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.
Paper Book
Paolo Bacigalupi, New York Times-Bestselling author and National Book Award Finalist, dives once again onto our uncertain future with his first thriller for adults since his multi-award winning debut phenomenon The Windup Girl.   In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona,...
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
Paper Book
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen. Over 1 million copies sold in the UK. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all...
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 warehouse
Hart, Rob (Fiction writer)
Paper Book
Paxton never thought he'd be working for Cloud, the giant tech company that's eaten much of the American economy. Much less that he'd be moving into one of the company's sprawling live-work facilities. But compared to what's left outside, it doesn't seem so bad. It's more than anyone else is...
The dog stars
Heller, Peter
Paper Book
Hig, bereaved and traumatised after global disaster, has three things to live for: his dog, his neighbour and his Cessna aeroplane. He's just about surviving, so long as he only takes his plane for short journeys. But, one day, he takes his plane over the horizon, knowing that he won't have enough...
The fireman : a novel
Hill, Joe
Paper Book
#1 New York Times Bestseller 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...
Never let me go
Ishiguro, Kazuo
Paper Book
Shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, 'Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro written about wasted lives with such finely gauged forlornness.' - Sunday Times
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
Every night the whole nation watched the ultimate live game show on TV, as the contestants tried to beat annihilation at the hands of the hunters in order to win the billion dollar jackpot. And now there was a new contestant, the latest Running Man, staking his life while a nation watched.
The stand : a novel
King, Stephen
Paper Book
Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by virus and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published. 'THE STAND is a masterpiece' (Guardian). Set in a virus-decimated...
Awake in the Floating City
Kwan, Susanna.
Paper Book
For fans of Station Eleven, Birnam Wood and Migrations, an astonishingly beautiful literary dystopia about care and compassion in times of devastation.   In a future San Francisco transformed by years of rain, Bo, a 40-year-old lapsed...
American rapture
Leede, CJ
Paper Book
The instant USA Today bestseller from CJ Leede, author of Maeve Fly--a scorching and sweeping new novel about the end of the world as we know it. "A blistering, feverish ride through a uniquely American apocalypse."--Chuck Wendig, New York Times...
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...
Swan song
McCammon, Robert R
Paper Book
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. New York Times bestselling author Robert McCammon's prescient and astonishing vision of a post-apocalyptic United States comes to life in this classic epic of terror and renewal.<...
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)
Paper Book
A haunting, ethereal and beautiful twist on The Secret Garden, for fans of Shirley Jackson, Piranesi and Unsettled Ground 'Extraordinary... it already feels like a classic' Emerald Fennell, Oscar-winning director of PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and SALTBURN 'A...
The memory police
Ogawa, Yōko
Paper Book
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers. 'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino __...
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
O brave new world, that has such people in't. Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house. What does it mean? It's a truism of our time that it'll be the next...
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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