Bestselling Young Adult holiday perennials

The last category of our holiday perennial series is here: Young Adult. While we combined YA with Juvenile titles in last year's list, this year we wanted to feature YA titles on their own since Juvenile titles dominated last year's top 10. 

To discover the top 10 YA holiday perennials, we looked in BNC SalesData in the YA category for titles that have consistently sold well during the last eight weeks of the year from 2015 to 2017 (SalesData tracks sales in the Canadian, English-language trade market for print books only; sales for formats like ebooks and digital audiobooks are not included). We sorted that compiled list by units sold in 2017 to make sure the rankings reflected the current relevance of each title. Though the sales for some of these titles may have diminished or increased over the course of the three years, they remained high enough to be considered perennial bestsellers. We removed titles with the "Classics" BISAC subject as those titles sell consistently all year round. The final 10 titles are all published in 2015 or prior and have sold well over the holiday period.

The top 10 perennial Young Adult favourites over the holidays

1. Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 9781619630345)

2. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Random House Children's Books, 9780375842207)

3. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (Quirk Books, 9781594746031)

4. The Giver by Lowry Lois (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 9780544336261)

5. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (Penguin Publishing Group, 9780142424179)

6. Looking for Alaska by John Green (Penguin Young Readers Group, 9780142402511)

7. The Rule of Three by Eric Walters 🇨🇦 (Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, 9780143187523)

8. Cinder by Marissa Meyer (Square Fish, 9781250007209)

9. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne (Random House Children's Books, 9780385751537)

10. The Maze Runner by James Dashner (Random House Children's Books, 9780385737951)

Click to tweet about the top 10 Young Adult books

There's a broad range of sub-genres in the holiday perennial YA list, including school and education, fantasy and magic, sports and recreation, and humorous stories. But most of the top 10 titles are not uplifting topics that one might expect over the holiday season. The themes range from death and dying, the Holocaust and survival stories, to fantasy, fairy tale adaptations, and dating and sex. So we're overriding our research associate's view of YA as hopeful. YA is dark. 

The Book Thief and The Maze Runner were the only two YA titles that also appeared on last year's list. John Green is the only author with more than one title in the top 10 with both The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska ranking fifth and sixth, respectively. 

Find out more about this year's favourites in our Holiday Perennials 2018 – YA catalogue.

As noted earlier, titles with the BISAC subject "Classics" were filtered out from the top 10 list. For YA perennials, only one title, The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, was removed based on this criteria.

We hope you enjoyed this series — if you missed any, check out the Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Juvenile perennial bestseller lists.