Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Image Unavailable
Color:
-
-
-
- To view this video download Flash Player
- 2 VIDEOS
Audible sample Sample
Neverworld Wake Hardcover – June 5, 2018
Purchase options and add-ons
Five friends. Only one can survive the Neverworld Wake. Who would you choose?
From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Night Film comes an absorbing psychological suspense thriller in which fears are physical and memories come alive.
"A thriller that will grip readers from the start." --Hypable
It's been one year since graduation, and Beatrice Hartley has mixed feelings about joining her friends a weekend reunion.
She's right to be worried. After a night out, they narrowly avoid a collision with a car on a deserted road. Or so they believe.
Back at the mansion where they are staying, a mysterious man knocks on the door during a raging storm. He tells them that they must make a choice: one of them will live, and the rest will die. And the decision must be unanimous.
Soon time backbends. Beatrice and her friends are forced to repeat that dreadful day so many times they lose count. With each replay, events twist and fears come alive in horrifying ways.
This nightmare, this nothingness . . . this is the Neverworld Wake.
To escape, they have to vote. But how do you choose who to kill? And then how do you live with yourself?
"Beautifully creepy." --The New York Times
"You wont be able to stop reading until the mystery is unraveled." --Refinery29
"A dark and twisty tale brimming with psychological suspense." --Bustle
- Reading age12 years and up
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Grade level7 - 9
- Lexile measure810L
- Dimensions5.81 x 1.13 x 8.56 inches
- PublisherDelacorte Press
- Publication dateJune 5, 2018
- ISBN-100399553924
- ISBN-13978-0399553929
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year
"Neverworld Wake is a shape-shifting binge read . . . It's a 'clear your calendar' kind of one-day read, singular as both a psychological thriller and a new addition to Pessl's uncategorizable canon." --Melissa Albert, New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel World
"Beautifully creepy . . . .A mystery within a mystery." --The New York Times
"An altogether eerie, philosophically challenging exploration of the ways in which our actions have consequences . . . the kind of book you'll tear through and then want to talk about with everyone you know immediately after finishing." -- Nylon
"The first must-read of beach season." --Town & Country
"[A]sophisticated novel ... similar to Libba Bray's acclaimed Going Bovine."—VOYA, starred review
"Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics) adeptly creates a compelling nightmare world while maintaining a foothold in realism. Thought-provoking and suspenseful." --PW
"Unpredictable, exciting, and emotionally wrenching." --SLJ
"Pessl manages to keep her first-person narrative moving forward while her characters are stuck in time. An eloquent and haunting tale." --Kirkus Reviews
"This novel has ambition to spare, and teens looking for something odd, atmospheric, and twisty will likely be enthralled." --Booklist
" . . . there's a broad range of readers who will find Neverworld a place in which to linger." --The Bulletin
“A dark and twisty tale brimming with psychological suspense.” —Bustle
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I hadn’t spoken to Whitley Lansing--or any of them--in over a year.
When her text arrived after my last final, it felt inevitable, like a comet tearing through the night sky, hinting of fate.
Too long. WTF. #notcool. Sorry. My Tourette’s again. How was your freshman year? Amazing? Awful?
Seriously. We miss you.
Breaking the silence bc the gang is heading to Wincroft for my bday. The Linda will be in Mallorca & ESS Burt is getting married in St. Bart’s for the 3rd time. (Vegan yogi.) So it’s ours for the weekend. Like yesteryear.
Can you come? What do you say Bumblebee?
Carpe noctem.
Seize the night.
She was the only girl I knew who surveyed everybody like a leather-clad Dior model and rattled off Latin like it was her native language.
“How was your exam?” my mom asked when she picked me up.
“I confused Socrates with Plato and ran out of time during the essay,” I said, pulling on my seat belt.
“I’m sure you did great.” She smiled, a careful look. “Anything else we need to do?”
I shook my head.
My dad and I had already cleared out my dorm room. I’d returned my textbooks to the student union to get the 30 percent off for next year. My roommate had been a girl from New Haven named Casey who’d gone home to see her boyfriend every weekend. I’d barely seen her since orientation.
The end of my freshman year at Emerson College had just come and gone with the indifferent silence usually reserved for a going-out-of-business sale at a mini-mall.
“Something dark’s a-brewin’,” Jim would have told me.
I had no plans all summer, except to work alongside my parents at the Captain’s Crow.
The Captain’s Crow--the Crow, it’s called by locals--is the seaside cafe and ice cream parlor my family owns in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, the tiny coastal village where I grew up.
Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Population: You Know Everyone.
My great-grandfather Burn Hartley opened the parlor in 1885, when Watch Hill was little more than a craggy hamlet where whaling captains came to shake off their sea legs and hold their children for the first time before taking off again for the Atlantic’s Great Unknowns. Burn’s framed pencil portrait hangs over the entrance, revealing him to have the mad glare of some dead genius writer, or a world explorer who never came home from the Arctic. The truth is, though, he could barely read, preferred familiar faces to strange ones and dry land to the sea. All he ever did was run our little dockside restaurant his whole life, and perfect the recipe for the best clam chowder in the world.
All summer I scooped ice cream for tan teenagers in flip-flops and pastel sweaters. They came and went in big skittish groups like schools of fish. I made cheeseburgers and tuna melts, coleslaw and milk shakes. I swept away sand dusting the black-and-white-checkered floor. I threw out napkins, ketchup packets, salt packets, over‑21 wristbands, Del’s Frozen Lemonade cups, deep-sea fishing party boat brochures. I put lost cell phones beside the register so they could be easily found when the panic-stricken owners came barging inside: “I lost my . . . Oh . . . thank you, you’re the best!” I cleaned up the torn blue tickets from the 1893 saltwater carousel, located just a few doors down by the beach, which featured faded faceless mermaids to ride, not horses. Watch Hill’s greatest claim to fame was that Eleanor Roosevelt had been photographed riding a redhead with a turquoise tail sidesaddle. (It was a town joke how put out she looked in the shot, how uncomfortable and buried alive under her plate-tectonic layers of ruffled skirt.)
I cleaned the barbecue sauce off the garbage cans, the melted Wreck Rummage off the tables (Wreck Rummage was every kid’s favorite ice cream flavor, a mash‑up of cookie dough, walnuts, cake batter, and dark chocolate nuggets). I Cloroxed and Fantasticked and Mr. Cleaned the windows and counters and doorknobs. I dusted the brine off the mussels and the clams, polishing every one like a gemstone dealer obsessively inspecting emeralds. Most days I rose at five and went with my dad to pick out the day’s seafood when the fishing boats came in, inspecting crab legs and fluke, oysters and bass, running my hands over their tapping legs and claws, barnacles and iridescent bellies. I composed song lyrics for a soundtrack to a made‑up movie called Lola Anderson’s Highway Robbery, drawing words, rhymes, faces, and hands on napkins and take-out menus, tossing them in the trash before anyone saw them. I attended grief support group for adolescents at the North Stonington Community Center. There was only one other kid in attendance, a silent boy named Turks whose dad had died from ALS. After two meetings he never returned, leaving me alone with the counselor, a jittery woman named Deb who wore pantsuits and wielded a three-inch-thick book called Grief Management for Young People.
“ ‘The purpose of this exercise is to construct a positive meaning around the lost relationship,’ ” she read from chapter seven, handing me a Goodbye Letter worksheet. “ ‘On this page, write a note to your lost loved one, detailing fond memories, hopes, and any final questions.’ ”
Slapping a chewed pen that read tabeego island resorts on my desk, she left. I could hear her on the phone out in the hall, arguing with someone named Barry, asking him why he didn’t come home last night.
I drew a screeching hawk on the Goodbye Letter, with lyrics to a made‑up Japanese animated film about a forgotten thought called Lost in a Head.
Then I slipped out the fire exit and never went back.
I taught Sleepy Sam (giant yawn of a teenager from England visiting his American dad) how to make clam cakes and the perfect grilled cheese. Grill on medium, butter, four minutes a side, six slices of Vermont sharp cheddar, two of fontina. For July Fourth, he invited me to a party at a friend of a friend’s. To his shock, I actually showed. I stood by a floor lamp with a warm beer, listening to talk about guitar lessons and Zach Galifianakis, trying to find the right moment to escape.
“That, by the way, is Bee,” said Sleepy Sam. “She does actually speak, I swear.”
I didn’t mention Whitley’s text to anyone, though it was always in the back of my mind.
It was the brand-new way-too-extravagant dress I’d bought but never taken out of the bag. I just left it there in the back of my closet, folded in tissue paper with the receipt, the tags still on, with intention of returning it.
Yet there was still the remote possibility I’d find the courage to put it on.
I knew the weekend of her birthday like I knew my own: August 30.
It was a Friday. The big event of the day had been the appearance of a stray dog wandering Main Street. It had no tags and the haunted look of a prisoner of war. He was gray, shaggy, and startled with every attempt to pet him. A honk sent him skidding into the garbage cans behind the Captain’s Crow.
“See that yellow salt-bed mud on his back paws? That’s from the west side of Nickybogg Creek,” announced Officer Locke, thrilled to have a mystery on his hands, his first of the year.
That stray dog had been the talk all that day--what to do with him, where he’d been--and it was only much later that I found my mind going back to that dog drifting into town out of the blue. I wondered if he was some kind of sign, a warning that something terrible was coming, that I should not take the much-exalted and mysterious Road Less Traveled, but the one well trod, wide-open, and brightly lit, the road I knew.
By then it was too late. The sun had set. Sleepy Sam was gone. I’d overturned the cafe chairs and put them on the tables. I’d hauled out the trash. And anyway, that flew in the face of human nature. No one ever heeded a warning sign when it came.
Product details
- Publisher : Delacorte Press; First Edition (June 5, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0399553924
- ISBN-13 : 978-0399553929
- Reading age : 12 years and up
- Lexile measure : 810L
- Grade level : 7 - 9
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.81 x 1.13 x 8.56 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #882,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Videos
Videos for this product
0:37
Click to play video
Neverworld Wake
Merchant Video
About the author
Marisha Pessl's bestselling debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize (now the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize), and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. Pessl grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and currently resides in New York City.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
This story follows protagonist, Beatrice Hartley, who is back in her Rhode Island hometown, attending Emerson college, living with her parents, helping them at their café and nursing her grief after the sudden death of her boyfriend and first love, a year ago at Darrow-Harker School.
Beatrice had tried to forget that fateful day, when her boyfriend, Jim, mysteriously died. Everyone ruled it a suicide, but Bea knew that there was no way Jim would opt out and she was also certain that their friends knew more than they let on about that night. Since his death, Bea had completely detached herself from her friends, an elite group that had taken her in even though she came from more humble backgrounds and was not as privileged.
That summer, Beatrice receives a very random text from her best friend Whitley, who invites her over to her house (mansion) to hang out just like old times. Beatrice is very tempted to go, because Jim's death is still nagging at her and she needs to know what happened to him in order to put that chapter in her life to rest. She decides to go to and see her friends again, even though her parents think it's a very bad idea.
Upon her arrival, the group - consisting of Kipling, Martha, Cannon and Whitley - is slightly surprised she showed up, but quickly accept her with arms wide open that felt a bit...forced. You could sense there is tension and that the dynamic has shifted in the group in the year that's passed, but everyone was trying to act normal. They go out to a concert, and spend the night drinking and dancing without a care in the world. On the drive back home, it is raining heavily, and Whitley, who was driving, loses control of the car and almost collide with a tow truck. After the scare, they get back home drenched in rain and feeling a bit subdued. As they are drying off, they get a knock on the door and an old man speaking in old English introduces himself and tells them...
"You're all nearly dead. Wedged between life and death. Time for you has become snagged on a splinter, forming a closed-circuited potentiality called a Neverworld Wake."
The rules of this world are explained to them. He informs them that the driver of the tow truck is dead, and that 4 of them will also have to die, and only one can survive. They have to vote who that person will be, and it has to be a unanimous vote. Until they decide, they will be living the same day over and over and over again, in a constant time loop straight out of Groundhog Day. There's only one way to break that loop, during the last 3 minutes of their day, they will be given the chance to make their vote. Until they can reach a consensus, the loop will repeat itself, with the day playing itself out endlessly from the moment they hit the truck. Every day, they will wake up at the exact moment they hit the truck.
In that time, they are able to leave, go home, see their families, live their lives normally, until they go to bed, and then they wake up repeating the same cycle, with their loved ones completely oblivious to their plight and no memory of the day before. Every one in the group deals with this news in their own way, some becoming violent, others in denial, Martha trying to study the science behind the Wake phenomena, but Bea...Bea wanted to solve Jim's mysterious death.
These loops were insane. I mean, absolutely insane. Think the violence of "A Clockwork Orange" kind of insanity. The group goes into a rampage, stealing, lying, thieving, seducing and turn into absolute monsters. When they all end up collapsing...and we are never sure how much time has passed or how many Wakes they've lived, Bea confronts them and tells them of her need to find out what happened to Jim. Enter Martha, who has figured out how they can move through time and space during the loop. They use that new knowledge to try and find out what really happened that night, and the deceptions and lies begin to reveal themselves, breaking the group apart, then bringing them back together, defeated and desperate.
This is where Pessl's true skill shows as she is able to really navigate the readers through all the confusing timelines, clues and complex bits and pieces in a way that was always easy to follow and understand. As we race towards the end, and the true events of that fateful night is revealed to us, we think we have it all figured out and reach acceptance, only for Pessl to pull the rug from under us with another explosive twist.
Everything we thought we know, the stereotypes that we set ourselves and other people go out the window. That is one of the many things Pessl tries to convey with this story. I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the book that really sums up that thought:
"We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rock star, trust the good girl. That's never their only story. We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read."
After letting it set in for a couple of days, I'm landing at a solid 4 stars and sticking with it. I don't know how to really compare this book to anything else I've ever read. I was so immersed in this story and this world that I couldn't pull myself away. I found myself questioning if this was a thing that really happened - what if every time some tragic accident/act of violence happened where only one out of many survived, the survivor was determined by an endless cycle of negotiating and reliving one day until everyone decided whose life was most worth living? I definitely recommend this book. It is a true one-of-a-kind and something that will stick with me for a while. Even if it's a kind of different that you don't end up enjoying, it's worth a shot because it's not a huge time commitment.
SPOILERS AHEAD
I only didn't give it 5 stars because I'm one of those people that hopes that there might be an unhappy or tragic ending in like 9/10 books that I read. I expected Bee to end up committing suicide after she was spared. I was kind of disappointed that she was the one chosen to survive. Most people would be infuriated, but I felt like it could have just ended with them all fading away in the icy water because our main character and narrator hadn't survived. I assumed when Martha disappeared, it was because she was the one who had been saved.
I can’t help feeling a bit dissapointed, as switching from writing for adults to writing a YA novel seems to have diluted a bit of the Pessl magic. Neverworld Wake is quite good, and I think I would have very much enjoyed it if I had happened upon it as an independent entity. Unfortunately, I’m someone who still makes strangers at cocktail parties listen to how much I love Special Topics. I think Neverworld Wake is missing some of the ornate language and horrified suspense present in the previous two books, and I think that’s probably intentional.
I’m someone who generally enjoys YA books, and I would recommend this to others—still, in my heart, I have to accept that it’s second tier to Pessl’s previous books.
Bonus points for all of The Cure references because they are the perfect band for this book!