The Best Young Adult Books That Adults Love Too

Gene Forrester narrates the story of his friendship with Phineas — brilliant, athletic, generous — at a New England boarding school during the Second World War, and the act of jealousy that destroys it. Knowles published this in 1959 and it has never gone out of print, which tells you something. What it captures — the specific mixture of admiration and resentment that close male friendship can produce, the way adolescence is its own kind of war — is as true now as it was then. The prose is controlled and the ending is devastating in the way that only honest books are.

A child military genius is recruited into a programme designed to produce the commander who will save humanity from an alien invasion — trained through increasingly brutal games that may not be games at all. Card's 1985 novel works as science fiction, as a study of how institutions shape and damage people, and as one of the most gripping narratives about leadership and moral responsibility in the genre. The twist is famous enough to have become cultural shorthand. It still lands. Adults who read it for the first time in their thirties frequently report being unable to put it down.

Miles Halter leaves home for a boarding school in Alabama in search of what the poet François Rabelais called "the Great Perhaps," and finds Alaska Young — funny, damaged, brilliant, unknowable. Green's debut novel is the best of his books: rawer and less tidily resolved than his later work, built around a mystery that is also a meditation on grief and the limits of knowing another person. The question it asks — how do you live in the aftermath of something you can't undo? — is not a young adult question.

Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and a friend named Calvin travel through space and time to rescue Meg's father from a dark force that has enslaved an entire planet. L'Engle's 1962 novel was rejected by 26 publishers before it won the Newbery Medal. It holds up because L'Engle took her readers seriously — the physics is real, the theology is real, and the emotional stakes are real. Adults who return to it find things they missed: a quietly radical portrait of a girl whose greatest weapon is her anger, and her love.

Three friends grow up together at a school called Hailsham, and the novel gradually, reluctantly, discloses the nature of what they are and what they are being prepared for. Ishiguro withholds information the way a person withholds a difficult truth from themselves — you understand before the characters do, and then you watch them understand, and then you sit with what that means. It is technically science fiction. It is also one of the saddest novels ever written about the things we do and don't do with the time we have.

Christopher Boone is fifteen, mathematically gifted, and finds human behaviour largely baffling. When the neighbour's dog is murdered with a garden fork, he decides to investigate — and the investigation leads him somewhere far more difficult than he expected. Haddon's novel is narrated entirely from Christopher's perspective, and the formal constraint is everything: you see the world through a mind that processes it differently, and the effect is both clarifying and quietly heartbreaking. One of those books that makes you think differently about thinking.

Art Bechstein spends one last summer in Pittsburgh before adulthood closes in — falling in with a charismatic man named Arthur Lecomte, his girlfriend Phlox, and the shadow of his father's organised crime connections. Chabon wrote this as his MFA thesis at 22 and it was published to immediate acclaim. It's a coming-of-age novel in the classical sense — desire, identity, the end of a particular kind of freedom — written with a verbal richness that most debut novelists don't find for another decade.

Susie Salmon is fourteen when she is murdered, and she narrates the novel from heaven, watching her family and her killer and her friends in the years that follow. Sebold's premise sounds gimmicky and isn't — the distance of the narrator from events she cannot change gives the book its particular ache. It's about grief and the persistence of love and the things families do and don't survive. Adults who read it expecting something lighter than it is tend to be ambushed by how much it stays with them.