Books like A Clockwork Orange
What should you read after Anthony Burgess’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Anthony Burgess
- 1962
- Dystopian fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after A Clockwork Orange
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchNineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell's state doesn't rehabilitate Alex, it rewrites him — and the last act asks the same question Burgess does about whether a coerced conscience is one at all.
- Free will versus conditioning
- The state as the worse evil
- Nadsat, the invented slang
- Duplicate of the 1984 record
Great matchBrave New World
Aldous Huxley
Conditioning as a public good, applied at birth rather than in prison. Huxley makes the argument Burgess dramatises, and makes it funnier.
- Free will versus conditioning
- The state as the worse evil
- No violence, no gang life
Great matchFahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Another author who invented a whole verbal style for a society that stopped thinking. Bradbury's is prettier; the anger underneath is the same.
- Free will versus conditioning
- Nadsat, the invented slang
- Lyrical rather than brutal
Great matchThe Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
A state that reforms people for their own good and calls the result freedom. Atwood's version has none of Alex's swagger and twice the dread.
- The state as the worse evil
- Free will versus conditioning
- Sexual violence throughout
Great matchLord of the Flies
William Golding
Boys with nobody watching, discovering what they are capable of within a fortnight. Burgess's droogs, minus the state and minus the irony.
- Youth gangs and boredom
- A charming monster narrator
- No dystopian apparatus
Worth a look — with a warningA Brave New World Revisited
Aldous Huxley
Huxley's own non-fiction follow-up, checking his predictions against 1958. Useful if you want the argument straight, dull if you wanted a novel.
- Free will versus conditioning
- The state as the worse evil
- Non-fiction, no story
Great matchWe
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The original novel about a state that surgically removes the imagination from its citizens, narrated by a man who is losing his. Jagged and strange.
- Free will versus conditioning
- The state as the worse evil
- Difficult modernist prose
Great matchThe Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
A beautiful young man who commits atrocities without consequence and remains charming throughout. The aesthetics-and-evil pairing Burgess is playing with.
- A charming monster narrator
- Violence set to classical music
- Victorian, mannered prose
Great matchFight Club
Chuck Palahniuk
A narrator who makes his own violence sound like a joke you're in on, in prose built for velocity. The closest modern descendant of Alex's voice.
- A charming monster narrator
- Youth gangs and boredom
- Violence set to classical music
- Nihilism without Burgess's ethics
Worth a look — with a warningAmerican Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
A polished, funny, unreliable narrator describing atrocities between restaurant reservations. The most extreme thing here, and it means to be unbearable.
- A charming monster narrator
- Violence set to classical music
- Extreme sexual violence
Worth a look — with a warningClockwork Angels
Kevin J. Anderson
Matched on the word 'clockwork' and little else — this is a steampunk novelisation of a Rush concept album. Fine on its own terms, unrelated to Burgess.
- Nadsat, the invented slang
- Youth gangs and boredom
- Shares only a title word
Great matchNeuromancer
William Gibson
Gibson invented a vocabulary and made readers learn it mid-sentence, exactly as Burgess did. Low-life criminals, high-tech state, dense slang.
- Nadsat, the invented slang
- Youth gangs and boredom
- Cyberpunk, and quite technical
Best for the free-will argumentOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
An institution that corrects difficult men into docile ones, and what it costs the one who resists. The Ludovico Technique with a different name.
- Free will versus conditioning
- The state as the worse evil
- A charming monster narrator
- Racist and misogynist passages
What should you read after A Clockwork Orange?
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Nineteen Eighty-Four by — orwell's state doesn't rehabilitate Alex, it rewrites him — and the last act asks the same question Burgess does about whether a coerced conscience is one at all.
If what stayed with you was free will versus conditioning, read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley instead: conditioning as a public good, applied at birth rather than in prison. Huxley makes the argument Burgess dramatises, and makes it funnier. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is the other strong option — another author who invented a whole verbal style for a society that stopped thinking. Bradbury's is prettier; the anger underneath is the same.
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