Are there any books written in 2nd person

If you want to determine which POV is right for you and your specific story , we recommend taking this quick 1-minute quiz below. Take our quiz to find out! Takes only 1 minute. Despite the naysayers, several authors have dared to write a novel, chapter, or short story from the second person point of view.

So what might they be trying to achieve? And why might you consider taking the risk yourself? When we talk about POVs, we often mention intimacy — in particular, how first person narratives tend to be more intimate than third person narratives. In this closer POV, there is no "I thought," but rather this is how you we, really think.

In the example of Bright Lights, Big City , a level of immediacy and intimacy quickly emerges as the reader is thrust into the role of a serial cheater. There is no debate about what kind of person you are or if these actions happened. You are, and they did, and we know that because there is no functional difference between the reader and the character.

When characters tell their own tales, we often wonder how the truth of the story might be filtered — either by their selective reporting or lack of introspection.

With a second person narrator, readers are told what to feel, think, and see — and they usually have no reason to doubt it. A more recent example is N. Set on a dying world, the story is told from the viewpoints of three women, one of which is written from the second person point of view. When the narrator turns the reader into one of the characters, the story feels immediate and surrounding. The protagonist is not meant to be you, the reader, or Moore, the writer. Speaking of concepts, let's return to the book by Italo Calvino, mentioned at the very beginning, "If a traveller one winter's night".

Just relax. Driveaway extraneous thoughts. Let the surrounding world dissolve in an obscure haze". Is it possible to further reduce the distance between the reader and the book hero? Here, this technique has a very special meaning. The entire book delves into the nature of literature and is largely devoted to the act of reading, the process of narration and perception of stories.

This is a novel about reading and readers. Here, the second-person view is not just appropriate is the element that makes the entire book work as it should. However, more often than not, such a narrative mode becomes not so much a connecting link as a stick in the wheels. Many take to books to step back a little from the harsh realities of their own lives, and the last thing such readers want is to be at the head of a tense story again.

And if the conventional hero, whose skin we have to try on, is also not a very pleasant person, then reading becomes many times more difficult. Who likes to feel like a villain for three hundred pages? Some scenes may not be very suitable to get so closely involved in them. Everyone has their own personal boundaries.

Then repeat what I just said The whole book, of course, cheerfully and fervently examines different love stories, but the scenes of such interaction concerning the main character are spelt out somewhat clumsily. We don't really know her husband he had one and a half appearances and quite a few replicas , and therefore love scenes with him, described in the second person, feel almost like an invasion of privacy.

Conclusion: the element is a little more than controversial. So, if you are not afraid to take responsibility and become, in fact, the main character of the story, by all means, try reading one of the books written in the second person. What if this is exactly what you were missing? National Library of Belarus News. Who lives in a pitch-black house, in a pitch-black room, in a pitch-black corner? Modern kids are not so easy to scare — Google says that boogeymen do not exist, a gray wolf will not come, and Baba Yaga is a thing of the past.

For our grandparents, on the other hand, the world was a much darker, fairytale-like place, with all sorts of childhood scares that seemed very realistic. Let's skip all the stories about khatniks! A rapping librarian, a dictionary-obsessed dad, and a fractured family round out this excellent YA coming-of-age story. Crappy jobs in mill towns and dreams that could take you away. If you liked the sports focus of Booked , you may also enjoy Damage. Travel can take you out of your comfort zone, but the protagonist of this book is taken out of everything—including her identity—when her papers are stolen in a foreign land.

Or some kind of plot? The Soviets have invaded Afghanistan. As war ravages the nation, the people who suffer the most are also the most innocent. Follow the journey of Dastaguir and his grandson as they seek shelter and safety from the violence around them.

This is perhaps common for two reasons. If the aim of using the second person is to create an intimacy and immediacy, then using the past tense can soften that effect by adding a layer of detachment.

Regardless of how well-written it is, a novel in second person can be challenging for readers. As a result, it can start to tire them if goes on for too long. Some novelists have taken it one step further by experimenting with occasional second-person chapters.

Some formats are a perfect fit for the second person point of view. We mentioned how-to stories earlier, for instance. To an extent. Because of its tendency to be unrelenting, second person is less popular in novel-length works than it is in short stories.