Books that pull you back in when nothing's clicked
15 books
A small woman with brittle bones is forced into a dragon-rider war college. The first chapter is a hook; the next eighty hold.
A man wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or why he's there. The reveal of the answer is the best opening hundred pages in modern SF.
Four pensioners in a Kent retirement village investigate cold cases on Thursdays. Then someone they know is killed. Osman writes warm and clever in the same paragraph.
Two friends who make video games. The kind of book where you say *one more chapter* until it's three a.m.
A chemist sidelined to a TV cooking show. Funny enough to read on the bus, sharp enough to read at a desk.
A teenager volunteers for a televised death match. Collins wrote the YA dystopian template in the present tense and the present tense is why you can't look up.
A 1950s Mexico City socialite goes to a crumbling English mansion in the mountains to check on her cousin. The house is what's wrong.
An aged Hollywood star chooses an unknown journalist for the only interview she'll ever give. Reid writes interview-by-interview and you forget you're reading at all.
A solitary case worker, an island of magical children, the kindest novel you'll read this year.
Two writers swap genres for the summer. Henry's cleanest hook and the one to start with.
A painter shoots her husband and stops speaking. A therapist gets her admitted to his ward. The twist landed for everyone for a reason.
A girl raised alone in the North Carolina marshes, a town that calls her wild, a body in the swamp. Owens makes the marsh the second protagonist.
A woman between life and death browses every life she could have had. Haig wrote the comfort book of the decade by accident.
A magicians' duel staged across decades inside a black-and-white circus that arrives without warning. Morgenstern writes atmosphere the way other writers write plot.
An astronaut left for dead on Mars science-problem-solves his way home. Weir writes engineering as suspense and you'll learn the catalysed combustion of hydrazine on the way.
