Every End of the world book…Ever

Apocalyptic fiction should be a recognised genre of it’s own, like crime fiction or romance. That’s our goal.

At Survival Of The Bookish we’ve gathered a living list of all the books we consider to be in that genre with the hope that it’s useful to anyone else who suffers with the same narrow (but brilliant) taste in literature.

We thought about adopting a star-rating system but if they are on this list then they are all 5* in our opinion.

It’s tough to discriminate.

They could be tacky with unsophisticated writing, but if they are taking on this subject matter they will usually have something interesting to say about the world. The great ‘unveiling’ - which is the meaning of the word apocalypse - gives the writer a good leg-up.

We only include books that we have read, so the list will continue to grow. The title in the table takes you down to the mini-review.

What’s missing in your opinion? Let us know.

In The Rapture, peril balances with thoughtful cli-fi in Jensen’s first end-of-times adventure. She never lets the heroine have a moment of calm which made me tense (in a good way) for the whole read. I won’t ruin it by saying why, but she has an added reason why going through an apocalyptic event would be particularly trying.

This book that made me track down the rest of Jensen’s catalogue and it goes from the blockbuster to the barmy. I love her.

The Uninvited, is possibly even more ambitious than the first, this book ends in a way that I didn’t see coming. Yes, I was like a right wing politician looking at climate change unable to see what was right before me.

In some parts Wyndham-esque because of all the uncanniness and deadly kids, it also reads like a thriller and I was here for it.

Described on her website as a love story, Oryx and Crake is the first part of Atwood’s Maddadam trilogy. Although I would call it a love story as much as I would call Terminator a buddy movie.

Atwood constructs a world that is both ours, but also extreme. It chaotically covers more ground than her earlier Handmaid’s Tale and so in that sense has more scope but also more room for critique. Not from me, though. I think it is perfect and eerily prescient since it was published in 2003.

It is concerned with big business and genetic engineering and it is no spoiler to say the novel starts with most humans being completely wiped out, and yet still builds tension despite you knowing that.

The second in the trilogy, Year of the Flood has more alone time than the first. For perhaps obvious reasons. The themes have been set up and so now she lets smaller characters play out large themes. It’s hard to not keep comparing anything Atwood writes to Handmaid’s tale, but in this text there are clear thematic parallels with the religious fundamentalism of God’s Gardeners and that of the state of Gilead. The impact it has on women is covered again here. Never have I rooted for the hero more.

Maddaddam was a long time coming, relatively speaking, being published a decade after the first. I remember being so desperate to have it I bought it on Kindle the day it came out to save a trip to the bookstore. Something I need to remedy to complete my collection.

Atwood weaves together the stories of our heroes like Snowman, Zeb and Toby in a way that convinced me she must have had the whole thing mapped out a decade prior.

It is deft and complete and as with all of Atwood’s work, saying a lot more than racing to the finish line of a story arc.

The Heart Goes Last is set in a near future where Stan and Charmaine are living in their car. The world has really gone to shit and many are like them after a financial collapse leaving too many people and hardly any jobs. They are offered a place in a programme where they are given a home, a community and a job with one catch. Every other month they have to go and spend time in jail and swap places with their alternates. They don’t even pause to think before saying yes.

Using the what-if set up Atwood dissects capitalism as a structure in which all of us under the 1% are locked in to a pattern of conformity, consumerism and complicity. But that makes the book sound boring, when it is actually jubilant, funny, absurd and sticky with realness at the same time.

There is a nice connect to the world of the MaddAddam trilogy as the factory they work in builds the Prosibots and are charged with making them as close to reality as possible.

The real triumph of this piece for me is the way Atwood makes introspective questions like ‘who am I?’ and’ does love really exist?’ collide with the external questions like ‘how can I change anything when I’m just a cog in the machine?’.

As per my rules of this site, I won’t talk about the TV show because I know nothing about the medium except watching a lot of it when hungover. The Handmaid’s Tale is so close to perfection since it weaves an extraordinary imaginative and satisfying narrative with huge themes of social commentary and does so with some of the best sentences that have ever been published. I can still smell the musty showgirl dress that Offred wears to the secret ball, and touch its decaying velvet. I lost the copy I studied at A-level and it is my only regret since every single page was covered in scribbled notes. Pen is envy.

Margaret you’re a wily one. You only went and did it again. Following the huge success of The Handmaid’s Tale TV show, Margaret Atwood gave us The Testaments. The previous novel ended with a great cliff hanger. Did Offred make it out of Gilead? What happened to her child? In Testaments Atwood brings us up to speed, and maybe answers some questions that she left hanging for literal decades - The Handmaid’s Tale was written in 1985.

For me, tonally, the book felt more like later Atwood - The Heart Goes Last etc. Which makes sense as it IS later Atwood. The crushing oppression of the Gilead regime is recognisable as the same universe from the original novel, but this time Atwood shows us behind the curtain. With part of the novel written from one of the Aunt’s perspectives, Atwood skewers the truth of what makes good people do bad things. Juxtaposed against a background of corruption and hypocrisy, Atwood gives us four strong female characters, and a taste of what a good revolution might look like.

Written in 1965 there’s a lot of boy-scouting your way through this one. In A Wrinkle in the Skin survivors of a global catastrophe know how to do things like light fires without matches and scavenge for food. It is a great UK-focused grand-scale disaster and a snapshot into the time of writing without being too dated.

The Death of Grass Possibly Christopher’s most famous and therefore has been reprinted in as a penguin modern classic. The death of grass means that all wheat will no longer grow either causing a global food crisis. Our protagonist sees this happening in China and makes a sensible move out of the city. The rest of the novel is an exercise in needling the point of what would you do for the sake of your family. You may not consider yourself a violent person but faced with violent times, could that change? The shocking ending certainly felt like it punched me right in the face.

This book almost didn’t make the cut since it is more on the pure sci-fi end of the spectrum than his classic The Death of Grass, however The Possessors, by John Christopher makes the cut, just. A mysterious force from another world is planted in the earth lying dormant, waiting to be discovered by a human host who’s body it will then take over, discarding the useless mind.

From there it takes a relatively templated ‘invasion of the body-snatchers’ direction, but considering it was written in 1964 you could argue it was one of the originals.

It feels apocalyptic due to the pace and ease in which the body snatching happens once the first victim has been triggered. Could this be the end of humanity as we know it?

Brian Aldiss coined the term “cosy catastrophe” for literature that wipes out almost all of humanity leaving our hero as a sole survivor in a world of abundance without other people. That is until they either stumble across others or are driven through loneliness and madness to find one another.

I sometimes indulge in these narratives, particularly if I’ve just crammed myself into a London tube carriage so the fantasy of all human life being eradicated is quite appealing.

Our teen protagonist, as with other Christopher books, has a load of boy scoutish skills at his disposal. Despite this, Empty World doesn’t hold back from showing some harrowing outcomes of a global pandemic. The misogyny of the era (1970s) still manages to squeeze through the frame of so few characters as the conceptual conclusion is essentially, “Women. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em, probably.”

The World in Winter asks us to imagine a world where most of Europe has succumbed to a deathly ice age where living at all, let alone being part of a functioning society, is impossible. Written in 1978 Christopher’s novel focuses on the fates of white Europeans forced to become refugees to African nations where the snow hasn’t hit. Our main characters are Londoners who have to contend with a new social system that puts them fighting it out for scraps and a living with the poorest in Lagos.

The copy I have has an introduction by Hari Kunzru which succinctly wraps up the what-if scenario with “Imagine if you will, that the Oxford brogue is on the other foot.” For its time this book would have been a progressive exercise. It asks the white middle class reader to put themselves in the position of an unwelcome immigrant and wonder how they would like to be treated. It is, however, very much of the era it was written and several passages had me wincing with the choice of language, despite the intention.

As Kunzru puts it “Christopher is no white supremacist, indeed his anger at crude prejudice is there on the page.” That’s not to say the way he writes doesn’t have a snow drift’s worth of “yikes” moments.

The author of the acclaimed Cloud Atlas brought us another multi-character drama with not-too-unusual structure this time - The Bone Clocks. David Mitchell takes us from the nineties to the twenty-somethings and trots us all over the globe in his tale of Holly Sykes and her mystical connection to another world. I heard they were making a movie of this one too and I imagine it would be hard to create due to the trail mix of genres packed into the one book. It’s fantasy, travel fiction, inner-world naval gazing, apocalyptic, self-referential fiction and it’s cracking.

A Ballardian world through and through, The Drowned World shows us a London that is also a humid, overgrown swamp. Most of the world has retreated north but our band of unlikelies has stayed put and is living out a thin existence on roof tops and in the new jungle-lands of the streets.

As I read this book I felt like I needed to take a shower after each sitting, in the same way I did when I trekked the rainforest of Borneo. Ballard puts you there and makes you sweat while you think about not just the fleeting nature of society, but really of all human relationships.

In a novel that could be read as a companion piece to The Drowned World, Ballard’s The Drought pushes the earth’s limits in the other direction, with all fresh water evaporating due to radiation(?), decimating communities from all over North America. Our protagonist Ransom is your average Ballardian guy, unsure about how he really feels about anything. It is very similar in structure to Mad Max: Fury Road in that we take a road trip, and then return again. Making you wonder why we did in the first place. Answer: Ballard and nihilism.

As with The Drowned World, this text is so evocative that I needed a glass of water next to me the whole time. The parched landscape throws its decaying dust off the page at you.

Now we have Then, the bleak offering from Myerson which uses unreliable narration to emphasise the horror of the post-apocalyptic London setting. Our protagonist has definitely experienced some trauma around the loss of children and the juxtaposition of personal tragedy and societal nightmare works really well.

An uncomfortable read for many, I found it gripping with smart pacing.

Ahead of its time, Super Sad True Love Story reads like a Black Mirror pre-cursor with people’s financial and social status displayed for all to see and governing both your career and love life. Old people can live forever and look younger than their actual years as long as they can stump up the cash. That said, China has the US on the hook for a lot of debt and the threat that it all might come crashing down is not lost on 39 year old Lenny Abramov who still has a love for the real things in life. Like books. We agree Lenny.

It’s satire that, though written in 2010, remains relevant as it skewers topics of social media, privacy and phone addiction.

Published 14 years after the US detonated a nuclear weapon over Hiroshima, Alas Babylon by American author Pat Frank asks the biggest ‘what if’? What if it was us instead of them? In this classic book, a bomb is dropped over the US killing millions of people. A small town in Florida, Fort Repose, is saved but overnight civilisation is stripped away. Our protagonist Mark Bragg is the everyman who navigates us through this new world. Ticking off some of my favourite tropes we also see his band of misfits and the “what makes the non-violent, violent” question pop up.

There is definitely some overt racism and misogyny in the book but also some powerful passages where Frank brings us face to face with the fall-out. Quite literally. Radiation sickness, contamination, isolation. The book addresses these things technically and head-on.

A real favourite of mine, The Dog Stars by Peter Heller is very close to a “cosy catastrophe”. Set in North America, most people have been wiped out through a flu-like epidemic that turned into a deadly blood disease. As with any of this narratives written before covid-19, it feels eerie to go back and re-read what now seem like warnings. As well as the humans, all other nature appears to be suffering.

Heller writes the landscape of North America beautifully and you feel for the character as his fishing expeditions yield less and less bounty on each outing.

A lot of planes in this book makes it really feel like one of those conversations you have over dinner about “what you would really do if it all fell apart tomorrow?”. Answer according to Heller, acquire planes, grenades and a squeeze in a slightly shoe-horned romance.

A fellow Sussex graduate (hi Megan 👋), Megan Hunter delivers a short but startling apocalyptic yarn. Themes include the limits of our relationships from the romantic to the societal. Hunter definitely adheres to the “nine meals away from anarchy” rule and the scene where a husband trying to be brave does a supermarket run is memorable and harrowing.

A bit of a mainstream smash-hit, End of the World Running Club by Adrian Walker takes us to Scotland where Edgar Hill, an inattentive and slightly hapless father starts the apocalypse (raining meteors) in a more attentive but still hapless way. Ultimately the small family is separated. Will Edgar be able to redeem himself and save his family when it counts most of all?

The tone reminded me of the 2014 film Force Majeure. That film asks us to consider if a man won’t step up at the worst of times (in this case an avalanche bound for his family), then is he capable of doing anything more in the day-to-day? End of the World Running Club sees the failing father figure being quite useless day-to-day and gives hope that they would step up when it comes to catastrophe. Of course they would. Wouldn’t they?

Often found in top ten post-collapse novels lists, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is one of those rare things in our genre, both exquisitely written, with a conceptual theme at the heart and packed full of story and characters that keep us turning the page.

Never descending fully into the cliches of this genre, St John Mandel wants to look at the epidemic that wipes out 99% of the human population not as a survivalist think piece, but to question relationships, memory and the importance of art. The result is a tapestry of storylines that interconnect with satisfying emotional resolutions. We also spend a lot of time in an airport, the old world rubbing shoulders with the new post-collapse world, giving us that moment of “what-if” escapism.

Karen Thompson Walker is a funny one - she writes a really outstanding speculative novel in 2012 then waits seven years to write another (see below). She has a unique voice which is also paradoxically so much like Margaret Atwood. Every word does something. In The Age of Miracles, our protagonist schoolgirl Julia is in a world that has just discovered it is slowing. As in, the whole globe’s rotation is slowing down. At first by an hour every day, then longer and longer.

Everything is lagging out of kilter. Birds, tides, humans. Julia feels the enormity of the change impact her family on a planetary scale. Thompson Walker takes high concept jumping-off points in her (two) novels and delivers questions of family, love, and ultimately identity.

Set in a Southern Californian college town in the mountains, The Dreamers is about a contagious sleep disease which first appears in a freshman student who takes herself to bed early in her dorm room and the next morning doesn’t wake up. The sleep of the victim is deep and yet all vital signs seem to be fine. She is taken to hospital where professionals cannot wake her either. And then, another victim is struck down.

Karen Thompson Walker, the author of The Age of Miracles knows how to take “what if” scenarios and use them as lenses through which to observe the most basic of human traits. In The Dreamers she uses ambiguous and beautiful prose to keep our curiosity piqued for the action while allowing her to expand on the themes that she is there to unpack. For a book about dreaming, it manages to emulate that feeling you have when you wake from a dream, poignant and impactful, without stepping into the territory of what it feels like to listen to someone else describe their own dream. It is deftly done. 

There are parts that are philosophical. Versions of Philippa Foot’s trolley problem appear. Who deserves to be saved? Why? Just because they are a child? Or a character we have come to love? Or a family unit? 

Like a dream, Walker seems reluctant to labour the specifics about the disease, how it is transmitted or what can be done to cure it. She is very much more interested in the conflicts that it throws up for the characters. She has no problem throwing them under the trolley. 

Without spoilers I can say that I was at first disappointed with the ending, but now after some time and reflection, the choice of Walker not to hand the answers to you in a big box with a bow on only reinforces the contemplative tone of the book. It will be a book that stays with me, perhaps even in my dreams. 

A classic often taught in schools, On The Beach is a liminal sort of catastrophe. Set downwind from a nuclear war, the people of Australia know they aren’t long for this world. Shute wonders on love, community and the loneliness at the heart of all existence.

An offbeat allegorical tale for the nuclear threat of mutual destruction. Cat’s Cradle is about human stupidity and arrogance and a chemical called ice nine which turns all water to solid upon contact. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well. Written when the Cuban missile crisis was a very real threat, this satire uses black humour to make the awful truth about humanity a little more laughable.

This is one “what if” scenario that genuinely scares the daylights out of me - One Second After is William R Forstchen imagining a world in the wake of an electro-magnetic attack. Essentially what would happen if we lost all electric power overnight.

The first of the trilogy this book is great at detailing the return to a simpler time (via chaos), however the author can’t help but hide their misogynistic views. The book leaves you with the sense they’d quite like going back to a time when men were men, grrrrrr. Also - lots of guns.

Why do I do it to myself? After the NRA-fest that was the prequel to this - I still went on and read One Year After by William R Forstchen. It’s sort of like if the “you have no authority here Jackie Weaver” guy became the chief of martial law in a post-collapse town.

You can’t argue that there’s a lot of pace and in the sequel we see a town struggling to find its feet, also face a war. More guns than ever. Where are they finding all these blasted guns?

Written in 1949 Earth Abides by George R Stewart is another of our “cosy catastrophes” where everyone is wiped out other than our protagonist and a bunch of misfits. Stewart’s gives us scenes that are screenplay ready, pushing that “what if I was the last one left” hypothetical to technical extremes. There’s an engineers knowledge when it comes to things decaying. It certainly made me think about car tires a new way. There’s also a scene of a library overtaken by nature in just decades. It’s poetic and humbling. You can read more about Earth Abide in my bit on generations and the apocalypse: https://www.survivalofthebookish.com/posts/altered-offspring

When reading The Black Cloud you can tell Fred Hoyle is an astrophysicist. I love that an accomplished scientist would use a novel to explore a “what if” scenario. It’s science fiction but it also could happen.

A black gas cloud enters our solar system and threatens to block out all sunlight, devastating life on earth. Whenever I hear about the Fermi Paradox I think of this novel. And that’s mind blowing (<< this is a really good joke if you’ve read the book).

I knew after I finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy I’d never be able to watch the film. From all accounts I hear the film actually pulls back on some of the most harrowing parts in the novel and yet is still a tough watch. It’s a contradiction that in this end-of-the-world sub-genre I love so much, you often find hope in the face of the destruction. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily so with this McCarthy novel about a father and son on a post-collapse walkabout. It’s pretty bloody bleak.

The Comet, W.E.B Du Bois

Review coming soon

Nod, Adrian Barnes

Review coming soon

The History of Bees, Maja Lunde

Review coming soon

The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta

Review coming soon

All Our Wrong Todays, Elan Mastai

Review coming soon

The Power, Naomi Alderman

Review coming soon

Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham

Review coming soon

The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber

Review coming soon

Part murder mystery, part apocalyptic fiction The Last by Hanna Jameson is a fantastic debut set in the Swiss Alps. Tonally very similar to John Christopher’s The Possessors, Jameson creates a sharp and striking mis en scene of the cut-off hotel in the wintry surroundings coping with the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. Guests of all nationalities have to co-exist and find a way to plan for a future eating just rations left in the hotel’s kitchens. After the blasts, witnessed on lobby TVs, people react in different ways, many fleeing. Our main characters, however, stay put. They have many different reasons for this that we find out about over the course of the next chapters.

Jameson’s wonderful book contains some of my favourite tropes of end-of-the-world fiction. The band of misfits with characterisation of the highest degree. The scrap for survival on rations. The key difference here is that Jameson also gives us a murder for heightened peril. The intrigue for the reader is huge and the suspicions in the hotel are rife. It kept me gripped on each page. A new favourite.

Blind Faith, Ben Elton

Review coming soon

Vox, Christina Dalcher

Review coming soon

Dark Matter, Blake Crouch

Review coming soon

The Circle, David Eggers

Review coming soon

1984, George Orwell

Review coming soon

The Wall, John Lanchester

John Lanchester chose a perfect title for this book - the eponymous wall is like a character of its own alongside the main players we follow for the course of the book. Set in a post-climate-crisis UK, The Wall lands us in a dystopia that could be all-to-real in the not distant future as a solid concrete wall has been built around our island nation. This appears to be to stop both issues with rising sea levels (only old folk remember beaches) and also as protection from refugees and aslyum seekers bound to the UK from climate-ravaged countries. 

Our jump-off point is following protagonist Kavanagh as he is drafted for his mandatory couple of years at the wall, their new national service. Kavanagh quickly introduces us to the wall, describing its non-descriptiveness in visceral detail that makes us feel like we’re on top of that wall freezing on the watch with him: “Always water, sky, wind, cold, and of course concrete, so it’s sometimes concrete-waterskywindcold, when they all hit you as one thing, as a single entity, combined, like a punch, concretewaterskywindcold.”

As with your typical dystopia things aren’t always what they seem, and soon Kavanagh is part of an adventure that serves as a warning of what we might be 

In true fashion there is not one real antagonist of this book, except perhaps his parents who appeared to do nothing about the climate issue, or the wall. The intergenerational resentment feels recognisable in our Brexit-divided country.

I’ve said that every book in this list is five star, but The Fall (Burning Skies Book One) is unfortunately the exception. There was so much promise at the start. The hero Cal, a fish out of water, is an Englishman on his own in New York taking a trip that should have been his honeymoon. There’s a great build up of character here with Cal’s inner chatter spitting out staccato angry reactions as he remembers that he should be there with his ex. Then one day into his trip, the worst happens, a series of explosions and then worse, a nuclear bomb hits Boston, Washington and the US is brought to its knees.

Ex-marine Cal rises to the challenge and soon groups with an unlikely band of very different characters (one of my favourite tropes) but rather than keep this character-portrait-in-apocalypse scenario going, Ford indulges in a military parallel plot that struggles to hold attention in the same way.

There is a lot of telling not showing through the military chapters. The author tells us that “they were nervous every time a car passed” where instead he could have shown a car approach, then some nervous reaction behaviour from the passengers. Looking out the back window, as if watching the stranger’s car would make it safer somehow, for example.

Even in my attempt to read every book that concerns itself with the end of the world, I won’t be hunting down book two and three of this trilogy. I salute the attempt, but this one was not for me.

The cover of the copy I purchased pushes hard that The Last Dog on Earth is by the same author as The End of the World Running Club. Written before that novel, and its sequel, The End of the World Survivors Club, the doggy tale takes us on walkies around a post-collapse central London. Alternating chapters are narrated to us through two voices, that of Lineker the dog and Reginald his master. The backdrop of the destroyed city and a highly anxious, anti-social, man trying to navigate his way through it all is a great set up. Walker knows just how to tear his protagonists down to the kernels of who they really are. Reginald goes on a . Job-like journey to reach a the conclusion, which is far more satisfying than actual Job’s. It wasn’t the easiest or reads for me because, as a cat lover, the visceral dog stuff about shit and arses and bosh! and fuck and digestion were a bit much for me.

Long listed for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, The Water Cure is an impressive debut novel from prize winning writer Mackintosh. Set in an abandoned hotel on an unnamed island, Grace, Lia and Sky have only known a life of an isolated upbringing with their parents. The world beyond their island became toxic and men are the source. Except King, their father of course. He is fine because he has been kept separate from the collapsing world all this time.

Everything is normal - although hardly peaceful - until one day when some unexpected unwanted visitors wash up on the beach. The visitors are men.

I’ve said from the start, I will read ANY material on the apocalyptic theme. Anything. That means even when the Daily Mail have a sticker on the front saying “did this thriller predict coronavirus?”, I’m reading that. This competent thriller follows the story of Tina, a show producer in Las Vegas as she deals with grief following the sudden death of her son Danny. One day she wakes to a message written on the chalk board in his untouched room, NOT DEAD. Gasp. An adventure unfolds which couples bioengineering catastrophe with slightly supernatural mystery. The world building of the Las Vegas setting feels like it was written for screen. This grounding helps for when the narrative starts taking us down a more surreal avenue. Without spoilers, the justification for the clickbaity cover sticker happens on page, like three hundred and twenty of a 325 page novel. But it does pack an eery punch when it finally arrives.

I am surprised it took me until 2020 to uncover this post-collapse sci-fi. And it’s a trilogy too! Set in a silo of hundreds of floors, society is organised into strata delineated by profession. No one can question the safety or structure of the silo set up or they are immediately sent out for “cleaning” into a post-apocalyptic wasteland viewed through a massive screen in the common area. From the outset Silo is great at subverting your expectations. For a novel in this quite corny genre of ours, it blends action nicely with deeper meaning about society, class and dictatorships. I can’t wait to read books two and three.

Review coming soon

Review coming soon