I love unanswered questions, especially in regards to worldbuilding. I hate feeling catered to as a read and instead love feeling like an observer.
My favorite recent example of this is I Who Have Never Known Men. The narrator didn’t have an explanation for the state of the world, so I didn’t get one.
What are some other ones?
by SecretAgentIceBat
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Never let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Loved never known men
This is like Gene Wolfe’s main thing. Pretty much all of his books are like this.
Book of the New Sun is his most famous series. Fifth head of Cerberus is also excellent.
*The Memory Police* by Yoko Ogawa. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that that book doesn’t answer a single question about what’s going on or why it’s happening.
I also think that Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka also do this, in more surreal ways.
Maybe “This is how you lose the time war”? Im not sure if It is a novel but It definitely fits the abstract worldbuilding requirement
If you like having exposition deliberately and even gratuitously withheld, M. John Harrison is your guy
It can be a little maddening sometimes, but his Kefahuchi Tract novels, especially *Light* and *Nova Swing*, are a ton of fun *precisely* because there’s no turgid pseudo-scientific justification for all the crazy crap going on — he’ll just write “then the physics went all wrong” like he’s daring you to ask what that means