5 Coming-of-Age Novels That Capture the Mystery of Childhood Summers
By Jennifer Trevelyan
There’s something about childhood summers. The combination of complete freedom and utter boredom, with the possibility of actual physical danger thrown in for good measure. Most of us can probably remember going on holidays with our families and being forced into situations we might not have had to deal with in the course of our ordinary lives. We made friends we wouldn’t otherwise make, and, at least in pre-social media days, we lost those friends as quickly as we’d found them – sometimes never to see them again. This meant that the summers of our childhood became perfect time capsules, both impossible to forget and difficult to pin down. What really went on? Did things really happen the way I remember them?
In this list you’ll find five novels that brilliantly capture the confusion of childhood and adolescence, set against a summer backdrop rich in nostalgia and longing. The first two in particular were key sources of inspiration for me when I was writing my own summer coming-of-age mystery novel, A Beautiful Family.
This classic novel boasts with one of the most famous opening lines of all time. ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ I remember my father urging me to read this book. It was rare for him to do the urging – it was usually my mother feeding me classics. The story of a young boy in over his head while holidaying with one of his well-to-do schoolmates for a long, and very hot summer (the temperature is recorded throughout), this beautifully written book has a shocking ending that I didn’t see coming.
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This long-awaited follow-up to The Secret History is set in 1970’s Mississippi, and follows twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve as she sets out to solve the mystery of her brother’s unexplained death. If you enjoy complex family dynamics, flawed and eccentric characters, and the sense of having been transported to another world, you’ll love this Southern gothic novel. But if it’s hard and fast answers you’re after, this may not be for you.
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Set on Valentine’s day in Australia in 1900, this book, like The Little Friend, dwells heavily in the unknown. A group of students from a local girls’ boarding school journey to a scenic spot where strange and mystical forces are at play. It is worth reading this book for the picnic scene alone. Needless to say, not everyone returns safely. The book then goes on to explore the aftermath of the disastrous picnic, and its effect on the local community.
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‘It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.’ So commences this dreamlike novel about a group of teenage boys who watch, smitten, as the enigmatic Lisbon sisters quite literally destroy themselves. I loved the first-person plural point of view. The collective ‘we’ seems to perfectly fit the young narrator, who might not have the confidence to describe what he is seeing without the support of his peers. While not strictly a summer novel – the girls’ slow demise takes place over a two-year period – the book carries a languid, listless kind of heat throughout.
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David Nicholls is one of my favourite contemporary writers. In this book his 16-year-old narrator, Charlie Lewis, decides to join a summer theatre production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at a particularly difficult time in his life. His parents have gone their separate ways, his father is grappling with alcohol addiction, and Charlie has failed his GCSEs. Funny, sad, and rooted in reality, the book is an unsentimental but nostalgic look at first love and the challenges of adolescence.
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