Best Young Adult Books

Pip, an orphan boy raised by a fearsome blacksmith's wife, is elevated by a mysterious anonymous benefactor and sent to London to become a gentleman. Dickens's most personally felt novel is a meditation on class, ambition, and the painful cost of social aspiration.

The four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — come of age in Civil War-era New England, each navigating the tension between social expectation and personal aspiration in Alcott's masterpiece about ambition, sisterhood, and growing up.

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger — Dickens's self-declared favourite child, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman that follows David from childhood misery to eventual peace, populated by some of the most vivid characters in all of Victorian fiction.

Percy and Annabeth fall into Tartarus while their friends fight to close the Doors of Death from the mortal side. Both storylines push the series into darker territory, with character revelations that changed how the fandom understood these heroes.

The penultimate book in the Zodiac Academy series — the battle for Solaria reaches its most devastating point, and the cost of the throne becomes almost unbearable.

The final book in the Zodiac Academy series — the Vega twins face their ultimate destiny in a battle that will determine the fate of Solaria and everyone they love.

The London Institute is threatened with closure unless its leader can be vindicated. Will and Jem must uncover the Magister's true identity before a deadline expires — while Tessa finds her feelings for both of them becoming impossible to deny or resolve. The love triangle deepens into something that resists easy resolution.

Baldwin's first and most autobiographical novel follows fourteen-year-old John Grimes on his birthday in 1935 Harlem, moving between his stepfather's fierce Pentecostal faith and the sins and suffering that faith is meant to redeem. The novel interweaves three generations of a Black family in the American South and Harlem in prose of extraordinary lyrical power.

Emma and Julian's investigation into the ritual murders leads them across the Atlantic to London and the Shadowhunter Academy, while the Cohort — a faction of Shadowhunter extremists — gains political power. The middle volume of the Dark Artifices trilogy expands the world's politics and brings back characters from across the Shadowhunter Chronicles.

The seven demigods of the Prophecy finally unite aboard the Argo II for a dangerous quest to Rome. Annabeth carries the burden of a solo quest following the Mark of Athena — a path that no child of Athena has survived — while the team races to prevent war between Greek and Roman demigods.

The darkest instalment yet — as the prophecy surrounding the Vega twins comes into sharper focus, betrayals shake the alliances they have built, and the battle for Solaria approaches.

Alliances are forged and fractured as the Vega twins draw closer to claiming their throne — and the final confrontation with the forces threatening Solaria becomes inevitable.

Lirael and Sameth face the greatest threat the Old Kingdom has known — a free magic creature of ancient and terrible power. The concluding volume of the original Old Kingdom trilogy resolves its two storylines in a climax of genuine emotional and moral weight.

Victorian London, 1878. Tessa Gray arrives from New York looking for her brother and is captured by demons. Rescued by the Shadowhunters of the London Institute, she discovers she has a rare power: she can transform into anyone she touches. Set a century before the Mortal Instruments, the Infernal Devices prequel trilogy begins here.

Two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, grow up in the small lakeside town of Fingerbone after their mother drives into the lake, looked after by a succession of unsuitable relatives, until their drifting aunt Sylvie arrives.

The original Shatter Me trilogy concludes — Juliette must finally embrace her power and decide who she truly is, as the world around her collapses toward revolution.

Los Angeles, five years after the events of City of Heavenly Fire. Emma Carstairs is a Shadowhunter obsessed with finding the truth about her parents' murders, and her parabatai Julian Blackthorn is hiding feelings for her that Shadowhunter law forbids. As a series of ritual murders echoes the killings that took Emma's parents, the first Dark Artifices novel opens a new chapter in the Shadowhunter world.

Sydney discovers her boyfriend has been cheating on her with her best friend. She moves in with Ridge — a musician and songwriter who happens to be deaf — and the two collaborate on music through written notes and an undeniable connection neither of them wants to acknowledge. A love story about the ethics of attraction and the power of music.

Percy must navigate the deadly Labyrinth of Daedalus to prevent Kronos's army from using it to launch a surprise attack on Camp Half-Blood.

The Shadowhunter world is fracturing: the Cohort has seized control of the Clave, Emma and Julian's parabatai bond has become something that threatens to destroy them both, and an invasion from the faerie realm hangs over everything. The Dark Artifices concludes in Clare's longest single volume — 912 pages that resolve multiple series' worth of threads.

Aelin Galathynius — the assassin formerly known as Celaena — returns to Rifthold with one goal: free her friend Aedion and destroy the king who murdered her family. But the city she returns to is darker than the one she left, and her old enemies have become new allies in ways she never expected.

Nobody Owens was raised by ghosts in a graveyard after the murder of his family. Growing up among the dead, learning their ways and secrets, Bod must eventually reckon with the world of the living — and the man who killed his family is still out there, waiting. A coming-of-age story set among the most protective community imaginable.

Percy Jackson wakes up with no memory at a Roman demigod camp. With new friends Hazel Levesque and Frank Zhang — both carrying heavy secrets — Percy must journey to Alaska to free the god of death and stop a giant army from destroying Camp Jupiter.

As the Vega twins strengthen their powers and their alliances, darker forces move against Solaria — and the cost of the throne they were born to claim becomes terrifyingly clear.