7 Novels Across the World About Turbulent Coming of Age
“The FamilyMart on the corner of Yingchun Road and Changliu Road, right across from my middle school in Shanghai, was no larger than 25 square feet, but had all the necessities swarms of middle-schoolers needed to self-soothe after marathon test prep: fish balls on skewers bathing in a perpetually bubbling brown broth, mini Taiwanese sausages roasting under a heat lamp, plastic-wrapped onigiri bursting with mayo and pork floss. Though no one dared to test this during peak student hours, I knew the market sold alcohol to minors: my mom had been sending me on beer runs since I was nine or ten, and no clerk batted an eye.
My novel, River East, River West, is in part a social portrait of restless and suffocated youth in Shanghai. I’ve long been fascinated by the effect of place on adolescence, how a locale’s social and environmental factors exerts an influence on how young people behave or misbehave, how landscape informs crevices of society young people burrow into or the barriers they break out from. In Shanghai, this meant FamilyMarts and dark KTV rooms where teens could drink and frolic, all-night cybercafés and gargantuan malls, city parks teeming with feral cats, residential housing towers dense as concrete forests where supervising adults were too often absent, busy making money in distant cities.
This is a reading list about young people growing up too fast, too hard, too weird, too tenderly because they live in places where the setting is a driving force for complicated youths. Let these books take you around the globe, from working class towns of volcanic northern Tenerife to squatter apartments in Beijing, from a desolate eastern French town corroded by alcohol to the rooftops and cafés of Mexico City, from 1990s Burundi to the tundra of the Canadian arctic. In these stories of fevered hopes and bleak pessimism, absentee parents, epidemics of violence, the anonymity of buzzing metropolises, the wilderness remote towns, the suffocating provincialism, and racial and class tensions are all vivid setting traits to contribute to a kaleidoscopic collection of youth in flux—spanning continents, but all authentic portraits of hyper-particular settings.”
This story appeared in January 2024 in Electric Literature.
Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash