14 Coming-of-Age Books That Will Have You Feeling Nostalgic for the Past

Margo Millet never planned to have an affair with her English professor or get pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger. Now, at 20, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Cate Kay is one of the most successful authors of her generation. But her real identity had been a closely guarded secret until now. As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda fantasized about escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But a tragedy shattered their dreams, and Cate has been on the run ever since. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she’ll be a whole person again.

It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Percy can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But the guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night. Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again.

After living through a dumpster fire of a Valentine’s Day, Emilie Hornby passes out on the couch, but when she wakes up, she’s back home in her own bed—and it’s Valentine’s Day all over again. Emilie is stuck in some sort of time loop nightmare that she can’t wake up from as she re-watches her boyfriend, Josh, cheat on her day after day. In addition to Josh’s recurring infidelity, Emilie can’t get away from the enigmatic Nick, who she keeps running into—sometimes literally—in unfortunate ways.

Beginning in the 1950s in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost 60 years. Its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as 10-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Adela Woods is 16 and pregnant. Her parents banish her to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of 4-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck. The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern Black community and running away at age 16, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape, and the other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Sam Masur and Sadie Gree, friends since childhood, borrow money and beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even 25, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, Persephone Fraser spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart. Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek. For six summers, Percy and Sam had been inseparable. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.

Millie Cousins just wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a writer and visiting professor itching for her next big topic, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity for them to help each other further their own interests, Millie naturally jumps at the chance. But Millie’s starry-eyed hustle quickly becomes jeopardized by a lonely transfer student, unruly residents, and illicit intrigue. Both Millie and Agatha are forced to question just how much of themselves they are willing to trade to get what they want.

Most people don’t even notice the tiny figures in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. But Louisa does, and she is determined to find out their story. Twenty-five years earlier, in a seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier. Out of that summer emerges a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into 18-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it.

Lily Chen couldn’t be more different than Matthew. He’s easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily is flat-broke, raised in Tampa, and the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, 15-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a plan to seduce him. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife.