Project Hail Mary works because it does several things at once. It's a survival story built on real science. It's a mystery, since Ryland Grace wakes up with no idea who he is or why he's alone on a spaceship. And, without spoiling anything, it becomes one of the warmest first-contact stories in modern science fiction, about two very different minds learning to understand each other.
If you finished it and want more, here's where to go next, depending on which part you loved most.
If you loved the first contact: Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
The best follow-up for most readers. Three thousand years after the events of Ender's Game, humanity has found a second intelligent species on the planet Lusitania, and contact is going badly. A researcher is found dead, killed by the aliens in a ritual no one understands, and Ender Wiggin is called across the stars to find out why.
Like Project Hail Mary, it's a book about the hard, patient work of understanding a mind that doesn't think like ours, and about what happens when you get it wrong. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula, and you don't need to have read Ender's Game to follow it. See the book.
If you loved the stranded-alone-among-aliens feeling: Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis
A Cambridge scholar named Ransom is kidnapped by two men, bundled onto a spacecraft, and delivered to Mars as an offering to whatever lives there. He escapes into the landscape and discovers three intelligent species living in peace, none of whom can understand why humans behave the way they do.
Written in 1938 by the author of the Narnia books, it's shorter and gentler than Weir, but it shares the same core pleasure: an ordinary man, far from home, slowly learning an alien world and finding friends in it. See the book.
If you loved the moral stakes: Hard to Be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
An agent from an advanced Earth lives undercover on a planet stuck in its Middle Ages, under strict orders to observe and never interfere. Then a new regime starts executing everyone who can read.
Where Grace has to decide how far he'll go to save two worlds, the hero here has to decide whether he's allowed to save one at all. It's a classic of Soviet science fiction, and it's as gripping as it is thoughtful. See the book.
If you loved the amnesia and second chances: Replay by Ken Grimwood
Jeff Winston dies of a heart attack at 43 and wakes up in his college dorm room at 18, with every memory of the life he just lived. Then he dies again, and wakes up again. Winner of the 1988 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. See the book.
If you loved the unlikely friendship: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Two agents on opposite sides of a war fought across time begin leaving each other letters, and what starts as taunting becomes the most important relationship either of them has. It's very different in style from Weir, lyrical where he's practical, but it hits the same note: two beings who should be enemies choosing each other anyway. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. See the book.
If you loved the science expedition into the unknown: the Southern Reach novels by Jeff VanderMeer
A government agency sends expedition after expedition into Area X, a stretch of coastline where something has gone very wrong with nature. Where Weir's universe always turns out to be understandable, VanderMeer's refuses to be, which makes it the perfect eerie counterpoint. Start with Annihilation, then continue with Authority and Acceptance.
And of course: The Martian
If somehow you haven't read Weir's first novel, about an astronaut stranded on Mars who has to science his way home, that's the obvious next stop. See the book.
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