Best Young Adult Books

Magic is draining out of Earthsea. Wizards are forgetting their spells. Ged and the young prince Arren must sail to the farthest reaches of the world to find the source of the wound in the world — and the entity responsible for it. The concluding volume of the original Earthsea trilogy is Le Guin's meditation on death, courage, and the limits of power.

Punished by Zeus, the god Apollo crashes to Earth as a flabby, mortal teenager named Lester Papadopoulos. Rick Riordan launches The Trials of Apollo with a vain, hilarious narrator who must claw back his divinity through humility, humor, and a return to Camp Half-Blood.

Jason wakes up on a school bus with no memory of who he is. Piper and Leo think he's their friend, but nothing about his past is real. Drawn into the world of Greek and Roman demigods, Jason must discover his true identity while leading a quest to free the goddess Hera and prevent an ancient enemy from waking.

Maggie Tulliver grows up on the River Floss, trapped between her fierce intelligence and her society's refusal of it, between loyalty to her beloved but conventional brother Tom and her own ungovernable desires — Eliot's most autobiographical and psychologically penetrating early novel.

Martin Amis's debut novel, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, follows Charles Highway — nineteen years old, vain, bookish, and obsessively calculating — as he pursues and wins Rachel, then discovers that getting what you want is not the same as wanting what you've got.

In an alternate-history United Isles of America, Joel attends Armedius Academy alongside Rithmatists — students who can bring chalk drawings to life as warriors. When Rithmatist students begin disappearing, Joel and his unconventional mentor Professor Fitch must investigate before the killings reach the school itself.

Carter and Sadie have three days to find the three sections of the Book of Ra and awaken the sun god before the chaos serpent Apophis escapes his prison. Racing against a countdown across multiple continents, the Kane siblings fight gods, demons, and each other's stubborn pride.

Tenar is taken from her family as a young child to become the High Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan — a buried labyrinth serving nameless, ancient powers. Her world is enclosed, complete, and entirely certain. Then Ged the wizard breaks in, and Tenar must decide whether to kill him or help him — and what that choice means for everything she has been.

Grieving and battered, Apollo arrives at Camp Jupiter as the Roman legion braces for an assault by two undead emperors. Rick Riordan's penultimate Trials of Apollo book is a war story full of sacrifice, courage, and a fallen god learning what it means to be human.

Jude holds the power behind the throne, controlling the High King she placed there — but court intrigue and her impossible feelings for Cardan threaten everything she has built.

Chaol Westfall and Nesryn Faliq travel to the Southern Continent to seek an alliance with the Khagan of the Southern Continent — and to find healers who might restore Chaol's ability to walk. What they discover in the Torre Cesme will change everything they thought they knew about the war.

Jules and Josh have hated each other for years. When they end up in a fake relationship to serve their own purposes — Jules needs a date for a family event; Josh needs the same — the animosity becomes something more complicated. An enemies-to-lovers romance with more bite than the previous Twisted books.

Twin sisters Tory and Darcy Vega discover they are Fae royalty and heirs to the throne of Solaria — but they must first survive Zodiac Academy, where the four powerful Heirs will stop at nothing to drive them out.

Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor navigates a year of his life in a small Worcestershire village in 1982 — a stammer, a dissolving marriage, and the specific brutality of adolescent social hierarchies.

The Reckoners track the source of Epic powers to Ildithia — the former Atlanta — and David confronts the cosmic force behind Calamity itself, with the future of both Epics and ordinary humans at stake.

The maji have their powers back — but so do the kosidan nobles who once oppressed them. As civil war breaks out across Orïsha, Zélie and Amari must fight enemies on multiple fronts, including each other. The second book in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy deepens the world's moral complexity and raises the cost of revolution.

Clary Fray must protect those she loves as Valentine prepares to raise a demon army, while the revelation about her relationship to Jace casts a shadow over everything.

Spensa enters the Nowhere — a dimension outside normal space-time — to master her cytonic abilities and find a way to save humanity from the Superiority, encountering fragments of ancient civilizations and the truth about why cytonics are feared.

Nic Stone's hard-hitting debut. Justyce McAllister, a top Black student bound for the Ivy League, is racially profiled and handcuffed, then later caught in a deadly confrontation with an off-duty officer. Writing letters to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he struggles to make sense of racism, justice, and his own future.

The second Shattered Sea novel. Thorn Bathu, a girl who lives to fight, is condemned as a killer and then trained for a deadly mission across the Shattered Sea, in a coming-of-age adventure that pairs her with the thoughtful Brand in Abercrombie's grittier take on YA fantasy.

In a world inspired by Tang Dynasty China, giant mechas called Chrysalises are piloted by male pilots who drain the life force of their female co-pilots — until Wu Zetian engineers her own revenge from the inside.

Twilight retold from Edward Cullen's point of view. After a partial manuscript leaked online in 2008, Stephenie Meyer spent twelve years completing the full novel. Reading the original story through Edward's immortal, analytical, perpetually-conflicted mind transforms a familiar love story into something darker and more psychologically complex.

Alina is trapped underground, her power diminished and her allies scattered. To defeat the Darkling and end the Fold, she must find the firebird — the third amplifier — before he does. The fate of Ravka and all of its Grisha rests on a choice that will cost Alina everything.

Tex McCormick is fourteen, easy-going, and content with his life in rural Oklahoma — unlike his older brother Mason, who resents everything about it. When their absent father stays away too long, the differences between the brothers deepen toward breaking point.