A man reflects on the summer of his fourteenth year, where in Baton Rouge he fell in love with a golden-haired girl across the street before an unspeakable crime shattered illusions in his seemingly idyllic neighborhood.

On its surface, life in Houston is as you would expect: drive-in restaurants, souped-up cars, jukeboxes, teenagers discovering their sexuality. But beneath the glitz and superficial normalcy, a class war has begun, and it is nothing like the conventional portrayal of the decade. Against this backdrop Aaron Holland Broussard discovers the poignancy of first love and a world of violence he did not know existed. When Aaron spots the beautiful and gifted...

This is the story of two small-town former high school sweethearts from opposite sides of the tracks. Now middle-aged, they have taken wildly divergent paths, but neither has lived the life they imagined, and neither can forget the passionate first love that forever altered their world. When they are both called back to their hometown for the funeral of the mentor who once gave them shelter, they will be forced to confront the choices each has made,...

"At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He's popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne's house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her...

This work is a novel about first lovers meeting again after more than thirty years, walking the streets of Rome and reimmersing themselves in their lost past. Miranda and Adam, high school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, where they once spent a summer deeply in love, blissfully living together. At an awkward reunion, the two, who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven't...

Alice Dyson knows exactly how she'll spend her final year of high school: head down, avoiding all attention, while concentrating on her work and her perfect plans for the future. That is, until a silly, out-of-character moment with Teddy Taualai, the school's notorious troublemaker, goes viral, derailing her plans and pushing her into the spotlight. Suddenly, Alice's quiet, orderly life has turned into an improvised dance of beach trips, museum...

"Growing up across the street from each other, Scott and Cath have been best friends their entire lives. Cath would help Scott with his English homework, he would make her mix tapes (it's the 80's after all), and any fight they had would be forgotten over TV and cookies. But now they've graduated high school and Cath is off to college while Scott is at home pursuing his musical dreams. During their first year apart, Scott and Cath's letters help them...

It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace"-- the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different, because last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, over the next 24 hours, Elle will...