Books

Five incredible literary dystopias you may not have heard of

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It would be misleading to say that my new novel, Claudia, is a dystopia – most of it isn’t, though some of it is – but while I was working on the book I found myself reading heavily in the genre, which has always been a favourite of mine. Mind you, dystopia is probably a favourite genre of nearly everyone’s these days (have you seen these days?), and so it’s slightly dismaying that even now we tend to get the same familiar titles cropping up in lists of recommended dystopic reading. Here, then, I have assembled five literary counterworlds that I want to assure you are absolutely fantastic while perhaps being not quite so grindingly obvious as your Nineteen Eighty-Fours, your Brave New Worlds, even (post-Emmys) your Handmaid’s Tales. See what you think…