The most recommended dystopian books

I’m a sucker for a good opening and this book intrigued me from the beginning. Kelly does a great job in building the tension and setting her world up in the seemingly normal reactions of her characters and it was this that kept me reading. Even though the main character is only 14, and it’s targeted at young adults, I still enjoyed it as an adult. It does some great cli-fi storytelling without being preachy, which is great! 

The best sci-fi has a lived-in feel – think of the polluted, grimy futurism of Blade Runner or Alien.

This is something that it has in common with noir fiction. Compare, say, the cyberpunk of  William Gibson with the gritty, hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett – take out the sci-fi elements, and they could be writing about the same world.

In Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway imagines just that. It is a razor-sharp pastiche, combining the best tropes of the gum-shoe genre – the femme fatale, the world-weary PI, corrupt cops, and menacing crime bosses – with an intriguing sci-fi premise: What if someone invented a drug that made youth eternal? What influence and power would such people wield? And what would happen if one of them mysteriously died?

In this tale, the world is in post-apocalyptic decline, and human fertility has collapsed to zero. A family set up a cloning facility, hoping to overcome the odds and produce a fertile population. The clones, once mature, have other ideas. They take over the facility and marginalise the non-clones. Only rarely is a fertile clone produced, and they are kept as ‘breeders’. As the story progresses, the desire of a naturally born individual for self-determination, and conflicting values between individual and clone, lead to a tension that cannot go unresolved. The storytelling cleverly slips between omniscient in the scenes with the clones, and third person in the scenes with the individual characters.

Call me an end-of-days junkie; I won’t deny it. 

I have a twelve-story climbing rope in my storeroom in case the building catches fire. There’s a fire blanket in there and a go-bag, too. Talking about bomb shelters does something to my blood. Preparations excite me; maybe it’s a competitive streak. When I come face-to-face with disaster, I want the groundwork taken care of so I can focus on what’s important, like grabbing my children, our passports, and snacks for the road.

Reading this book was like living through the nightmare of my dreams. Communities came together, scrounging for food and water. Disaster after disaster was ingeniously avoided with other people’s refuse, raw brain power, and the occasional bullet. Man was pitted against man, and the only prize was survival. It was everything I needed to get a true appreciation of the bricks and mortar surrounding me and the covers… show more.

Emma Ellis spins the most horrifying yet hope-filled stories of dystopian societies. In book one of the Eyes Forward series, the world is in a population crisis. Resources are heavily rationed, and the governments of the world are actively taking steps to curb population growth.

That’s when Mae gets pregnant and learns she must find a “life donor”—someone who agrees to die so that the baby may live—or abort her unborn child. I appreciated how Ellis threaded the horror of a forced abortion into a gripping tale of human resilience in the face of overwhelming odds.

The plot twists and turns kept me on the edge of my seat, yet the message of the book made me think about how we steward our natural resources. This book is perfect for Octavia Butler, 1984, and Brave New World fans.

This book fascinated me with its title, a contradiction in my Dutch mind. It proved to be a rewarding and intriguing read.

I loved to be on the other side and be in the mind of the child, affected by the cruel history of WW2, and feel how to make a life afterward. It made me grateful for my own life in Canada. 

This book grabbed me from the moment I picked it up. It was dark, delicious, and one of the best mindf*cks I’ve read in a long time. It kept me on the edge of my seat with the twists and turns I never expected. And as far as the spicy scenes go…they were beyond magnificent. There was no skimming there, I devoured every morsel.

I devoured this book because it resonated with many of my spiritual beliefs.

The MC is an evolved being who is the daughter of a goddess, she is reincarnated many times. I loved the higher power and the evolved beings, alongside human evolution as the MC lived through the ages. I am a Spiritualist and I truly believe that we are here on this earth plane to learn and grow.

This book offered a unique perspective on life, and the human psyche. This book left me asking questions about my own life, a deep and meaningful read indeed. 

A man is chosen. A hero emerges. Deep, dark future action and adventure at its story-telling best. As a beast created to kill other beasts, what keeps Ragnar in check? What controls his path? Great questions, but who cares? These are adventures of the purest, most entertaining form. King offers the perfect balance of action and coming-of-age in a dystopian future. As the main character, Ragnar Blackmane can best be described as a noble savage, ascending within the pantheon of heroes that leave their mark on the galaxy. It’s this combination that makes it all work, and I wish King would have written more. 

Jenna Fox wakes from a year-long coma after a terrible accident and tries to figure out who she is now. This is a book with futuristic medicine and technology, but the feelings and emotions are universal. Jenna’s struggle to find out the truth about her past, and her place in the present make this one of my very favorite books, which I’ve read and reread many times.