The best dystopian books, with the Australian ones nobody lists

The Australian dystopias

On the Beach, Nevil Shute (1957)

After a nuclear war has destroyed the northern hemisphere, Melbourne waits for the radioactive cloud drifting south. Shute's novel is quiet and devastating: people go to work, plant gardens and fall in love while the deadline approaches. It is the original Australian dystopia, and still the most famous.

Tomorrow, When the War Began, John Marsden (1993)

A group of country teenagers come back from a camping trip in the bush to find Australia invaded and their families taken. The first of a seven-book series that a generation of Australian teenagers read in school. Suzi Dougherty reads the audiobook.

The Swan Book, Alexis Wright (2013)

Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's novel is set in a future Australia reshaped by climate change and by a government that controls Aboriginal lives. Its heroine, Oblivia, is a mute girl who lives in a rusting hulk in a polluted swamp full of black swans. Dense, poetic and demanding; the audiobook, read by Jacqui Katona, runs thirteen hours.

The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood (2015)

Two young women wake up drugged in an outback compound behind an electric fence, with other women who, it turns out, were all at the centre of sex scandals involving powerful men. It won the Stella Prize in 2016. City of Sydney's Libby catalogue held 41 copies when we checked.

Clade, James Bradley (2015)

Three generations of one family across a century of climate change, from the near future onward: fires, floods, pandemics and, through it all, ordinary love. Less a single catastrophe than a long, believable slide.

Terra Nullius, Claire G. Coleman (2017)

Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman's first novel, developed through the black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship. It is best read knowing as little as possible: a story of Natives, Settlers and runaway children whose turn halfway through reframes everything before it. City of Sydney's Libby catalogue held 56 copies.

The Old Lie, Claire G. Coleman (2019)

Coleman's second novel takes Earth into an interstellar war on the side of a powerful Federation, and follows soldiers, a fugitive and a prisoner whose stories slowly connect, with deliberate parallels to Australian history. Our guide to The Old Lie has more.

The classics

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1949)

Big Brother, the Thought Police, Newspeak and Room 101. Still the book every other dystopia is measured against.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)

The opposite nightmare to Orwell's: a world kept docile with comfort, engineered birth and a drug called soma. Brisbane's Libby catalogue held 14 copies.

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

In the theocracy of Gilead, fertile women are assigned to bear children for the ruling class. Narrated by Offred, one of them. Audible Australia's top result is a full-cast production; Brisbane's Libby catalogue held 16 copies.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953)

Fireman Guy Montag burns books for a living, until he starts reading them. Short, and the quickest classic here to hear.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)

A father and son walk south through a burned, grey America after an unexplained catastrophe. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Bleak and spare.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

Kathy remembers her school days at Hailsham, an English boarding school with a secret purpose that the students half-know and never question. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Read by New Zealand actor Kerry Fox.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

After a flu pandemic collapses civilisation, a travelling troupe performs Shakespeare to the scattered survivors around the Great Lakes. The hopeful dystopia on the list.

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