L iterature has returned again and again to the idea of an imminent apocalypse: the end of everything that we know and love, and the beginning of some nebulous, gruelling ‘after.’ The cultural critic Frank Kermode argued in The Sense of an Ending Whatever the true reason , post-apocalyptic novels seem to scratch an itch in many of our brains. So here we are: a selection of the very best depictions of armageddon, as recommended by our expert interviewees on Five Books over the years.
🏆 Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 🏆 Winner of the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
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“The Road is a very spare novel by Cormac McCarthy. Humanity has been wiped out, for the most part. There’s a man and his son traveling on a road to try to get to where it’s rumored that sprouts of civilization are starting to grow again. It’s a very minimalistic book. It’s very sparse and elegiac, just with those two characters.” Read more...
The Best Apocalyptic Fiction
Elliot Ackerman ,
Military Historians & Veteran
“An absolute classic of the genre. One of the things that’s superb about this book is how it interweaves timelines and flashbacks. The contemporary world has a strong presence in it, which makes the near-future dystopia feel proximate and plausible. The meeting of post-apocalyptic and contemporary life makes you feel nostalgic for the world we’re in, and that’s a wonderful thing.” Read more...
The Best Near-Future Dystopias
Rosa Rankin-Gee ,
Novelist
“One of the things that I actually find paradoxically comforting about The Last Man is that it’s so much worse than even the worst predictions about coronavirus. But while The Last Man is a work of fiction, it does capture some central ideas about epidemics that were ubiquitous in the early nineteenth century.” Read more...
Books on Living Through an Epidemic
Alex Chase-Levenson ,
Historian
“World War Z is told from multiple different perspectives and multiple different cultures. It’s about how they respond to the impending apocalypse: what the Americans do and what happens in the Middle East, how individuals respond. So you have a couple of people who are already preparing for the end of the world and you’ve got the military view. It’s great because Max Brooks really pulls together this multi-cultural viewpoint, it’s not just a Brad Pitt action-movie vehicle.” Read more...
The best books on Surrealism and the Brain
Bradley Voytek ,
Medical Scientist
“It’s the quintessential Cold War story. It’s utterly haunting. It captures so well the madness of mutually assured destruction. By not playing it out at the level of the generals and the White House Situation Room, but instead focusing on one submarine crew and the civilians they interact with, it brings it down to the personal level. It shows the craziness of this mutual suicide pact that the entire world willingly or unwillingly signed up to.” Read more...
The best books on World War III
“This is a really interesting book. It had quite an unconventional publishing journey, but it became something of a cult hit. It’s not a traditional post-apocalyptic book, but it tells the story of an excommunicated knight turned brigand. He comes into the company of a young girl who might be a saint, and they travel through medieval France during the Black Death. The whole book is like walking through a Hieronymus Bosch painting. You have a chaotic, magical disintegration of the world, which everyone is absolutely sure is the end of days. We, the readers, know it is just a plague, that things are going to continue. But the characters feel like everyone is going to die: the end of the world has come.” Read more...
The best books on The End of the World
Paul Cooper ,
Historian
“Riddley Walker is one of those books that awoke in me a total fascination with dystopian and post-apocalyptic titles. It is set a couple of thousand years in the future, following a nuclear war, and is written in an imagined dialect that has evolved after the collapse of civilisation. The main character, Riddley, is the narrator and his account of discovering and trying to make sense of an attempt to recreate a powerful weapon from an earlier time makes for a riveting read.” Read more...
Forgotten 20th-Century Classic Books
Rebeka Russell ,
Publisher
“It’s the dual narrative of an artist called Harry who—thanks to a combination of grief and absorption in his painting—doesn’t realise that a pandemic is happening around him in London. He emerges from this ‘deep-dive’ into a devastated landscape, and, later, embarks on a cross-Europe road trip, as he tries to reach Africa with two fellow survivors, who are sisters. This narrative is interwoven with the story of two researchers in the Arctic Circle discussing an artificial intelligence thy have developed. They’ve been providing this AI with information about human history and culture, in order for the AI to predict the future. There’s a race against time, as these two stories happen simultaneously. There’s not a false note. It’s so well done. Beautifully written, filmic.” Read more...
The Best Near-Future Dystopias
Rosa Rankin-Gee ,
Novelist
“It’s a very humane portrait of motherhood and what it means to be human. It’s a future shock novel, an urgent novel reflecting where we are and what’s happening in society now. It’s wonderfully imagined and written, particularly in how it deals with intimate relationships, but also how it handles broader themes: the characters are driven by each other, and by the environment. “ Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2020: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Margaret Busby ,
Publisher
“The themes that underlie the book are reasonably positive: the way the characters deal with their duty to each other, at a community level – in the story of post-apocalyptic survivors eking out a civilised existence – and what technology means to us. It explores questions of how much faith we should put in computers. It has a lot of value for the decades ahead.” Read more...
The best books on World War III
“This is a vision, relevant to our discussion of apocalypse, of a century or so from now when climate change has made most of the American continent uninhabitable, with large parts of it covered by rainforest or desert. The ideas it puts forward are presented in the context of an adventure story, of a group of Europeans who explore this almost abandoned continent and come across various groups and tribes who live in the ruins or jungles. Ballard was a tremendous admirer of surrealist painters – he wanted to be a painter himself but didn’t have the talent, he used to say – and the novel is a tremendous gallery of images, beginning with a ship pulling into an empty New York, where everything turned gold by the sun.” Read more...
Critiques of Utopia and Apocalypse
John Gray ,
Philosopher
“It’s a really strange novel…it’s on my list because I’ve never seen anything like it. The words in the title, they’re animals, but they actually refer to people. One of them, Crake, is a scientist, a genetic engineer; and essentially, he’s a sort of evil villain character. He’s really, really interesting. He engineers a great pandemic, which wipes out most of the world. And he is in a relationship with this very ethereal woman, who we never really get to know very well, who is known as Oryx. It’s a difficult book to summarise, because it’s very hallucinatory and weird! Every aspect of it is brighter than life, somehow. The basic plot follows a man who in the narrative present is called the Snowman, and he lives in a post-apocalyptic world. He’s surrounded by these very innocent humans who seem a lot like the Eloi in The Time Machine by HG Wells” Read more...
The Best Sci-Fi Romance Novels
Natasha Pulley ,
Novelist
“There is a genius idea in this book … what I find very funny about his central conceit is that you have this misogynistic taxi-driver called Dave who rants away and his kids have been taken into custody. He is like one of those cabbies we have all had who sound off these ignorant, opinionated views as you are stuck in the back as a captive audience. Dave writes out his rant on metal so it survives in the post-apocalyptic world. And it is found, a bit like a Dead Sea scroll, and society has organised itself around these mad opinions. So, essentially, it is a satire on religion, the way in which religious authorities seek to impose absolute meaning on ancient texts even though society is drastically different from the context in which those texts were written. It’s a hilarious idea and one that rightly pokes fun at how religious dogma, conjoined with ignorance and fear, will always seek to impose a fixed meaning on something all writers know to be true – the impossibility of single interpretation and the inherent instability of all textual meaning.” Read more...
The Best Apocalyptic Novels
James Miller ,
Literary Scholar
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