Dystopian Reads

Looking for your next dystopian read? Look no further! Here are four upcoming titles that explore the future and what it might hold.

ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD by Eiren Cafall
9781250353528 | 1/7/25

In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they’ve saved.

DWELLING by Emily Hunt Kivel
9780374616069 | 8/5/25

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE ME by Melissa Pace
9781250358677 | 8/19/25

When a woman wakes up on a transport bus arriving at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, she remembers nothing of her life up to that moment, none of the dark things she’s seen—and done—that have forged her into the steely survivor she is. Dr Sherman tells her she’s Dorothy Frasier, a paranoid schizophrenic committed by the state for her violent delusions. And that it’s 1954. She knows none of this is true. The only problem is, despite her fighting skills and uncanny ability to pick locks and find escape routes, she has no idea who she actually is.

Delusional episodes begin to happen more frequently, moments where she finds herself in a broken future with a ragtag team of young scientists urging her to find a doctor in 1954. Apparently, this doctor holds the key to something lying dormant in them all, something they call the Guest. When she’s moved to the Unit, a section of the hospital where Dr. Sherman experiments with electroshock therapy, she knows that she has to get out—until she has a visitor. He’s a man whose concerned, loving face she recognizes, a man her doctor says is Paul Frasier, her doting husband.

Now she is sure of nothing but she needs answers—about the Guest and about Paul, but most importantly about herself. But to find those answers, she will have to face the darkness inside her and use it as she risks her freedom, mind, and ultimately her life in a battle for the truth.

THE SHUTOUTS by Gabrielle Korn
9781250323484 | 12/3/24

The year is 2041, and it’s a dangerous time to be a woman driving across the United States alone. Deadly storms and uncontrollable wildfires are pummeling the country while political tensions are rising. But Kelly’s on the road anyway; she desperately needs to get back to her daughter, who she left seven years ago for a cause that she’s no longer sure she believes in.

Almost 40 years later, another mother, Ava, and her daughter Brook are on the run as well, from the climate change relief program known as The Inside Project, where they’ve spent the past 22 years being treated as lab rats. When they encounter a woman from Ava’s past on the side of the highway, the three continue on in a journey that will take them into the depths of what remains of humanity out in the wilderness.

At the same time, way up North, weather conditions continue to worsen and a settlement departs in search of greener pastures, leaving behind only two members, drawn together by a circumstance and a mystery they are destined to unravel together.