The Ten Thousand Doors of January

As someone who is not a huge fantasy fan, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Although it's characterized as a fantasy, the main mechanism - characters' abilities to visit other worlds - felt as much like unexplained science fiction than fantasy. Some books that involve characters travelling to other worlds seem to rely on endless descriptions of fantastical worlds as a crutch to create interst or fill pages. To its immense credit, this book doesn't do that at all. This is a really well written and very character-driven story, that trusts that the characters' relationships to each other and to the "main" world is interesting enough to compell the story. Visits to other worlds are given a light touch that really worked for the novel and prevented it from getting bogged down in fantasy cliches and expository world-building.