Growing Up Twice | Fiction - www.zzdbook.com

Growing Up Twice

Apr 6, 2026 8:33 AM

Author:Rowan Coleman

Growing Up Twice

A warm, witty and moving novel about friendship and growing up - twice - from the author of The Memory Book.

Jenny, Rosie and Selin have been best friends since school. Their teenage years were spent drinking too much wine in the park, dressing up for Friday night, and making the wrong choices with the wrong men because tomorrow seemed a very long way off.

Eleven riotous years later, Jenny realises something. After more than a decade of waiting for her real life to begin, nothing has really changed. Here she is, still hung-over in the park, still dressed up in Friday night clothes and about to make her most inappropriate choice of man yet .

But Jenny's not the only one waiting for real life to begin. And when tragedy turns their world upside down, all three friends are forced to realise that the real growing up is still to come...

Reviews

Truly brilliant

—— Company

A fantastic first novel

—— Heat

The BBC adaptation is well structured and Paul Daneman is incredibly well cast as Bilbo. If you don't already own this, then now is the perfect time to add this wonderful radio play to your collection.

—— Nick Smithson , www.sci-fi-online.com

Tightly woven, each line detonating with meaning

—— Glasgow Herald

A memorable picture of the harshness London can offer to incomers... Youth is a wonderful book: a Bildungsroman, or portrait of the artist as a young man, to rank with any in the canon

—— Evening Standard

Farcical in the best sense: Blott on the Landscape is as tense and compelling as any good detective novel

—— The Times

This first novel is undeniably rich: a tale woven around the importance of faith, whether in imaginary friends or undiscovered treasures, and the strength of family

—— The Times

The year's most impressive debut

—— John Carey , Sunday Times

Like Donna Tartt’s "The Secret History" or a good film noir . . . Jane’s low-key narration has just the right tone to keep readers hooked

—— People magazine

The strength of 'The Lake of Dead Languages' is a silken prose that lures the reader into Goodman’s . . . story of murder, suicide . . . revenge, and madness

—— The Washington Post Book World

Part suspense, part coming-of-age, and all-enthralling . . . A book that needs the roar of a fire to ward off its psychic chill

—— The Denver Post

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