The biblio number-crunchers at Nielsen have just released the news that 80% of YA (young adult) fiction is bought by the simply A. Of course, it’s likely that some of this is being bought by adults for the young people in their lives (possibly after reading it themselves – who buys anyone a book they don’t read first?), but that still leaves a huge number being consumed by those outside the intended demographic.

Why? As one of those unintended, I can only respond – why not? YA literature, at its best, contains and induces in the reader everything that adult literature does and generally supplies a pile-driving plot too. Don’t tell me, Booker-only readers, that you haven’t missed those?

In the past few months I have read a quietly devastating counterfactual – Julie Mayhew’s The Big Lie, set in a Britain that was successfully invaded by the Nazis – whose heroine’s life is further complicated by the fact that she is gay. I have worked my way, with mounting pleasure and awe, through almost all of Melvin Burgess (Nicholas Dane, The Hit, Junk, Doing It – all causing laughter, enlightenment and harrowings of the soul by turns). I have read the most beautiful, spare, haunting book about the power of silence and the horrors of social prejudice in All The Truth That’s In Me (Julie Berry). I have had thrills and spills with most of Malorie Blackman and her unending and unerring ability to take you straight to the heart of the matter and the hearts of all her characters, Charlie Higson’s The Enemy series (how far will teenage cliquery get you when you’re under attack by zombie adults? I shall find out when the final volume is published next month) and Michael Grant’s Gone series (and had my brain bent by his Bzrk books). I have had my heart re-broken and my mind reopened by re-reading Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy. I have revelled in books written in strange forms of English – Moira Young’s Blood Red Road trilogy, Sophie Someone by Hayley Long – that show you your language anew, fallen in love with physicist Elon Dann’s Clockwise to Titan and Awe of Mercury which pushed at my brain from all new directions and been exhilarated by the boundless imagination of Frances Hardinge (The Lie Tree, A Face Like Glass, Cuckoo Song heading the list of joys so far).

Lined up, I’ve got Jennifer Donnelly’s These Shallow Graves, Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It, William Sutcliffe’s Concentr8, Ness’s The Rest of Us Just Live Here and many more, all of which I know will make me think, cry, laugh, work hard, illuminate and enrich me in all the myriad tangible and intangible ways we ask and expect of “real” books. And by some additional alchemy that this genre alone brings – something to do with enthusiasm of brilliant writers writing for a brilliant and enthusiastic audience infusing the cankered souls of the rest of us – they will make me read as if I were young again – in one mad, open-minded, unstoppable rush. What delight. What privilege. What joy.