Seven coming-of-age novels with elements of mystery or the supernatural

Rachel Donohue lives in Dublin, Ireland, where she works in communication and media relations.

In 2017 she won the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award for her short fiction.

The Temple House Vanishing, her first novel, explores "the dynamics of desire in an oppressive, conservative catholic boarding school in Ireland in the early 1990s."

At CrimeReads Donohue tagged seven favorite “coming-of-age” novels that have elements of mystery or the supernatural, including:

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

An immeasurably sad meditation on the notion of what it means to be human. Ishiguro takes us to a banal yet nightmare-like version of an England of the future and a school called Halisham where the teenage students learn and prepare for their “special” fate as donors. An affecting and poignant exploration of friendship, nostalgia, meaning and mortality.

Read about another entry on the list.

Never Let Me Go is on Chris Mooney's list of six top intelligent, page-turning, genre-bending classics, James Scudamore's top ten list of books about boarding school, Caroline Zancan's list of eight novels about students and teachers behaving badly, LitHub's list of the ten books that defined the 2000s, Meg Wolitzer's ten favorite books list, Jeff Somers's lists of nine science fiction novels that imagine the future of healthcare and "five pairs of books that have nothing to do with each other—and yet have everything to do with each other" and eight tales of technology run amok and top seven speculative works for those who think they hate speculative fiction, a list of five books that shaped Jason Gurley's Eleanor, Anne Charnock's list of five favorite books with fictitious works of art, Esther Inglis-Arkell's list of nine great science fiction books for people who don't like science fiction, Sabrina Rojas Weiss's list of ten favorite boarding school novels, Allegra Frazier's top four list of great dystopian novels that made it to the big screen, James Browning's top ten list of boarding school books, Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

--Marshal Zeringue