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The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier
When a routine transatlantic flight inexplicably defies reality, governments scramble, scientists speculate, and ordinary lives are thrown into extraordinary focus. Through razor-sharp vignettes and mounting tension, The Anomaly turns a high-concept mystery into a human story about identity, chance, and what it means when the impossible lands in your lap.
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In The Anomaly, did you enjoy ...
... a mosaic of intersecting lives reacting to a single uncanny event, seen through many voices?
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
If what hooked you was how Le Tellier hopscotches between Blake the hit man, pilot David Markle, and the Lucie–André romance to refract one impossible flight from countless angles, you’ll love how Station Eleven braids Kirsten’s traveling troupe, the prophet’s cult, and Arthur Leander’s past. Both books let you feel the shockwave of a singular rupture by hearing from everyone standing in its blast radius.
... unsettling questions about identity, personhood, and what makes a life “original”?
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The moment the passengers of Flight 006 confront their own doubles—and governments, theologians, and lovers scramble to define who is “real”—echoes the quiet dread in Never Let Me Go. If the scene where Lucie must weigh feelings for two versions of André stayed with you, Kathy H.’s calm, devastating reckoning with the purpose of her life will land just as deeply.
... near-future tech bending reality while focusing on relationships and society over hard mechanics?
Version Control by Dexter Palmer
Like the unexplained duplication in The Anomaly—scrutinized by task forces and think tanks without a tidy scientific answer—Version Control uses a not-quite–time machine to warp causality while digging into Rebecca and Philip’s marriage, memory, and the eerie sense that the world is slightly “off.” If you enjoyed the government briefings and media churn around Flight 006 as much as the human fallout, this will hit that same soft-SF sweet spot.
... a story that turns itself inside out and foregrounds authorship and the act of reading?
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Victor Miesel writing a novel called The Anomaly inside The Anomaly is a wink you likely caught. Calvino takes that wink and makes it the whole show: a reader reading a book about a reader reading a book. If the meta flourish—media spectacle, a book-within-the-book, reality poking at its author—was your catnip, this playful labyrinth will be irresistible.
... deadpan cosmic absurdity that skewers bureaucracy, media, and big existential questions?
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
If the CIA briefings, presidential optics, and theologians arguing over duplicated souls made you grin at The Anomaly’s sly mockery, Adams’s classic gives you the full banquet: planet-destroying planning notices, a two-headed politician, and a guidebook that treats the end of the world with a breezy “Don’t Panic.” It’s the same sharp, satiric bite—just turned up to galactic.
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