The 19 Best Dystopian Novels of All Time

Classroom staples share the shelf with cult paperbacks and YA blockbusters, each one imagining a different way for society to go wrong.

1. 1
   The Man in the High Castle

   Philip K. Dick's 1962 Hugo Award-winning novel set in a United States divided between the victorious Axis powers.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Divergent

   Veronica Roth's 2011 debut novel about Tris Prior in a future Chicago split into five factions.
   999pts
3. 3
   Parable of the Sower

   Octavia E. Butler's 1993 novel following Lauren Olamina through a collapsing 2020s California.
   933pts
4. 4
   Never Let Me Go

   Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel about Kathy H. and her friends, clones raised at the English boarding school Hailsham.
   902pts
5. 5
   Brave New World

   Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel of a World State that grows its citizens in hatcheries and pacifies them with the drug soma.
   857pts
6. 6
   The Handmaid's Tale

   Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel narrated by Offred, a Handmaid in the theocratic Republic of Gilead.
   833pts
7. 7
   1984

   George Orwell's 1949 novel about Winston Smith living under Big Brother's surveillance state in Oceania.
   833pts
8. 8
   The Maze Runner

   James Dashner's 2009 novel about Thomas, who wakes with no memory in a glade enclosed by a giant maze.
   755pts
9. 9
   We

   Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel, written in 1920–21 and first published in English in 1924, set in the glass-walled One State.
   755pts
10. 10
    The Hunger Games

    Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel in which Katniss Everdeen volunteers for a televised fight to the death in Panem.
    667pts
11. 11
    Fahrenheit 451

    Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel about Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is burning books.
    564pts
12. 12
    The Road

    Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, about a father and son crossing a burned-out America.
    564pts
13. 13
    Oryx and Crake

    Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel in which Snowman recalls the corporate-run world that ended in an engineered plague.
    444pts
14. 14
    It Can't Happen Here

    Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel about a demagogue who wins the US presidency and installs a fascist regime.
    444pts
15. 15
    The Children of Men

    P. D. James's 1992 novel set in a 2021 England where no child has been born for a quarter of a century.
    303pts
16. 16
    Wool

    Hugh Howey's self-published series, collected in 2012, about a community living in an underground silo; adapted as the TV series Silo.
    303pts
17. 17
    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

    Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel about bounty hunter Rick Deckard tracking androids, later adapted as Blade Runner.
    303pts
18. 18
    A Clockwork Orange

    Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel narrated by the violent teenager Alex in the invented slang Nadsat.
    303pts
19. 19
    The Giver

    Lois Lowry's 1993 Newbery Medal winner about Jonas, chosen to hold the memories of a community that has given up colour and choice.
    0pts

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