YA is leading the way | The Bookseller

Western society is experiencing a huge culture-quake, and young adults are at the centre of it, challenging age-old perceptions of gender, privilege, sexuality and race. They have been shouting for change, breaking down social norms. So it's hardly surprising they respond to authors who take the narrative rule book and make origami with it.

Take story structure - The World Between Us by Sarah Ann Juckes, switches between two first-person perspectives on the same page. Then there's This Can Never Not Be Real by Sera Milano which has five first-person narrators, sometimes switching perspective from one line to the next. And it works - it even adds to the heart-pounding tension. "YA readers are less critical of books that take risks with format," says Milano's agent, Molly Ker Hawn of The Bent Agency. "It may be that their priority is the story being told. If the story works, the reader is all-in."

The current generation of young adults are the first to have grown up with social media, where words and pictures are no longer seen as separate things. On the average WhatsApp chat it's common for sentences to run: word-emoji-word-emoji-gif and still make perfect sense. Graphic novels such as Alice Oseman's Heartstopper taps into this shift perfectly.