends on Big Tobacco to survive, she doesn’t know who she can trust—and fears that exposing the truth may destroy the lives of the proud, strong women with whom she has forged strong bonds. Shedding light on the hidden history of women’s activism during the post-war period, at its heart, The Tobacco Wives is a deeply human, emotionally satisfying, and dramatic novel about the power of female connection and the importance of seeking truth. “This is a story of courage, of women willing to take a stand in the face of corporate greed, and most definitely a tale for our times.” —Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author