Think of novels like Ready, Player One by Ernest Cline, where the MC jumps into a VR world that is so realistic, that everyone on the planet is engaged in it.  Other novels like The Midnight Library, The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, and The Night Circus, are darker novels that open doors into worlds that visit multi-verse lands, concepts of twin timelines, or portal-filled landscapes.  We can see the trend that novels today take on the fantastical worldbuilding into epic endless leaps.  Perhaps in the mind and perhaps through some portal, we are escaping into our novels, just as the MC escapes into his/her adventures within the pages.

Here are a few novels that take on this escapism task and are just what they say: 

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown – Cassie Andrews has her customer die in front of her, but not before he hands her the last book he’d ever read.  But this is no ordinary book… It is the Book of Doors.

Fourth Wing: Empyrean, book 1 by Rebecca Yarros – Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden – During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches, but is he?

Here are some favorites that have lasted over time:

Kindred by Octavia Butler – a time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi – What would you change if you had the opportunity to go back in time?

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods – A mysterious bookshop that disappears but puts the spell of the love of great novels into the patrons.  There is so much more in this novel, but you need to go read it.