9. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Bod's family were killed when he was only a toddler. To escape the murderer he fled into a graveyard populated by an odd assortment of ghosts and other supernatural entities, who take it upon themselves to raise and educate the little boy. Over the course of the novel we hear the stories of their lives, deaths and afterlives, and Bod's childhood becomes a gothic, inverted Jungle Book: the ghosts teach him things only the dead know, and he grows up loving things most children are taught to fear. Gaiman's prose is all charm and arch, gallows humor, but his whimsies are never as harmless as they first appear, and there's much more to The Graveyard Book than your average young adult novel.