Q: My 19-year-old nephew has rediscovered his love of reading, thanks to David Nicholls. (“I just lolled in One Day!” he texted. Then he was gripped.) Do you have any recommendations to keep young adults like him reading?
Sally Lewis, 55, piano, teacher, Cambridge
A: Stephanie Merritt, an author, journalist and critic, writes:
Your nephew is at the perfect age to rediscover a love of books, because he’s finally free of any associations of reading with homework, and also of the unfortunate notion, promoted by exam syllabuses, that certain books have greater value than others and must therefore be slogged through, regardless of whether or not you’re enjoying them.
If your nephew was drawn to One Day because it made him laugh, he should definitely try David Nicholls’s most recent novel, Sweet Sorrow, a bittersweet comedy about 17-year-old Charlie’s doomed love affair during a school production of Romeo and Juliet. Sally Rooney’s Normal People is another scalpel-sharp dissection of young love that fully deserves all its accolades, while Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine is a pitch-perfect distillation of male teenage angst, but gloriously funny (think Holden Caulfield meets Adrian Mole). So many coming-of-age stories are written at a distance of decades, but Dunthorne wrote this at only 26, and there’s a freshness to the voice that stands out. And if your nephew enjoys Submarine, he might want to try the ur-novel of teenage angst that inspired it, JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I had wondered if this might feel a little dated to contemporary readers, but my 18-year-old son tore through it in a couple of days, so it clearly still resonates.
Other comic coming-of-age classics include Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club, one of my personal favourites, set in 1970s Birmingham against a backdrop of punk and protest, and Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, about a group of friends trying to get a soul band together in 80s Dublin. Historical contexts may change, but the frustrations and joys of love, sex, music and friendship in young adulthood remain evergreen in both books.
Finally, Naomi Alderman’s award-winning The Power was a hit with my son last year. Set in a world where young women have the power to inflict physical pain on men, it’s a pacy thriller that also raises big questions about who gets to hold power and how we use it.
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