'Traumaland is dark, twisted and completely unputdownable: a review'

'Fruit Fly introduced me to Josh Silver. His YA thriller hit even harder'

Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly is my pick for book of the year so far, so naturally I went looking for what he wrote before it exploded. That’s how I landed on Traumaland, his 2025 YA thriller, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Traumaland follows 17-year-old Eli, who survives a near-fatal car crash that wipes his memory and, more disturbingly, his ability to feel anything at all. His therapist has a clinical name for it: Overwhelming Emptiness.

Desperate to feel something again, Eli finds his way into TraumaLand, an underground club where numbed-out partygoers strap in for hyper-real virtual reality simulations of other people’s worst moments. When Eli immerses himself in a stranger’s trauma, the story he’s given starts to unravel, and so does everyone he thought he could trust.

It’s a premise that could easily tip into gimmick, but Silver, a former RADA-trained actor who now works as a mental health nurse with teenagers, writes trauma with a precision that only comes from sitting with it professionally. The Observer called it “compelling” and “thought-provoking” on release, comparing it to Black Mirror in book form. The Guardian went with “mind-bending” and “compulsive”. Both undersell it slightly.

What struck me most is how relatable Traumaland is underneath the sci-fi shell. Strip away the VR club and the twisty plotting, and it’s a book about working out who deserves your trust after something breaks you, which is about as universal as trauma gets. It’s dark, occasionally confronting, and unflinching in a way a lot of YA fiction shies away from.

Eli is the reason it works. Silver doesn’t write him as a device to move the plot along; he writes him as a kid who feels genuinely, achingly real, numbness and all. By the final chapters I was invested in Eli the way you’re invested in someone you actually know, which made the ending land like a gut-punch. Without spoiling it: it’s one of the most satisfying, and most devastating, closes I’ve read in YA this year. I’m still not over it.

Traumaland was published by Rock the Boat on May 8, 2025, and was named an Observer Book of the Year. It followed Silver’s HappyHead duology (Happy Head and Dead Happy) and came before his adult debut Fruit Fly, which A24 has since optioned for television. I look forward to discovering Happy Head and Dead Happy).

If Fruit Fly is what put Silver on your radar, go back for Traumaland. It’s the rare backlist read that makes the new book make even more sense.