Dystopian or Post-Apocalyptic Books

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Updated July 2, 2025
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Chain-gang all-stars
Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR * FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION * A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from...
The handmaid's tale
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from "the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction" (The New York Times) * The sixth and final season of the award-winning Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss is now streaming ...
The water knife
Bacigalupi, Paolo.
Ebook
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A "fresh, genre-bending thriller" (Los Angeles Times) set in the near future when water is scarce and a spy, a hardened journalist and a young Texas migrant find themselves pawns in a corrupt game. "Think Chinatown meets Mad Max."...
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
Paper Book
Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman....
World War Z : an oral history of the zombie war
Brooks, Max.
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Prepare to be entranced by this addictively readable oral history of the great war between humans and zombies."--Entertainment Weekly   We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by...
Red Rising
Brown, Pierce
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Pierce Brown's relentlessly entertaining debut channels the excitement of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. "Red Rising ascends above a crowded dys­topian field."--USA Today<...
A psalm for the wild-built
Chambers, Becky
Paper Book
Winner of the Hugo Award! In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, bestselling Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk and Robot series, gives us hope for the future. It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools;...
American war
El Akkad, Omar
Paper Book
"Powerful . . . As haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in The Road, and as devastating a look as the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America. . . . Omar El Akkad's debut novel,...
Upright women wanted
Gailey, Sarah
Paper Book
A 2021 Hugo Award Finalist! A 2021 Locus Award Finalist! A 2020 ALA Booklist Top 10 SF/F Pick! A Booklist Editor's Choice Pick! Book Riot's Best Books of 2020 So Far! Named a Best of 2020 Pick for NPR |...
The dog stars
Heller, Peter
Paper Book
"Leave it to Peter Heller to imagine a postapocalyptic world that contains as much loveliness as it does devastation. His hero, Hig, flies a 1956 Cessna (his dog as copilot) around what was once Colorado, chasing all the same things we chase in these pre-annihilation days: love, friendship, the...
The fireman : a novel
Hill, Joe
Paper Book
From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and...
Never let me go
Ishiguro, Kazuo
Paper Book
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private...
The long walk : a novel
King, Stephen
Paper Book
*SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE COMING SEPTEMBER 12, 2025* In this #1 national bestseller, master storyteller Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman, tells the tale of the contestants of a grueling walking competition where there can only be one winner--the...
The running man
King, Stephen
Paper Book
In the reality TV show The Running Man, the only objective is to stay alive. This "slam-bang action suspense" (Gilbert Cruz, Vulture) from Stephen King is now a major motion picture coming from Paramount on November 7, 2025. Ben Richards has no...
The stand : a novel
King, Stephen
CD
This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of...
Station eleven
Mandel, Emily St. John
Paper Book
This Anniversary Edition of Station Eleven, a finalist for the National Book Award and named a Best Book of the Twenty-First Century by the New York Times, celebrates ten years of this now iconic novel with a new color illustration and a guide to "The Mandelverse" A...
The road
McCarthy, Cormac
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive that "only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). One of...
The garden
Newman, Nick (Pseudonym)
A darkly beautiful, eerie, hypnotic novel about two elderly sisters living alone at the edge of the world. In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. Evelyn and Lily have only ever known each other. What was...
The memory police
Ogawa, Yo?ko
Paper Book
*** 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST *** *** LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE AND THE 2020 TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD *** *** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR *** A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the...
1984 : a novel
Orwell, George
Paper Book
Written 75 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell's chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever... This 75th Anniversary Edition includes: *...
Gliff
Smith, Ali
Paper Book
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE * From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world....
Wanderers : a novel
Wendig, Chuck
Paper Book
A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world's last hope. From the mind of Chuck Wendig comes "a magnum opus . . . a story about survival that's not just about you and me, but all of us, together" (Kirkus Reviews,...
Zone one : a novel
Whitehead, Colson
Paper Book
In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under...

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