The Best Modern Dystopian Novels To Satisfy Your Gnawing Sense Of Dread

SHOP

After leaving her young daughter, Harriet, alone to run a work errand, Frida Lui must be re-trained in motherhood. Labeled as a 'bad' mother, Frida heads back to school and gives up all contact with the outside world to learn what it means to be truly 'good'. The School for Good Mothers is a thought-provoking exploration of cultural expectations of parenthood, how this differs for mothers and fathers, as well as making mistakes in an age of state surveillance. Jessamine Chan's heart-wrenching analysis of sexist societal pressures perfectly combines aspects of our current reality with visions of a dystopian future, and you'll be left wondering how far-fetched this story really is.

SHOP

Candace Chen works in a high-rise building near Times Square producing different types of Bibles for a publishing company. Her parents are dead and her boyfriend has moved out the city to escape the capitalist rat-race he feels it has become. When a worldwide epidemic of Shen Fever sweeps through the city, she stays, watching as it becomes a ghost town. Ma's debut novel is an impressively restrained vision of how the end of the earth might look like just another boring day at work.

SHOP

As the cult of #wellness grows into something more resembling a religion than a lifestyle choice, the world in Rachel Heng's novel becomes ever more feasible. In it, the possibility of immortality is up for grabs - but only to those who practise yoga and sleep ten hours a night and therefore 'deserve' to live forever. Now, a reactionary group who live a life of trans fats and wild orgies are being hunted by the government as terrorists. Heng makes interesting points about whether there is a right way to live while amusingly painting green juice as a poisoned chalice.

SHOP

In Station Eleven there is still Shakespeare - even after the apocalypse. The book opens with a performance of King Lear on the night that a flu pandemic breaks out in America. Twenty years later after the illness has ravaged the world, a young girl who appeared in the same production tours with the Travelling Symphony and performs the tales of the Bard. Though the illness is touched upon in the book, what stays with you is the characters wrestling with how to carve out meaning in life after the world has ended.

SHOP

One of Obama's favourite books of 2017 - the only accolade worth shouting about - Alderman's is a book within a book, telling the history of how women came to power after a seismic event. When teenage girls discover they can emit electricity from their hands and inflict death with their fingertips the world is forever changed. Telling the story of four women at the time of rapid social change, Alderman creates a vivid historic account of how a female ruled world came to be.

SHOP

In Ruffin's debut novel a racially divided world, and constraints that come with it, are disturbingly compared to our own. In the book the narrator fears for his biracial son Nigel's life in a near-future of increasing racial segregation and privatised prisons. In order to afford an operation that will save his son's life by turning him white, he must put his relationships, happiness and better judgement on the line. A racial satire with echoes of Get Out, Ruffin's world is brilliantly drawn and uncomfortably close.

SHOP

As its The Day After Tomorrow-style cover suggests, climate catastrophe is the theme of Blackfish City. After a global conflict described as the 'climate wars', the floating city of Qaanaaq is constructed in the Arctic Circle. This is actually about as farfetched as the book gets - instead of creating an extreme hell-scape, it shows how the chance to start afresh is likely to revert to the same type of corruption we already know.

SHOP

British author Ishiguro's body of work earned him the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017 and his 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Set in a dystopian version of 1990's England, it describes a state-run cloning program to continue the lives of citizens through organ donation. A more nuanced type of dystopian fiction than most, Ishiguro skilfully withholds the fates of his characters until we are deeply invested in them, raising interesting questions about friendship and what make us human along the way. Charlie Brooker's 'San Junipero' episode of Black Mirror drew comparisons when released.

SHOP

Perfect for those keen to see how an illness might rip apart society in gruelling detail, Pulitzer Prize-winning Zone One picks up in a Manhattan segregated by an illness that has divided people into the infected and uninfected. Telling the story of one of the people tasked with removing the former and keeping order, Whitehead manages to conjure a frighteningly believable world and what preceded it in the events of just three days.

SHOP

In a less bright imagined future for women, Sophie Mackintosh's Man Booker Prize-nominated novel focuses on a world which she has said, despite being set in the future, "is not a million miles away." In it a man keeps his wife and three daughters on an island to protect them from dangerous men on the mainland. After he leaves them and three men wash ashore, they become a threat the women must fight against. Mackintosh creates a striking world where the need to control women is taken to barbaric extremes.

SHOP

Set in an imagined future America were abortion is illegal, IVF is banned and new legislation grants rights to every new embryo, five women suffer the consequences of the new world order with one put on trial in a crazed witch-hunt. A fascinating drama which asks all too timely questions about women's rights to have control over their bodies, and the pain they are subjected to when they cannot.