More Than This

Patrick Ness's 2013 young adult novel begins with a boy named Seth drowning alone. Then he wakes up, naked, thirsty and starving but alive, though he remembers his bones breaking on the rocks. Around him is what seems to be the English suburb of his childhood, which his family left for America after a tragedy, yet the streets by his old house are overgrown, dusty and empty of people. Whenever he closes his eyes, painful memories return that seem more real than his surroundings. Believing he may be in a hell made for him, Seth goes looking for answers and for any sign that he is not alone. Ness had already won the Carnegie Medal twice.

A reader of The CEO Library named it, through an anonymous form, as one of the three best books they read in 2019.