The Explorer

Cormac Easton is a journalist, not an astronaut. He was chosen to fly with the crew of the Ishiguro so that somebody could tell the story of the first crewed mission into deep space, and he expected the story to be a triumphant one.

Instead the crew die, one after another, in ways that are individually explicable and collectively impossible. Cormac ends up the last person aboard, unable to turn the ship around, writing an account nobody is going to read, watching the distance to Earth grow.

Then the book does something else entirely, and the first half stops meaning what it appeared to mean.

The opening novel of James Smythe's Anomaly Quartet: cold, claustrophobic literary science fiction closer to a locked-room mystery than to space adventure, in which the reader learns the truth in the same order and at the same pace as the man trapped inside it.