More Than This

More Than This is a young adult novel by the American writer Patrick Ness, published in 2013.

The book opens with Seth Wearing, sixteen years old, drowning in the sea, and then waking on an abandoned street in a town he recognises as the English place he lived in before his family moved to America. He assumes at first that he has been sent somewhere made for him, because there is nothing and nobody in it, and as he searches the empty houses for water and food he begins to work out what happened before he died. Whenever he sleeps he returns to scenes from his earlier life, including the accident that killed his younger brother and the years in which he was a stranger at his own school, and the novel moves between those memories and the town. Ness wrote the book for older teenagers and keeps the question of what the town is open for most of its length.

The novel is deliberately spare, with long stretches in which Seth is alone among the houses and the weather, and the reader has as little information about where he is as he does.