More Than This

by Patrick Ness

Patrick Ness's 2013 novel begins with a teenage boy drowning and waking up — alone, starving, in the ruined English town where he grew up — in what may be a version of the afterlife, a simulation, or something else entirely. Ness constructs a philosophical mystery that interrogates the nature of consciousness, regret, and whether the stories we tell ourselves are the only reality we have access to. The book is more daring and thematically ambitious than most adult literary fiction. Ness is unafraid of big questions and this may be his most existentially bold work.