If you loved how Thomas keeps pushing toward the exit—mapping the Maze with Minho, braving the Grievers, and forcing a confrontation with WICKED—then you’ll click with Todd’s breathless flight across a hostile world in The Knife of Never Letting Go. Like the Gladers’ singular objective to break out, Todd’s goal is crystal clear: keep moving, survive, and expose the truth behind the men who control his town. The stakes escalate chapter by chapter with the same white-knuckle urgency you felt from the first run to the final breach.

Remember how the Gladers rationed food, enforced rules, and organized Runners while Grievers prowled after dark? Gone drops a whole town of kids into a similar crucible. With adults vanished and danger closing in, they improvise leadership, form crews, and battle threats that feel as relentless as a night in the Maze. If the Glade’s makeshift society and knife-edge survival hooked you, this will scratch that same itch—complete with power struggles and brutal choices.

If the reveal of the Flare and WICKED’s human experiments grabbed you—Thomas waking up with no memories, pushed through lethal trials—then The Hunger Games will resonate. Panem’s Capitol designs arenas that force Katniss into the same kind of engineered peril the Gladers face in the Maze. The ruthless spectacle, high-stakes set pieces, and moral outrage echo those moments when Thomas and Teresa realize they’re pawns in someone else’s puzzle.

If you tore through The Maze Runner’s rapid-fire chapters—late-night runs, the Griever ambush, the shocking ‘Changing’—Illuminae delivers that same turbo pace. From the opening evacuation to shipboard chases and catastrophic twists, every document spikes tension. Like Thomas racing the clock in the corridors, Kady hacks, sprints, and improvises under fire, with reveals that land as hard as the end-of-book WICKED twist.

If you loved decoding the Maze’s maps, hunting for patterns, and questioning WICKED’s motives, The Testing centers on that same puzzle-forward tension. Cia faces staged exams where every task hides a trap, just as Thomas and Teresa discover the Maze is a designed experiment. The surveillance, ethical mind games, and breadcrumb clues mirror the Gladers’ investigations from the Map Room to the final coded escape.