Dark Matter

Jason Dessen has a good life: a stable career teaching physics, a marriage he still cherishes, and a teenage son he adores — a life he chose over the dazzling scientific career he once seemed destined for. Walking home from a bar one night, he's abducted at gunpoint by a masked figure who drugs him and leaves him in an unfamiliar world.

In this world, Jason is not a community-college professor but an celebrated physicist, globally renowned for a breakthrough in quantum technology. His wife isn't his wife. His son was never born. Everything he built his identity around exists here only as the road not taken — and Jason has to figure out how, and whether, he can find his way back to the family and the ordinary life he chose, before another version of himself claims it as his own.

Blake Crouch's genre-bending thriller fuses hard science-fiction ideas about the multiverse and the paths not taken with a relentless, propulsive plot, asking how far a person will go to reclaim a life that was never guaranteed to be the only one.