Coming of age has been a theme of the novel since the conception of Tom Jones, so to choose just 10 from the possible hordes, I had to invent some strict criteria. First, I decided I was only interested in single protagonists – out went Tell it on the Mountain and Jean Brodie; then that a certain amount of inner turmoil was mandatory – off with Mr Jones – and finally that only stories where characters really did "come of age", and acquire, even briefly, some the trappings of maturity: love, wisdom or cynicism would do – and that put paid to Holden Caulfield, who refuses them all.

Beyond this, I've chosen novels that reflect, to my mind, the real qualities of adolescence: the unabashed selfishness alongside the youthful high-mindedness; the bodily obsessions as well as the romantic longings; and the callowness and yearnings for status as well as the untrammelled perceptions. That sort of realism was certainly what I was aiming for when I wrote my own coming-of-age novel Meeting the English. Like my own book, too, all these stories have elements of the picaresque and the lurid, contain monsters, and are to some extent comical, because adolescence is a season of extremes, the time when we are outraged and horrified and have to giggle about it, our hands held over our mouths.

The books are in chronological order of publication, because preference was beyond me.

Passionate, clever Maggie Tulliver can't fit herself into the narrow world of St Oggs and her brother Tom, yet yearns to be accepted and loved. Love, lust, betrayal and superbly-rendered petite blonde envy all culminate in a melodramatic flood.

Pip's journey across a childhood landscape of prisoners, mists, and decaying wedding veils, his drastic leap into adolescence and final turn into a strained, pale adulthood charts the map of adolescence for a century to come.

Luminous and bold, elegant and elliptical, epic and novelettish, Cather's story reflects the paradoxes of the small town on the wild prairie of its setting, and of its pioneering author. Narrator Jim Burden delivers an unrivalled study of the unspoken crush, unforgettably eroticising his portraits of the Bohemian and Swedish girls he grew up with and the landscape they shaped.

Paul Pennyfeather is shaken from his studies at Oxford by the marauding Bollinger Club, and embarks on a vertiginous, queasy journey through the relative innocence of school teaching to the corrupt experience of chrome-covered London. Joyously comic, savagely satirical, quietly sad.

Linda is impossibly posh, ridiculously well-connected, horribly pretty, and gets to wear some deeply enviable clothes – I cherish the memory of her stumping in cork-soled sandals across her Paris flat – but her hopeless lovelorn yearnings and hapless choices still break the hearts of sensitive young things everywhere. A wonderfully sad and romantic ending completes the sob-fest.

Not once in this dead-pan, hilarious story of mental breakdown, attempted suicide and slow recovery do you doubt that the narrator is sane and the society which surrounds her, the one which 'Electrocuted the Rosenbergs' and now wants to break her into a woman's shape, is crazed. Plath's alter-ego Esther Greenwood emerges sturdily herself, remade and 'ready for the road.' If only Plath could have held on to that optimism.

Melanie slips on her mother's wedding dress and slides immediately into orphanhood and the Gothic world of Uncle Phillip, who wants her for one of his giant puppets. There is a mute aunt, a grubby, sexy, cousin, and a brother disappearing into the mechanics of ships in bottles. Only Carter could make all this live and breathe, and deliver Melanie from the grip of her lush adolescent dreams to the bleak street of her adult life.

The glamorous but naive Katherine is taken up by the intellectual, self-indulgent, Goldman family, and has her heart broken in a series of vivid, comical vignettes – and that's just the first half of the novel. The second part, when the broken narrator puts herself back together, is less self-consciously charming, and even more beguiling.

9. The Fall of Kelvin Walker by Alasdair Gray



The eponymous hero escapes his home town of Glaik, where they make fish glue, and conquers London in few brief, vigorous chapters before, like Boswell before him, he is summoned back to Scotland by his father. This mordant, energetic story started life as a play, and is a little short for a novel – the only reason I can think of that it's not an established classic.

Tiresome, narcissistic, funny, pornographic, but always unsettlingly authentic, Sheila Heti paints a picture of an adolescence which is these days enacted online, continues past your first divorce, and forces you to go on badgering your friends about the meaning of life right into your thirties. You will either identify, or be thankful that you are too old to join in.