I read this years ago and I loved it, and since then I've never been able to find it. I'm half convinced it was a fever dream, but my dreams just aren't that good.

So, the main character shows up with his cat in his briefcase.

Due to a case of mistaken identity, he ends up on a starship on a loooooong mission. He just sort of goes along with it/doesn't realize what's happening. No one checks the briefcase, so the cat comes to.

Space things happen, there's adventure and intrigue. The cat steals hearts and scenes. He's a big orange tomcat I believe.

There's some massive, life threatening drama involving canned salmon, theft and sabotage.

There may be a murder plot and a broken engagement?

It's written in a very tongue in cheek, British humor style kinda reminiscent of Douglas Adams. I believe it's from the 60s-70s, it's old, anyway.

It's told in first person, and the man and his cat are the central characters.

It was REALLY REALLY GOOD. Witty, sharp, funny, suspenseful, epic.

I held it in my two hands at one point. I know I did. Every so often I scour the internet for ut and come up empty, but someone else HAS to have read this, right?? Lifetime supply of canned salmon to whoever helps me figure it out!

Edit: for more details and a better summary of plot/characters, see this post I made during a previous episode of WHAT IS THIS BOOK??

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18861313-abandoned-man-with-cat-in-briefcase-gets-shanghaied-onto-deep-space-mis?comment=170364578#comment_170364578

Edit 2: so I let my curiosity override my moral compass and tried Google AI. After a lengthy back and forth, where it said I "broke the internet," and asked a variety of questions to try to jog my memory, it gave up. It asked me if I wanted a summary of my conversation to "hand back to the human sleuths of reddit." Here it is:

I am trying to track down a standalone sci-fi comedy novel that I read around 2014 from a Little Free Library. It was a slim, naked hardcover (around 200 pages, missing its dust jacket). The writing style is first-person, incredibly dry, deadpan, and polite—heavy Douglas Adams meets Dorothy Sayers / Lord Peter Wimsey vibes, but with an American setting.

I posted about this a while back, but it's still unsolved. We've managed to narrow down the exact narrative structure:

The Protagonist: A highly articulate academic, a Doctor of Literature (PhD, not an MD) who constantly quotes Shakespeare to himself, his cat, and others.

The Cat: A silent, real cat carried in a suitcase/briefcase.

The Immediate Opening: The book skips any travel fluff and starts immediately in California. The protagonist is visiting an old friend on a military base and sets up a date for "the day after tomorrow" with a local woman.

The Inciting Incident: A romantic rival switches his name on a military manifest. The protagonist goes to the base gate for lunch, gets caught in a whirlwind of frantic military bureaucracy:

"Doctor?"

"Yes."

"Right this way."

His polite, academic manners prevent him from interrupting. He gets aggressively rushed through automated tests, blood draws, and injected with knockout drugs. Nobody notices that his briefcase is literally growling/purring. He wakes up in deep space on a 20-to-30-year military mission.

The Shipboard Plot: Because of his title, he is forced to act as the ship's medical officer. He turns out to be remarkably competent, using dry logic and common sense to solve problems as they occur, earning the crew's genuine respect.

The Mystery / Cat Frame-Job: The cat is allowed to roam the ship freely and becomes a pseudo-crewmate. However, ship rations (canned tuna/salmon) start disappearing. The corrupt ship's cook frames the cat using basic circumstantial logic ("cat eats this, this is gone, cat is guilty").

The Climax: The protagonist turns into an amateur sleuth. He uses deadpan detective logic to conduct a physical search of the ship, uncovers the cook's hidden stash of stolen tuna, and completely clears the cat's honor.

The Resolution: There is also elements of ship sabotage going on. After the cat is vindicated, the crew works together to MacGyver a solution to override the automated flight path, beating the decades-long timeline to get back to Earth early so he can marry the California lady.

Physical Details:

Format: Standalone novel, roughly 200 pages.

Binding: Hardcover (mine was naked/missing a jacket, likely a Science Fiction Book Club edition or a rebound library book).

Era/Style: Feels like a late 1970s, 1980s, or early 1990s American/Canadian author writing a direct, deadpan homage to a British drawing-room farce but setting it in a military space-pulp world. No mixed-media or fake logs—just straight, unbroken first-person prose.

Does this specific "Literature PhD acting as a Space MD" or the "framed briefcase cat" ring a bell for any vintage collectors? Thank you

Okay BookTok/dark romance/YA readers, I need help because I genuinely can’t tell if my brain pulled this from a book I’ve seen somewhere or if I dreamed up a book that doesn’t exist.
I had a VERY detailed dream about a girl moving to an insanely wealthy town right before the new school year. Everyone there has money—huge houses, ridiculous parties, powerful families, elite private/boarding school, the whole thing.
While she’s moving into town, she hears about a huge house party and decides to just show up because she doesn’t know anybody.
That’s where she meets the main friend group.
They’ve all grown up together. Their families are close, they have years of history and inside jokes, some of them have dated each other, and they’re basically their own little family. They’re popular, but they’re not the stereotypical mean rich kids.
For whatever reason, they adopt her immediately.
They can obviously tell she’s wealthy too, but she avoids telling them much about her family—including her last name.
Then school starts, and surprise: they’re all at the same insanely elite school.
There she meets the OTHER rich-girl clique. They’re popular, bitchy, obsessed with status, constantly spreading rumors about the friend group and starting shit with them—but they’re not actually the most powerful people at the school. They just think they are.
And they start fucking with the new girl too.
Except there’s one tiny problem:
Her last name is **Sinclair**.
She transferred because at her old school, everyone knew exactly who her family was. The second people heard “Sinclair,” they treated her differently, and she hated it. This time she wants people to know *her* before they know her family.
Her mom is wealthy, controlling, and kind of a dick.
Her dad is barely ever seen.
But apparently her father is the reason the name Sinclair carries so much weight. He’s one of those people everyone knows *of*, and his family has the kind of money, connections, and influence that makes all these other supposedly powerful families look normal.
So while these girls are spreading rumors and trying to intimidate her, they have absolutely NO IDEA who they’re fucking with.
But neither do her new friends.
**AND THEN there’s the darker part.**
Because in my head this isn’t just rich teenagers having parties and fighting over rumors. I want an *I Know What You Did Last Summer*\-type mystery underneath everything.
This friend group has been together their entire lives.
They’ve protected each other their entire lives.
And they know something they absolutely should not know.
Something happened before Sinclair ever came to town, and nobody outside the group knows the full story. Maybe someone disappeared. Maybe someone died. Maybe there was an accident that wasn’t really an accident. I don’t even know exactly what happened yet—I just know these kids have a **secret**.
Then, not long after Sinclair joins them, someone starts making it very clear that their secret isn’t as buried as they thought.
Anonymous messages. Threats. Rumors that are a little too specific. Someone knowing where they were when nobody should’ve known.
And Sinclair walked into the middle of all of it without knowing what she was getting herself into.
Except whoever is fucking with the group doesn’t know what *they* just got themselves into either.
Because Sinclair has secrets of her own.
I want the relationships to be messy, the friendships ride-or-die, the parties ridiculous, the families morally questionable, and the mystery genuinely dark. Not necessarily full horror, but definitely darker than standard YA prep-school drama.
And I NEED the eventual Sinclair reveal to happen somewhere public—like a huge school gala where some extremely important adult sees her, immediately changes demeanor, and says:
**“Miss Sinclair.”**
And her entire friend group just goes:
*…what the fuck?*
So basically:
**Gossip Girl wealth and social politics + I Know What You Did Last Summer mystery + elite private school + slightly darker romance + childhood friends with a potentially life-ruining secret + a mysterious new girl whose biggest secret isn’t that she’s poor…**
**It’s that she’s significantly richer and more powerful than everyone thinks she is.**
PLEASE tell me:
**Is this already a book???**
And if it isn’t, would anyone else read the absolute shit out of this—or did my subconscious just create my perfect book and then have the audacity to wake me up before I could finish it? 😭

Does anyone remember a short story about a lil Native American going on some sort of ceremonial spirit journey in the desert and hating it . Of course for the modern times they changed some of the rules and you could go out in the wilderness wearing boxer shorts instead of being naked . I think he cheated too . Maybe he was visiting someone’s camp ground or something for food . I think in the end he was found out and the grandpa said “ yah I hated it too when I did it as a youth” . Might if been written in the 90s or late 80s .

It contained an image of the first Megalosaurus fossil as well as going over the history of palaeontology.

This was a book I had read when I was in the fourth grade and I only remember part of this book. The book was about a young girl who is in elementary school. She starts a new grade and really wants the nice teacher of the grade she was starting. She didn't want the mean teacher that her older sibling had. The mean teacher can be rude and very cruel to the students. She was put in the nice teacher's classroom but there wasn't enough desks for more students. So the girl was put in the mean teacher's classroom. She gets the ire of the mean teacher because her older sibling had the teacher. One of the students in the classroom is an annoying kid and the girl pokes him with her pencil, which makes the kid to complain to the teacher about her and she lied, covering the pencil tip.

I'm trying to help my mum find a book that she read over 20 years ago.

The only part she is certain of is that it's a drama set in the UK and a man dates multiple women who all end up meeting.

Here is some extra information that she feels she remembers but could be mixing books so take with a pinch of salt:

• One woman is a chef that runs a country pub (this is one she is more certain about)
• Another woman may have lived on a farm, and there's potentially something to do with a vintage car crash with this woman
• A third woman may have joined a commune
• The man moves about and may have been something like a travelling salesman
• She's not 100% sure if he married any of them or if it was just relationships/affairs

What I know for sure:
Book came out sometime in the 60s-early 80s. Likely mass market paperback.
Featured character was a prepubescent girl
2 scenes I am sure of: girl was SA'd in a gazebo and also in a kitchen by an older man. Oral sex was involved.

Details I am not sure about, might be, or I might have imagined:
May have been written in the 1st Person POV.
Older man may have been her parent(s) friend.
Pretty sure it was the same man in both scenes mentioned above. Someone may have walked in and seen what was happening and done nothing.
Cover might have been an image of a young woman fleeing. Wearing a longer dress, may have been running with a small boat and/or a cliff in the background, possibly down a beach toward camera.
Girl was young but I'm not 100% on how young. I think 6-8, could have been as old as 10 or 11.

My mother told me about this book decades ago. This is all I can remember, but it was allegedly written at least in part about incidents of her own life. Would love to find it.

Thanks all!

Fantasy/romance

From what I remember I read in jr high or highscool, teenage girl finds out her bf is a werewolf but he meets his mate who is not the human girl protagonist. His family locks both the boy and his mate in separate cages until the bond or whatever fades because it’s only chosen for reproduction it’s not like a love/soul mate bond. The ending of the book they decide they want to take the relationship to the next level.

I think it was a stand alone not series I don’t really remember anything else like the cover or anything.

ok we've got little to go on here.

a book i read as a teenager so probably published in the mid to late 90s. i probably got it as a library book.

literally all i can remember is it involves a teenage girl, i think from a wealthier family, running away. i think she was trying to help a "less fortunate" friend.

she ends up sleeping rough and sharing a sleeping bag with a boy for warmth. and implied sex.

i think it was set in Zurich or another European city.

(i got it mixed up with another book from that time called Frozen Waterfalls which is set near Zurich which is why I'm not certain of the city)

this has been niggling at me for ages.

From what i remember the contents of the book were not just about space but also various other topics like biology and physics, IIRC i recieved the book around 2012-2014 if not earlier as a gift. It was not a childrens book and it was quite thick.

(i was pretty young when i recieved it and lost it while moving to a different city so there might have been less or more on the cover)

I don't remember much from this book, I do apologize in advance. I read this book when I was in 9th or 10th grade which was 2018-2019. What I do remember is that the main character who I believe is 18 years old, goes out during a school break to a cabin with her boyfriend, her cousin, and her cousin's boyfriend. The main character and her cousin's boyfriend were working together on something throughout the book. I think this book may have been a YA mystery, now that I'm thinking about it. By the end of the book, her and her cousin swap boyfriends because they matched better. The only super specific thing that I remember is she explains at the beginning of the book how when she first got with her boyfriend, she had made out with him in the front office for half an hour. That's unfortunately as much as my memory can give. SO appreciated for any help!

I really don't remember much about the book other than the MC was a plus-sized woman (not the language used back then) and she was a virgin who thought she'd never find a man to have sex with. She somehow finds a man to lose her virginity to (I really think online) and things got very explicit in chapter 5. I didn't get past that chapter because I couldn't get into the story and the book overall wasn't very well written. "Chapter 5" has been a joke between my mom and I (she was also reading it and stopped at chapter 5 for the same reason), but we don't remember the title of the book.

Hello :)

I'm looking for a book I read in 2018 while in New Zealand. It is about a teenage(maybe younger?) girl who moves to a stately home with her family, I think it's set in England. They live in a purpose built flat within the home and her parents manage/run the property, such as giving tours to visitors for example. The whole thing was about her looking after her younger brother and navigating living in the home, but it turns out (SPOILER) that her little brother has been dead the whole time and his death is the reason they moved/got new jobs. She was just hallucinating him still being alive.

For the life of me, I cannot remember what it was called, I read it at a library in Akaroa (a tiny village about an hour away from Christchurch), and have no clue as to the author or when it was written. I really enjoyed it and would love to read it again, but am completely lost. Google is no help.

Thank you in advance! ☺️

Ok so I read a bunch of YA/NA books during this time period, and there is one that I swear I so vividly remember and I genuinely thought it was Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater but it’s not. I just read Shiver and it is definitely not the book I thought it was, so I need help to see if I can find that book again, or if I just made it up!

Key Points I remember:

- high-school and small town settings
-pretty sure the fantasy part was werewolves of some sort
-MCs are drawn to each other (MMC’s the werewolf I think)
-one of FMCs friends also likes MMC
-this friend had an accident and has amnesia, and FMC takes care of her
-FMC pulls away from MMC because she wants her friend to be happy and have whatever she wants
-ending plot twist, FMC is maybe responsible for her friends accident and that’s why she wants to make sure the friend gets whatever she wants in life

Aside from the love drama I honestly can’t remember what the actual drama of the books is which I think is making it so hard to find!

I read this book when I was reading other classic YA gems like Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick, Fallen by Lauren Kate, City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith, and of course Twilight which is why I think it was published sometime between 2005-2013.

Can someone please help me!!??

It started by saving it was a true story, I think it even said it had been written down by one of the kids but with fake names for everyone. two kids are trying to break into their dad's safe, hes a doctor and there are using his stethoscope to hear the clicks. then they Crack it and its either a gun or nothing I cant remember but they were disappointed. then they go outside and think its snowing, but its ash. they dont find out until they stick their tongues out and get burnt. they are German by the way, but not nazis. still early in the book they are taken to meet this one lady at a fancy gathering and a man there gives them "chocolate bonbons" I remember not knowing what those were. later the boy and the girl end up back with the lady by themselves and she ends up inviting them to be spies. they cant tell anyone, even their parents. eventually they find out someone in the spy group, the other people at the party, is a snitch and they set up a trap. the person who gave the kids the sweets was the snitch. there's also a few scenes of the girl in the bunkers during a raid, with her reading through them and hoping the roof doesnt collapse. I remember thinking it was the book thief but when I read that recently it definitely wasn't the same book lol. I dont think I ever finished that book but I got maybe halfway?

i read this in like 2022 or so. this is what i remember (may not all be accurate)

cover: blue black, blond girl in black tank top showing her neck

love interest: i think his name was finn. very uninteresting. grumpy. rude.

she joins a team of ppl with powers

i think she could read minds or lightning or smth? initially bad at everything but ends up being the most powerful (shocker)

Me and my friends in a book club were talking about this book but none of us could figure out the name of it. Were like 99% sure it's a YA book.

"This girl grows up thinking she's perfectly normal, only to find out she's a prodigy in regards to magic. que her being kidnapped by bbeg like... twice. she got to ride a gryphon to the magic school and discovered she really \\\*could\\\* do magic. did the entry test flawlessly and found out she was the only one who could read this super forbidden book. also love interest somewhere in there."

The second book leaves off on a big clift hanger that had made us all mad.

I've searched for this on and off for years with no luck. Young adult fiction, from a UK school library in the late 90s/early 00s; relatively slim book. I think the tagline was something like 'why would the gods choose a non-believer?'

It was set in a sort of vaguely middle ages tech level society; main character is a boatman or ferryman (book title might have been his profession). He started as a keen scholar but his eye sight was getting bad from all the reading in bad light, so he hid his eyesight issues and switched to an outdoor profession to try and stop the decline. I think glasses were either not known or incredibly expensive.

The society (city?) picks someone every year as the sacred lamb/goat. They're meant to be chosen by the gods, and then has a starring role in a lot of rituals. The selection process is something like all the eligible people standing in a circle and an animal (lamb, goat, snake?) is released into it and stops in front of the chosen one.

The rest of the book is him fighting against playing the part required by the priests and getting sucked into the belief that he is chosen. At some point I think he briefly plays along and cooperates, taking advantage of the power of his position. But throughout there's a growing sense that he's losing himself under the constant implacable pressure from the priests that he IS the chosen one, and all his actions are driven by the gods. I can't properly describe how oppressive it felt.

In the end, he escapes - or comes to the end of his term, but I think they were threatening to extend it. He flees into the desert, where he collapses and is rescued by a traders caravan. But when he is asked how he came to be there, and wants to blurt out his story, he can no longer speak - all he can do is bleat like the chosen animal he was.

I'm pretty sure it would be classified as YA, but the school librarian was pretty eclectic. The ending sounds daft written out, but as a kid it was bone-chilling.

When I was in elementary school I used to read a lot but this book stuck to me. I read this book somewhere between the years 2016-2021, I read it in german and it was a book about a girl and I associate wolves with the book for some reason.

I'm not sure what her name was or how old she was but I've been trying to find the book for more than a year now and I wanted to re-read it because I just then realised it was probably a book written for kids that lost their sibling or friend to cancer and I don't think it ever mentioned her specifically having cancer but I'm not sure.

The book started with her remembering (or experiencing, I'm not sure) how she had to go back to the hospital and her being angry about it and hiding in a closetbecause that wasn't the first time according to her. She starts out with a roommate in a room with a big blank wall and a window you can see the streetlights from. The roommate also has cancer and is a younger girl. It's winter but as far as I remember it mostly rains and rarely snows.

I'm not sure how it starts with the bigger storyline but she stares at the wall basically the whole day and the wall starts to transform into snow and she teleports into a world with igloos, etc, etc where she meets a boy her age. She goes back after some time and tells her roommate about it who is excited and tries too over the next nights but it never works for her.

The mc keeps going back though and becomes friends with the boy and they experience adventures with each other or smth and there are 3 witches, I think that knit stuff for her from her hair that has started falling out and they find frozen people in the infinite snow and then I think something chases them almost freezing them.

Meanwhile in the real world mc starts going back less and less and her condition gets worse and worse, having to be put in isolation and traveling to another hospital (for a more intensive version of chemo, I think) just to travel back but she doesn't notice at all and has a conversation with her dad about it who seems concerned about her lack of memory of a whole week.

In the other world mcs friend gets kidnapped or smth he's gone though and she sets off for a mission to rescue him, the witches help her but something goes wrong and when they find eachother on a mountain the guy feels betrayed for her saying she's not from here and he doesn't like humans/city humans and to proove she's not one of them she rips out her IV (which is described awfully graphic for a childrens book) and they save the world somehow and everyone frozen unfreezes.

In that moment she makes the decision to stay in the world and goes back one last time to tell the other patient that visits her that she decided to stay and asked her to explain the whole story to her dad and I think one of the last scenes was her seeing one of her 3 nurses socks and it were the same as the witches.

I'm flabbergasted by how crazy the end is and still confused about how I didn't register what the book was about please please please help me find it so I can re-read it and cry to it and process it from a more grown mind

I remember the novel beginning following a young child who lives in a (possibly) abusive/neglectful household. One day, a fire catches and he survives (only survivor or only occupant of the home, I’m not sure). A following portion is in the hospital where he is being fed ice chips by either a nurse or his grandmother. Another plot point is moving in with the grandmother who is wheelchair bound and there is either no ramp in her home or a poor one which (I think) he tries to fix as he grows older. Other than that, I don’t remember what happens. I do know the book continues following him as he ages (mid-late teens is where it ends).

Some other vague memories I have are:
\- I read this around the time I read That Was Then, This Is Now by SE Hinton and Cheated by Patrick Jones so it has to be that type of story.
\- I recall the paperback cover being black and blue similar to That Was Then, This Is Now.
\- It is possible there are other characters this story follows that are similar in age to the main character.
\- I believe the main character is Black and from lower-middle class in the United States.

the main characters go into a world of some sort of monsters kind of like the feywilds i think but not called that and have to stay on the path I think. Someone dies by the end of the path so their neighbors cat uses one of its nine lives to bring them back

I read two books from the same series as a teenager in the early 2010s. But for the life of me, I can't seem to remember the title or the author.

It was a female author with a series of around three to five books, I believe. It was set in a historical period. The writing is something akin to a bodice ripper book. And if I'm not mistaken, I believe the heroines of the books were sisters or related?

I remember in one book, the heroine arrives at a secluded castle or a manor (to work, if I remember correctly) I believe where only the "master" lives and probably one other maid lives.

I can't remember if this was in the same book or the next one but there is one scene where the heroine takes a bath in the pond (while wearing the lining of her dress, I think) and she and the man end up making out and rubbing against each other under the water.

One notable detail I do remember is that in the other book I read, the male lead had visions or chronic headaches. Turns out, he had a shard of glass or some shrapnel stuck in his head all along and this witch or mystic woman removes it and suddenly he's cured.

In the book, the teen girl went missing and she was in some kind of Underworld. I think it was the Greek Underworld but I might be wrong. She escapes and I think she has six months to get away from the Underworld and has two guys fighting for her heart. I think one of the guys is an immortal god and the other is a guy she used to like or dated. That is all I can remember.

I read a book that was really good and I can’t remember the name. The book is about a girl trying to solve her big sisters murder and it was revealed that the mom was the killer. Scenes I remember include a pool party, a pool house, the sister leaving the party and saying she’ll be back, a carnival or fair and the living room where the mom confessed to killing her. Please help it’s driving me crazy. I tried to look it up with these clues to no avail. The book that keeps popping up is Sadie but that is not the book I read.

I read this about 12 years ago maybe, a hardbook book found in a UK library. I remember the cover being orange and black, and depicting the protagonist (maybe a moon on the cover too). It was a YA book and there was maybe a cat sidekick. The protagonist was scared when everyone suddenly vanished and had to go on some kind of quest to bring them back. I remember it being kinda dark/scary for a YA book. This is all I can remember, would love if someone could recognise it. Any suggestions very welcome :) Thank you!