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Call them what you like – gamebooks, pick-a-paths or choose your own adventure books – they all deliver the same thing: interactive, non-linear stories in which the reader is transformed from passive spectator into skilful puzzle solver.
Have you ever read a gamebook? Chances are you have. They’ve been around since the thirties and come in every genre, from fantasy to horror, whodunit to sci-fi. And, from time to time, a one will break into the mainstream and shoot up the bestseller list.
If you grew up in the eighties and nineties, you’ll remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series, though probably haven’t thought about them since. But did you know that last summer in Italy, a brain-scrambling gamebook was right up there on the bestseller chart alongside the latest bonkbusters? And who could have guessed that at the ripe old age of 86, the world’s hardest gamebook would go viral on BookTok during the pandemic?
Clues, puzzles, mysteries and choices… Today, we’ll see how authors pull readers into the thick of the action in the cleverest of ways.
The brain-teasing gamebook that obsessed Italians last summer
We kick off in Italy with a book that you probably haven’t heard of – at least not yet. It’s the summer of 2025 and Bozze non corrette (Uncorrected drafts) is taking the country by storm. Half novel, half puzzle, in this ingenious gamebook there are 1000 mistakes that readers must spot, 10 in each short chapter. These can be anything from typos and omissions to factual errors. Find them all and you have the key to unlocking the underlying mystery: how did Niccolò Errante really die?
In no time, the book shifted 40,000 copies – a huge number for Italy – and the rights were snapped up for major markets like the United States, France, Spain and Brazil.
The book’s success is in part down to the identity of its main author: a well-known name to Italian puzzle lovers, Stefano Bartezzaghi is editor of Settimana Enigmistica, Italy’s best-selling puzzle magazine.
Link to the book: https://www.amazon.it/Bozze-non-corrette-Stefano-Bartezzaghi/dp/8804800569
The world’s toughest gamebook: an octogenarian title trending on TikTok
The world’s toughest gamebook is also one of the oldest. Cain’s Jawbone was written back in 1934 by Edward Powys Mathers, a London cruciverbalist who went by the pseudonym Torquemada.
This whodunit contains six murders to solve, but there’s a catch: its 100 pages have been printed and bound in the wrong order. The reader must first put the pages in the right order (in itself no mean feat) and then work out who the killer is!
Sound easy? Be warned: in 90 years, only four people have solved the riddle! Two super sleuths cracked the case a few months after the book was first published, picking up a prize to boot. Decades then passed before another successful attempt. It arrived in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when British crossword fanatic John Finnemore identified the killer, taking advantage of the spare time afforded by lockdown. It still took him four months’ work, though!
As news of Finnemore’s achievement broke, Cain’s Jawbone began trending on BookTok, the TikTok community for bibliophiles [which we covered in depth here]. It even prompted American TikToker Sarah Scannell to try and solve the fiendish riddle with the help of her 60,000 followers.
One of the videos that Sarah Scannell posted on TikTok about her attempt to solve the Cain’s Jawbone mystery.
Thanks to its new-found fame on TikTok, the book not only climbed bestseller lists in the English-speaking world, but was also translated into more languages and published for the first time in countries like Italy, Portugal, Romania and Germany.
In 2024, Finnemore, published a sort of spiritual sequel of his own to Cain’s Jawbone, entitled The Researcher’s First Murder.
Link to book: https://www.amazon.it/Cains-Jawbone-Ernest-Powys-Mathers/dp/1783527412
The thrill of the escape room in paper form: the escape book
Another type of gamebook having a moment is the escape book, piggybacking on the popularity of escape rooms.
These books contain complex riddles to solve, secret codes to crack and illustrations to scour in search of precious clues to escaping the room. Some of the bestsellers in the genre have been written by Christopher Edge, the award-winning British children’s author.
The first author to explicitly connect this type of gamebook to the escape room was the Spanish writer Ivan Tapia in his Escape Book series. But there were many forerunners to the subgenre: books that don’t just tell a story, but also challenge the reader to solve head-scratching puzzles along the way. One of the best-known is The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, written by Eric Berlin and published in 2007.
Link to the book: amazon.it
The pick-a-path gamebook craze of the eighties and nineties
A book from Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf series. [“Lone Wolf” by Federico Rebeschini, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image: flickr.com]
Before we go, a touch of nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the eighties and nineties, when gamebooks were all the rage.
Many millennials fondly remember the pick-a-path style of gamebook. With their non-linear structure, these books force the reader to make decisions that determine how the plot unfolds and how the story ends, with each choice taking the reader to a different page in the book.
One of the most popular series from this gamebook golden age is Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf. This fantasy saga contains some 30 titles and has sold over 12 million books worldwide. The first instalment, Flight from the Dark, was published in the UK in 1984, with new episodes released at regular intervals over the next 15 years. Success was not confined to these shores, with Lone Wolf enjoying a loyal following in the United States, Spain and Italy, too. Other noteworthy gamebook series by Dever include Combat Heroes and Freeway Warrior.
Another huge hit was the Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first episode hit bookshops in 1982, and the series went on to sell 17 million copies.
While few choose-your-own-adventure-style gamebooks are released by major publishers today, hardcore fans continue to self-publish their own, and the genre still generates lively discussion online.
How did you like our look at bestselling gamebooks? Have you read any? And do you have an idea of your own that you’d like to publish one day? Share your thoughts!