Most read Graphic Novels books

A simplified retelling of George Orwell's dystopian classic, adapted by Michael Dean for the Penguin Readers / Pearson English graded-reader series at Level 4 for learners of English. Winston Smith lives in Oceania, a state where the Party controls every fact, every image, and every thought, and where the face of Big Brother watches from every wall. Winston's job is to rewrite old newspapers so the past always agrees with the present, but in secret he hates the Party and longs for the truth. When he falls in love with Julia, the two try to hold on to something real in a world built on lies, and their quiet rebellion pulls them toward a confrontation with the Party's terrifying power. The graded text keeps the shape and force of Orwell's story while using controlled vocabulary and shorter sentences, making one of the twentieth century's most important novels accessible to intermediate readers.

When aliens demolish every human-built structure on Earth and rebuild the planet as an underground dungeon, survival becomes a spectator sport. Carl and his ex-girlfriend's prize show cat, Princess Donut, are among the survivors forced into the first floor of an 18-level death maze broadcast live to trillions of alien viewers. The dungeon has rules, sponsors, and a timer that will collapse the floor whether or not anyone is done with it. Carl has no plan, a deeply unimpressed cat, and an accidental talent for making monsters look ridiculous on camera. He has days to level up, find allies, and figure out whether escaping the dungeon is even possible — or whether the game's true objective is something the rulebook never mentions.

Bilbo Baggins is a comfortable, respectable hobbit who wants nothing more than a quiet life in his hole at Bag End. That peace ends when the wizard Gandalf arrives with thirteen dwarves and recruits a reluctant Bilbo as the burglar for an expedition to the Lonely Mountain. There the dragon Smaug guards a vast treasure that once belonged to the dwarves, and their leader Thorin Oakenshield means to reclaim both the gold and his ancestral kingdom. The journey takes the company across a perilous landscape of trolls, goblins, giant spiders, and shape-shifters, testing a homebody who never expected adventure. Along the way Bilbo stumbles upon a magic ring and a strange creature named Gollum in the dark beneath the mountains, an encounter that will matter far beyond this tale. As the company nears its goal, Bilbo grows from timid passenger into the resourceful heart of the expedition, and the prospect of recovered treasure draws armies toward a single mountain. Written for younger readers but rich enough for any age, it is a tale of courage found in unlikely places, the pull of home, and the cost of greed, set in the world that would become Middle-earth.

• reluctant hero
• quest

Set on Long Island in the summer of 1922, The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner newly arrived in New York and renting a modest cottage next door to a vast mansion. His neighbor is Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire famous for the lavish parties he throws every weekend, though almost no one knows where his fortune came from or what he truly wants. Through Nick, we learn that Gatsby's glittering displays are all in service of a single obsession: Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved before the war and who is now married to the wealthy, brutish Tom Buchanan. As Nick is drawn into the tangled lives of the East Egg and West Egg elite, the distance between old money and new, between illusion and reality, becomes impossible to bridge. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is a compact, lyrical portrait of the Jazz Age and a piercing critique of the American Dream. Its symbols — the green light across the bay, the fading eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the valley of ashes — have become part of the language, and its story of longing, class, and self-invention remains one of the most enduring in American literature.

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (2003) is a sweeping, emotionally charged debut that follows one man's lifelong reckoning with a childhood betrayal. In 1970s Kabul, Amir is the privileged son of a wealthy merchant; Hassan is the loyal son of the family's servant. The two boys are inseparable, bound by kite-fighting tournaments and stolen afternoons — until a single act of cowardice, and the cruelty that provokes it, shatters their friendship and haunts Amir for decades. As the Soviet invasion and later the rise of the Taliban tear Afghanistan apart, Amir escapes to America, but the past refuses to stay buried. Spanning continents and generations, the novel traces guilt, class, fathers and sons, and the long and painful road toward atonement. A powerful, often harrowing story of friendship and redemption that introduced millions of readers to Afghanistan's recent history.

• betrayal
• redemption arc
• coming of age

Bella Swan is left devastated when the Cullens leave Forks, and slowly finds comfort in a deepening friendship with Jacob Black — who carries supernatural secrets of his own. As she's drawn back into a dangerous hidden world, Bella faces an ancient vampire authority. The second book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga.

• love triangle
• forbidden love

Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect, and his family's care slowly turns to revulsion. Kafka's spare, unsettling parable of alienation, dependence, and conditional love — a cornerstone of modern literature.

This is a story about a father and son traveling through a desolate landscape. They face harsh conditions and difficult choices as they try to survive. The journey tests their bond and forces them to confront the harsh realities of their world.

Two teenage boys at a British grammar school — one a rugby player, the other a quiet artist — find their friendship deepening into something more as they navigate school, identity, and the complexities of growing up.

• coming of age
• slow burn
• found family

Returning from the Middle East aboard the famed Orient Express, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot expects a quiet three-day journey across Europe. The train is unusually full for the season, carrying a cross-section of strangers: an English governess, a stiff army colonel, a voluble American widow, an aging Russian princess, a wealthy man's young secretary, and a businessman named Ratchett who confides to Poirot that his life has been threatened and tries to hire him as a bodyguard. Poirot refuses. In the night the train runs into a snowdrift in the wilds of Yugoslavia and stops dead, cut off from the world. By morning Ratchett lies dead in his locked compartment, stabbed a dozen times, and the killer can only be one of the passengers still trapped aboard. At the request of his friend M. Bouc, a director of the railway line, Poirot agrees to investigate. With no police, no escape, and the snow holding everyone in place, he questions each traveller and weighs a tangle of contradictory clues, false alibis, and a scrap of evidence pointing to an old American tragedy. As the accounts refuse to align, Poirot must reason his way toward a solution that tests his own sense of justice.

Charlie and Nick meet when they're assigned to sit together at their all-boys school. Charlie, who is openly gay, expects nothing but a friendship — but as the two grow close, Nick starts to question feelings he's never faced before. A warm, gentle graphic novel about first love and the courage to be yourself, and the opening chapter of Alice Oseman's bestselling series.

• coming of age
• slow burn
• friends to lovers

Charlie and Nick are officially boyfriends, and Charlie is starting to feel ready to say "I love you". But Nick has a lot on his mind — coming out to his dad, and a growing worry about Charlie's relationship with food. As summer turns to autumn and a new school year begins, the two of them learn what love actually asks of you. The fourth volume of Alice Oseman's LGBTQ+ graphic novel series.

• coming of age
• friends to lovers

Charlie and Nick are officially boyfriends, but navigating their relationship in the public eye is a new challenge. As they head to Paris for a school trip, they must figure out how and when to tell their friends about their relationship. With their feelings deepening, Nick and Charlie lean on each other for support.

• coming of age
• friends to lovers

Coraline Jones has just moved with her parents into a flat in an old, subdivided house, and her explorer's curiosity keeps running up against grown-ups who are too busy to pay her much attention. Then she finds a door that should open onto a brick wall — and one day doesn't. On the other side is a corridor leading to a home almost exactly like her own, but better: the food is tastier, the toys are wilder, and the Other Mother and Other Father dote on her endlessly. There is only one condition. To stay in this other world forever, Coraline must let the Other Mother sew black buttons over her eyes. When she refuses and tries to leave, she discovers that the Other Mother has taken her real parents, and that Coraline is not the first child to be lured through the door. To win them all back, she will have to be brave when she is most afraid, and clever enough to beat a creature that changes the rules whenever it likes. Neil Gaiman's award-winning novella is a modern dark fairy tale — creepy, funny, and quietly wise about courage — that has become a classic of children's and crossover fantasy, later adapted into the celebrated stop-motion film.

• portal fantasy

Three young men flee their village with an Aes Sedai after Trollocs attack, beginning the epic that launches The Wheel of Time.

• chosen one
• quest
• coming of age
• mentor figure

Prince Hamlet returns to Elsinore to find his father dead and his uncle Claudius on the throne. When his father's ghost names Claudius as his murderer, Hamlet is charged with revenge — and spends the play caught between conscience and action.

• revenge
• betrayal

Told by three witches that he will be king, the Scottish general Macbeth, spurred on by his wife, murders King Duncan and takes the throne. But guilt and paranoia drive him to kill again and again, and his blood-soaked reign hurtles toward ruin. Shakespeare's darkest tragedy of ambition, prophecy, and moral collapse.

• villain protagonist
• betrayal
• morally grey

In a world where masked vigilantes were once commonplace, a murder investigation threatens to expose a conspiracy that could lead to nuclear annihilation. A group of former heroes, now living in retirement, are drawn back into a dangerous game of cat and mouse. This graphic novel explores the complex nature of heroism and the dark side of power.

• morally grey
• anti hero
• rivals
• betrayal

Blue Sargent comes from a family of psychics, but her own abilities seem to be limited to making others stronger. Her life takes a turn when she meets Gansey, a mysterious student at the elite Aglionby Academy. Despite warnings from her family, Blue is drawn into Gansey's world of magic and secrets, uncovering a dangerous connection that could change everything.

• found family
• coming of age
• quest

After his family is murdered one night, a toddler wanders out of his home and up the hill into an old graveyard, where the resident ghosts take him in and grant him the Freedom of the Graveyard. Named Nobody Owens — Bod for short — he is raised by a loving pair of ghostly parents and watched over by Silas, a mysterious guardian who is neither living nor dead and who can pass beyond the graveyard's walls to bring the boy food and knowledge. Growing up among the dead, Bod learns their uncanny skills — to Fade, to Dreamwalk, to slip through the boundary between worlds — while longing for the world of the living. But the man who killed his family is still out there, patiently searching for the child who got away, and the graveyard cannot shelter Bod forever. Neil Gaiman's Newbery- and Carnegie-winning The Graveyard Book is a spellbinding, gently macabre coming-of-age fantasy — a graveyard reimagining of The Jungle Book, full of wonder, danger, and heart.

• found family
• coming of age

A man who has spent his life hiding behind a mask of clownish performance because he cannot understand or connect with others' emotions, and whose self-loathing drives him toward addiction.

Nick and Charlie have said "I love you" — but as Nick's final year at Truham draws to a close, university offers force them to face a future that could pull them apart. Charlie wants to be supportive, but he's terrified of losing the closeness they've built, and still working through recovery from an eating disorder, he wrestles with taking their relationship further. The fifth volume of Alice Oseman's bestselling LGBTQ+ graphic novel series follows Nick and Charlie — and their friends Tao, Elle, Tara, Darcy and Isaac — through distance, intimacy and growing up together.

• coming of age
• found family

Step into the tumultuous world of Jean Valjean, a man defined by his struggle against societal judgment and the unyielding pursuit of Inspector Javert. Victor Hugo's monumental novel paints a vivid picture of 19th-century France, exploring profound themes of justice, love, and the possibility of redemption amidst hardship.

• redemption arc
• morally grey
• reluctant hero
• sacrifice

Richard Mayhew’s ordinary life shatters when he stops to help a mysterious girl. This single act of kindness plunges him into London Below, a hidden, dangerous world teeming with forgotten people and strange beasts. To reclaim his old life, Richard must navigate this perilous new reality and confront the darkness lurking beneath the familiar streets.

• fish out of water
• portal fantasy
• quest

To win the heart of Victoria Forester, young Tristran Thorn promises to cross the wall at the edge of his village and bring back a fallen star. Beyond it lies Faerie — and the star turns out to be a young woman named Yvaine, hunted by the heirs of Stormhold and by three ancient witches who want her heart. A fairy tale written for grown-ups, and winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.

• quest
• portal fantasy
• coming of age

Alana, a soldier from the technologically advanced planet Landfall, and Marko, a prisoner of war from Landfall's magic-wielding moon Wreath, fall in love across the front line of a galaxy-spanning conflict. Their daughter Hazel — narrating from somewhere in the future — is born on the war-torn planet Cleave in the volume's opening pages, and her very existence makes the family a target for both governments and for a string of freelance bounty hunters. Collecting the first six issues of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Image Comics series.

• forbidden love
• found family
• morally grey
• family saga

Monkey D. Luffy sets out alone to find the legendary One Piece treasure and become King of the Pirates. Along the way he frees Coby from the pirate captain Alvida, and rescues the swordsman Roronoa Zoro from the corrupt Marine captain Morgan — gaining his very first crewmate.

• quest
• found family

Persephone, goddess of spring, has spent her life sheltered by her mother, Demeter. When she moves to Olympus to train as a sacred virgin, she's plunged into a world of parties, gossip, and politics she barely understands. A chance meeting with Hades, the reclusive god of the Underworld, sparks an unexpected connection, even as Persephone tries to hold on to the life she thought she wanted. Told through creator Rachel Smythe's saturated, neon-lit art, this opening volume collects the first chapters of the Eisner-winning WEBTOON series, reimagining the myth of Hades and Persephone as a contemporary drama about consent, family pressure, and the gap between the person Persephone is expected to be and who she actually is.

• forbidden love
• slow burn

Four young lovers flee into an enchanted forest, only to find themselves caught in a magical mix-up orchestrated by fairies. Their romantic pursuits become hilariously complicated by Puck's meddling, leading to mistaken identities and unexpected affections. This classic comedy explores the whimsical and often bewildering nature of love under a spell.

• love triangle
• forced proximity
• fish out of water

The first part of Marjane Satrapi's celebrated graphic memoir. Marji is a bright, headstrong girl in Tehran when the 1979 Islamic Revolution overturns her world. As the regime tightens and war with Iraq begins, she witnesses arrests, bombings, and the gap between public conformity and private life — until her parents make the wrenching decision to send her abroad. A coming-of-age story told in bold black-and-white artwork, balancing humour and horror.

• coming of age