Books like the man who was thursday

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is a novel by G. K. Chesterton, first published in 1908. The book is sometimes referred to as a metaphysical thriller. The novelist Kingsley Amis describes his reading of the novel thusly,

By 'thrilling' I mean not only doing what a first-rate action-writer like Ian Fleming or Dick Francis can do -- keep you in continual and almost painful suspense, put you in fear for the hero's survival -- but persuading you that something wonderful is afoot, that the events described have a mysterious and momentous significance you hardly dare guess at. ... The Man Who Was Thursday...remains the most thrilling book I have ever read. ... The plot concern concerns spying, terrorism, an anarchist plot and a secret New Detective Corps organized to overthrow it: so much is clear from almost the beginning. But even earlier... whatever mysteries lie ahead, they are going to reach further and deeper than the twists and turns of an adventure story. ... What we expect from fantasy or a nightmare is that it should develop in an illogical, unpredictable way or perhaps not actually develop at all. But the feeling of the reader of The Man Who Was Thursday...is of being pulled inexorably along an inevitable path. Even the bizarre scenes turn out to have a definite and intelligible purpose. ... In one way or another, then, the nightmare is a controlled nightmare, and so in its way believable. But the sense of mystery remains, heightened indeed by glimpses of the ordinary world, the backcloth against which the drama or melodrama or whatever we decide to call it takes place. Definition remains impossible: The Man Who Was Thursday is not quite a political bad dream, nor a metaphysical thriller, nor a cosmic joke in the form of a spy novel, but it has something of all three. What it has most of is a boy's adventure story...