More Than This
More Than This
More Than This
Patrick Ness
Top Choice
From two-time Carnegie Medal winner Patrick Ness comes an enthralling and provocative new novel chronicling the life — or perhaps afterlife — of a teen trapped in a crumbling, abandoned world.A boy named Seth drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying, his bones breaking, his skull dashed upon the rocks. So how is he here? And where is this place? It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighborhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust, and completely abandoned. What’s going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, that this might not be the hell he fears it to be, that there might be more than just this. . . .

Book Details

Genre: 

  • Fiction

Age Level: 

  • Mature Young Adult
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First, Seth dies. Then he wakes up, alone in a world filled with familiar houses and streets, yet devoid of humans. As he struggles to find food and water in this strange setting, he also wonders where he is. He definitely remembers dying, and naturally assumes that he is either in hell or some sort of purgatory. As his situation grows stranger and he regains more of his memories, however, Seth must come to terms with the fact that he, nor anyone else, really know where they are. 

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More Than This

                On a frigid winter night off the coast of a Washington beach, a seventeen-year-old boy drowns, his head dashed into a stretch of unforgiving rock just off the shoreline, fracturing his skull and severing his spinal cord.  There is no hope, no chance of survival.  The boy dies.  His life is over.  Finished.  Ended.

                Or is it?

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More Than This, by Patrick Ness begins with a very vivid description of Seth's suicide death by drowning. When he wakes up, he has no injuries and seems to be in a new world. Where is he? In Hell, an afterlife of some sort? Everything around him is covered in dust and nobody else is around. The beginning of the book is strictly inner monologue with plenty of flashbacks to his old life where Ness addresses a lot if issues, including, but not limited to; teen suicide, homosexual acceptance, forgiveness, guilt, love and the nature of reality itself.

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