There's nothing explicit, though, just Ness's trademark tenderness for his characters, good and bad. I have a feeling More Than This might cause a few collywobbles among some grown-ups because it features a gay relationship, so I suppose that puts it firmly in Young Adult territory. Seth is a survivor, though, and turns out to be emotionally strong enough to demonstrate that what remains of us all is love. This is brought into much sharper relief for young people like Seth, sometimes – as in this story – with tragic consequences. As Ness has said, all teenagers feel alone and misunderstood, 'even the popular ones'.

Seth is a terrific exemplar of the eternal teenage desire for there to be, in the words of the novel's title, 'more than this' – more than a world in which prejudice and hypocrisy dictate how people should or shouldn't live their lives. There's also a seriously scary threat and lots of great action sequences, but this isn't just The Twilight Zone meets The Matrix – it has real thematic depth too. Seth meets two other 'survivors' in the post-apocalyptic world – Regine, a sharp-tongued black girl, and Tomasz, a quirky Polish boy, their characters leaping off the page. He builds the story's plot steadily, parcelling out the elements of Seth's backstory in manageable chunks, ending each section with a revelation or a cliffhanger, solving some mysteries and setting up new ones. Or did he? The mystery deepens as he involuntarily slips back and forth between both worlds. In the other, he is a bewildered, post-apocalyptic Robinson Crusoe, trying to work out what happened and how he survived. One is a world in which his mother hates the fact that he's gay and blames him for something terrible that happened to his little brother, the circumstances around which led to him killing himself by walking into the sea. For the boy – Seth – is caught between two realities.

More Than This by Patrick Ness