Space exploration has to go wrong, or we don't have a story  Apollo 13's failure makes for a great film in a way that wouldn't be true of Apollo 8's success. But there are only a limited number of ways a space expedition can mess up: technical glitch, psychotic ship's computer, mad crewperson, hostile alien. It is to James Smythe's credit, then, that his new novel manages to pay its respects to the conventions of the astronaut-in-peril genre while still doing something new, and memorable, with it.

The novel's narrator, Cormac Easton, is a journalist accompanying the deep-space flight of a spaceship called (in a nice literary in-joke) the Ishiguro. The mission, apparently, is nothing more taxing than "travelling further in space than anybody else before". But of course things go wrong. Indeed, Smythe kills off all the crew but Easton in the first chapter ("they died one by one, falling off like there was a checklist")  a series of accidents that, as they keep happening, increasingly look less like bad luck and more like something very suspicious indeed.

By chapter two, only Cormac is left, narrating his isolation and fear. And in chapter four our desperate hero, strung out in space like a drug-free Major Tom and knowing he will never get back home, blows up the ship and himself with it. It's a bravura, even foolhardy way to start a novel, but Smythe moves the story smartly past this self-imposed dead end, and the narrative winds its way through some brilliantly handled twists and revelations.

Indeed, it's tricky discussing the bulk of the novel without giving things away. Suffice to say that Smythe is very good on the claustrophobia of his setting, and that he squeezes impressive amounts of suspense from his deliberately limited set-up. The narrator is perhaps more clueless than an actual space explorer (even a supernumerary writer-crew member) would be permitted to be. And some of the physics is iffy: Smyth seems to think it would be possible to stop a spaceship in ballistic free-flight by pressing a big "off" button, and that space-walks are only possible if a ship has come to a "full-stop"; while I didn't see how his artificial gravity worked.

But none of this gets in the way of the cumulative emotional power of the book. In particular, his portrait of the hero as a physically broken-down hermit, scarred and desperate, is very powerfully handled. It's like an episode of Star Trek written by JM Coetzee.

In this novel, space odyssey is a mode of reality TV: the commercially sponsored crew members are global celebrities whose video diaries and interviews are lucrative media events. As a mild satire on contemporary media obsession, that works fine. But reading The Explorer I was reminded of a different sort of TV experience: JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof's Lost. We're in space, of course, rather than on a tropical island, but otherwise the similarities are striking: a disparate group of folk sharing the same flight, widespread use of flashback to flesh out the narrative, and the same sense of pervasive doom, incipient violence and mystery. Smythe even includes a mysterious clutch of numbers (250480, since you ask) that may or may not be the key to everything.

On the other hand, Smythe handles his denouement much more effectively than Lost did, and the novel stays in the mind as a tightly knotted, expertly constructed space trip of a read.

 Adam Roberts's latest book is Jack Glass (Gollancz).