Recommend to me - Dystopian edition

[Cazzovuoi]

It’s my favourite genre and I’m looking for recommendations.

I’ve read the classics like Handmaids Tale and Testaments, The Road, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Station Eleven, Vox, The Power, Ender’s Game, The Stand, World War Z, The Mist.

I’m currently halfway through Children of Men.

I need more! Please recommend your favourite dystopian novels.

1. The Book of Guilt - Catherine Chidgey

set in an alternate near-present UK, three brothers in a children’s home are looked after by the Mothers.

Cloud atlas by David Mitchell

and Oryx & Crake trilogy also brilliant

Children of the dust

I’ve just finished What We Can Know by Ian McEwan and would definitely recommend as an arguably dystopian novel, but it’s really more a reflection on present day culture.

The Machine Stops - EM Forster
The Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa
Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham

English teacher so heavily young adult ...

The Girl with all the Gifts and it's sequel The Boy on the Bridge
The Grace Year (really thought provoking)
The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
The Vega Jane books by David Baldacci
The Gender Games
The Divergent series (not the films!)
The Shatter Me series

If I was to say one - The Grace Year - proper feminist dystopian fiction. Had a similar impact on me to when I first read the Handmaid's Tale

Hi piano she also wrote The Dreamers which is about a sleeping sickness.

And she wrote The Strange Case of Jane O. And Oh Susanna.

I really liked the Book of the Unnamed Midwife and its sequels.

Another vote for Woman on the edge of time by Marge Piercy.

Last year I read and enjoyed A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr which is often described as sci-fi but actually I think is more post-apocalyptic dystopia

Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland (the same guy who wrote Generation X). It really stayed with me.

Thanks all!

I’ve read Vox and The Power and really enjoyed them.

Lionel Shriver can also be great for near-future/alternative reality dystopia - The Mandibles, Should we stay or should we go (which has really stayed with me, as has Oryx & Crake) and The Post-Birthday World for current times Sliding Doors vibe

The Time Machine by HG Wells

Justin Cronin the passage

Actually on reflection these maybe more post apocalyptic but they were good

Fourth Wing / Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros.

Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.

I’ve read the Time Machine and all three Fourth Wing books! I’d put them in fantasy more than dystopian which is why I didn’t mention them in my “already read” list.

‘How high we go in the dark’ by Sequoia Nagamatsu

‘Foe’ by Iain Reid

‘Never Let Me Go’ and ‘Klara and the sun’, both by Kazuo Ishiguro

Oh these are some of my favourites from when I was younger.

Id also add The Knife of Never Letting Go

Oh and Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward although that leans Sci Fi

the arc of a scythe trilogy - Neal shusterman

The trilogy is brilliant. Stick with it through the wobbly bits because there are some seriously good tie ins from the last book to the first. (Disclaimer: it was a long, long time ago when I read them)