The Martian

During a dust storm on Mars, astronaut Mark Watney is struck by flying debris and left for dead when the rest of his Ares 3 crew evacuates the planet without him. He wakes up alone, alive, and stranded with no way to tell NASA he survived, and a botanist's and engineer's training that lets him treat every problem Mars throws at him, and it throws plenty, as solvable rather than fatal. He grows potatoes in the crew's habitat using reclaimed water and his own preserved waste as fertilizer, revives the decades old Pathfinder probe to reestablish contact with Earth, and eventually drives a modified rover thousands of kilometers across the Martian surface toward the site of a future mission he can use to escape. Setbacks keep arriving: a torn habitat wall kills his crop, an exploding resupply rocket destroys a shipment of food, and a dust storm forces him to strip his escape vehicle down to save weight. NASA, meanwhile, works the problem from the other side, and an astrodynamicist devises a slingshot trajectory that lets Watney's own crew, still traveling home aboard the ship Hermes, turn back for a risky rescue rather than abandon him. Watney launches from Mars in a stripped down ascent vehicle with an improvised nose cone, and the crew's flight surgeon Chris Beck, tethered to Hermes, catches him in open space to close the final gap between them; he survives, and the book ends with him back aboard Hermes, alive.

Weir tells most of the book through Watney's own mission log entries, written in a wisecracking, profane voice that turns real orbital mechanics and chemistry into page turning suspense rather than homework, interspersed with tighter third person chapters following mission control. It reads fast for a book this technical, and the humor never lets the isolation curdle into despair, though a reader who wants emotional interiority rather than problem solving may find Watney's cheerful competence a little too steady to fully believe.