More Than This

More Than This is Patrick Ness’s 2013 young adult novel, one of his most ambitious and one of the books that helped establish his reputation for taking serious literary risks within the YA category. The novel opens with a teenage boy named Seth drowning. The opening chapters render his death with the kind of unflinching detail that signals from the start that this is not going to be a comfortable read. Then Seth wakes up. He is alone. He is in a vaguely familiar suburban neighborhood. The world is empty of any other human beings. And he has no idea whether he is dead, dreaming, or somewhere considerably stranger than either.

The rest of the novel follows Seth through his slow exploration of the abandoned town and his increasingly difficult attempts to figure out what has happened to him. As he wanders the empty houses and the silent streets, his memories of his life before the drowning come back in fragments. Family. School. A relationship that ended badly. The accumulating reasons that the moment he died was not exactly an accident. The novel weaves the present day exploration with the slowly clarifying past, and the reader has to figure out alongside Seth what kind of reality he is actually moving through.

The arrival of two other people in the apparently empty world, a younger boy named Tomasz and a teenage girl named Regine, transforms the novel from a solo meditation into something closer to a collective survival story. The three of them together begin to figure out what has actually happened to the world they thought they knew, and the eventual revelation pushes the book into territory that few young adult novels are willing to engage with.

Patrick Ness writes literary young adult fiction at a level few other writers in the category attempt. The prose is precise, the structural ambition is real, and the willingness to engage with difficult subjects, including suicide, queer identity, and the nature of consciousness itself, is handled with the kind of seriousness that earns the page count. More Than This is not for every reader. It is dense, demanding, and unwilling to provide easy answers. But for readers who want literary fiction in YA form that takes both halves of that formula seriously, More Than This is essential.

For longtime Patrick Ness fans, this is one of his strongest novels. For new readers, it is a strong sample of what he can do at his most ambitious.