PAN Recursion by Blake Crouch: From the Bestselling Author of Dark Matter Comes an Exciting, Twisty Thriller
If you thought Blake Crouch's Dark Matter was unsettling, brace yourself. Recursion takes the science fiction thriller to a place that's genuinely difficult to shake off once you've finished it. At its core, the story follows two very different people: Barry Sutton, a New York detective grappling with a baffling new crisis, and Helena Smith, a neuroscientist whose life's work turns out to be far more consequential than she ever imagined. People across the world are being overwhelmed by intensely real memories of lives they never actually lived, and what first looks like a medical emergency reveals itself to be something much stranger and more dangerous. Andy Weir, author of The Martian, called it 'action-packed, brilliantly unique', and it's hard to argue with that. Crouch weaves high-concept ideas about memory, identity, and time into a story that's genuinely emotional rather than coldly cerebral. The science fiction here isn't decorative; it's the engine driving every twist, every loss, every revelation. Readers have praised the book's 'colossal stakes', its well-placed reveals, and characters who feel like real propelling forces rather than plot devices. Gregg Hurwitz described it as embedding mind-twisting premises inside a deeply felt story about grief and human connection, which captures it rather well. It's the kind of book that makes you read faster as the pages thin out, not because you're rushing, but because you genuinely need to know what happens next.
- Author: Blake Crouch
- Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
- Genre: Science Fiction
- ISBN: 978-1509866670
- Pages: 432 pages