Five Books to read if you like apocalyptic fiction

Posted on 9 June 2025 • Arts, Arts and social sciences

With the release of the movie 28 Years later this month, you may find yourself craving apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. Here are some suggestions from The Open University’s Jennie Owen, Lecturer in Creative Writing. These page-turners include pandemics, monsters and environmental collapse, and are guaranteed to have you both horrified and gripped.

1. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (published by Headline 2019)

This novel stands as a cornerstone of dystopian science fiction, as relevant today as it was when first published in the Nineties.

Set in a near-future America ravaged by climate catastrophe and social collapse, Butler introduces us to Lauren Olamina, a young woman with a unique gift – and curse: hyper empathy, the ability to physically feel the pain and pleasure of others.

Lauren’s journey begins in the relative safety of a walled community, while outside, chaos reigns and drug-fuelled arsonists terrorise the streets. When her sanctuary is inevitably breached, Lauren must venture north, forging a new path and seeking to build a better society from the ashes.

Although Butler passed away before completing the planned five-part series, this novel remains a powerful, self-contained vision – one that has inspired adaptations from opera to a graphic novel. It is a call to resilience, adaptability, and a reminder of the importance of community.

2. Blindness by José Saramago (published in English by Vintage Classics, 2013) translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

Pandemics have long haunted the pages of speculative fiction, but few authors conjure up such a visceral, unsettling world as Saramago’s Blindness. It’s no surprise that this chilling masterpiece helped earn him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, after it was published in Portuguese in 1995.

Set in an unnamed city, the novel plunges us into chaos as a mysterious epidemic of sudden blindness sweeps through the population. While Saramago’s characters remain nameless they are vividly depicted.

Among them is an ophthalmologist, one of the first to lose his sight, and his wife, who remains inexplicably immune. Together with a group of strangers, they must forge alliances and survive as civilization collapses around them.

There is a universality in the telling of the story, which explores the thin veneer of civilization as we understand it.

3. The Trees by Ali Shaw (published by Bloomsbury, 2016)

Ali Shaw’s The Trees is a dark, enthralling vision of a world on the brink of collapse — part ecological disaster novel, part modern-day fairytale.

Shaw delivers a story that is both haunting and imaginative. Readers may already know him from The Girl with Glass Feet (shortlisted for the Costa Prize) and The Man Who Rained, where he proved his gift for weaving myth and magic into the everyday.

In The Trees, he explores a post-apocalyptic landscape that unfolds overnight. One morning, Adrien wakes to find that nature has violently reclaimed the earth. Trees have erupted through concrete and steel, obliterating cities and destroying the technology we take for granted in a single night. Survival is no longer a given.

Adrien, once a self-absorbed and ineffectual English teacher, sets out on a deadly journey to the coast, in hopes of reaching his wife in Ireland. Along the way, he encounters a cast of unlikely companions, each altered by the new world in different ways.

Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but infused with a mythic and folkloric edge, The Trees asks us how we might change and evolve, when everything we thought was important is lost?

4. The Wall by John Lanchester (published by Faber & Faber, 2019)

Lanchester’s novel lingered in the mind, long after turning the final page. Its chilling relevance in today’s rapidly shifting landscape compels readers to confront pressing questions such as borders, modern-day slavery and environmental collapse along with comforting lies society tells itself to maintain a fragile sense of safety.

Set in a dystopian version of the UK, where travel between countries is strictly forbidden, every citizen is conscripted to serve two years as a ‘Defender’.

Their grim duty? To protect the rising coastline from the ‘Others’ – climate migrants forced to live on the sea, driven to breach the barriers for questionable safety.

Our first-person narrator, Kavanagh, finds himself ensnared in a life that is cold, wet, lonely, and monotonous, as he guards the wall and blindly follows a regime increasingly marked by political division. Yet, as the story unfolds, Kavanagh discovers that not everything is as it seems and begins to question all that he has been told.

It’s no surprise that this thought-provoking novel earned a spot on the prestigious Booker Prize Long List the year it was published.

Lanchester’s masterful storytelling invites readers to reflect on the complexities of humanity and the moral dilemmas we face in an uncertain world.

5. The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller (published by Penguin, 2023)

The engaging and well-structured narrative draws you in and won’t let go. Neffy is a young woman on the run from her past. When the world succumbs to a pandemic, she signs up to be a paid test subject for a risky experimental vaccine trial.

Abandoned in a locked ward with a small number of other volunteers, she soon discovers that the London outside the hospital is changing fast.

As communications falter, information from the outside world abruptly vanishes. The group is left to decide whether it is safer to watch from the windows, as their supplies run out, in the hopes of what seems like an unlikely rescue, or risk leaving in search of other survivors.

Along the way, Neffy is forced to not only confront the new reality of the present, but to revisit her past in technicolour detail. Will she find the resolution she is looking for? This is a thought-provoking story about loss, and grief; begging the question as to how far we would go to atone for our actions.

Picture: Cottonbro Studio for Pexels