Books Like The Hunger Games: 9 Dystopias That Still Hit Just as Hard

Every few years a new wave of readers discovers The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and comes away slightly stunned that a YA novel from 2008 reads this sharply now. Katniss Everdeen volunteering for a televised fight to the death is the hook, but what keeps the book alive is everything around the arena: a Capitol that turns children's deaths into entertainment, propaganda wielded like a weapon, a heroine who becomes a symbol she never asked to be, and a love triangle that is really an argument about survival versus hope. It is fast, furious and far smarter than its imitators.

And there were a lot of imitators. The good news is that the dystopia boom also produced genuinely great books, and the tradition Collins drew on runs deep. Whether you want another deadly competition, another spark-of-rebellion arc, or something older and stranger from the same family tree, these are the nine we recommend most often at Ever After Books. We have ordered them roughly from closest match to boldest departure, so you can pick by how far from Panem you feel like travelling.

What to read after The Hunger Games

Legend by Marie Lu

In a militarised future Los Angeles, the Republic's star prodigy is sent to hunt its most wanted criminal, and both teenagers discover their government has been lying to them their whole lives. Legend has the propaganda themes and the enemies-to-allies electricity of Collins at her best, told in alternating viewpoints that keep the pace absolutely blistering. The most purely exciting book on this list.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Tris lives in a Chicago divided into factions by personality, and her initiation into Dauntless is as brutal as any arena: knife throwing, fear simulations, rankings where the bottom get cut. It shares The Hunger Games' fascination with what oppressive systems do to identity, with a heroine remaking herself through sheer stubbornness. Less political than Collins, more of a training-gauntlet adrenaline ride.