10 best young adult books: From dystopian fiction to adventure stories

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YA is short for “young adult” but increasingly the genre is widely read by adults too. You’re almost as likely to spot an adult commuter racing through the pages of a YA novel as a teenager.

The term YA was originally created in the 1960s as the official way to describe books aimed at young people aged 12 to 18.

In the years since then YA has been used to define a vast range of books – everything from The Outsiders by SE Hinton and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy to The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

Today’s YA literature titles comprise a host of beautifully written novels by authors who aren’t afraid to tackle hard-hitting subjects.

We’ve chosen some of the best YA novels that have been published over the past 12 months or so, judging them on their subject matter, originality and sheer readability.

The themes they cover are impressively wide-ranging. Storylines include a pair of teenage brothers who trek across the Yorkshire moors in freezing conditions, a young albino boy striving to win a place in Zimbabwe’s national swimming team and a homeless girl who strikes up a friendship with an old woman who’s suffering from dementia.

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