Books like Delirium
What should you read after Lauren Oliver’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Lauren Oliver
- 2011
- 452 pages
- Young adult dystopia
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Delirium
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchRed Queen
Victoria Aveyard
A girl sorted by a system that decided her worth before she was born, and a romance she is not supposed to have. Aveyard trades Oliver's lyricism for velocity.
- Falling for the wrong boy
- An ending that cuts you off
- A cure everyone waits for
- Much more action and combat
Worth a look — with a warningThe Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
The book that made this whole shelf possible, and the hardest-edged version of it: same fenced district, same girl radicalised, far less patience for feelings.
- Evaluations, curfews and fences
- Portland as a closed city
- Falling for the wrong boy
- Violence is the main event
Great matchDivergent
Veronica Roth
Turning sixteen means a test that assigns your life, and the heroine's real secret is that she does not fit the categories. Lena's procedure with a different name.
- A cure everyone waits for
- Evaluations, curfews and fences
- Falling for the wrong boy
- Faster and more physical
Best for a state-assigned marriageMatched
Ally Condie
The closest book on the shelf: a state that assigns your partner, a girl who wants the other boy, and rebellion that begins with a single forbidden feeling.
- Love classified as a disease
- Falling for the wrong boy
- Evaluations, curfews and fences
- Even slower and gentler
Great matchLegend
Marie Lu
The state has been lying about a death in the family, and finding out is what breaks the protagonist open. Lena's mother, rewritten as a conspiracy plot.
- A mother who would not be cured
- Portland as a closed city
- An ending that cuts you off
- Thriller pacing over atmosphere
Best for engineered feelingThe Giver
Lois Lowry
The original: a community that removed love, colour and pain on purpose, and one boy given the memory of what that cost. Oliver is writing in its shadow.
- Love classified as a disease
- A cure everyone waits for
- A mother who would not be cured
- No romance to speak of
Worth a look — with a warningThe Selection
Kiera Cass
Also about a girl whose romantic future is state business, but Cass is writing a competition and a fairy tale rather than an argument about feeling.
- Falling for the wrong boy
- Evaluations, curfews and fences
- Very light stakes
Worth a look — with a warningThe Maze Runner
James Dashner
For the walls rather than the heart: a sealed community, a border nobody crosses, and an outside that turns out to be the whole story.
- Portland as a closed city
- Evaluations, curfews and fences
- No romance at all
Great matchThe 5th Wave
Rick Yancey
A girl who cannot tell whether the boy helping her is what he claims, in a world that has taught her trusting anyone is the fatal mistake.
- Falling for the wrong boy
- An ending that cuts you off
- Alien invasion, not social control
Great matchThe Darkest Minds
Alexandra Bracken
Children sorted, classified and interned by adults who are frightened of what they feel. Bracken's camps are Oliver's cure with the euphemism removed.
- Evaluations, curfews and fences
- A cure everyone waits for
- Portland as a closed city
- Road-trip structure, not one city
Best for the proseShatter Me
Tahereh Mafi
If what carried you was Lena's voice — the imagery, the fragments, the feeling written at full volume — Mafi does that harder than anyone on this list.
- Love classified as a disease
- Falling for the wrong boy
- Epigraphs from a fake handbook
- The style is divisive
Worth a look — with a warningEnder's Game
Orson Scott Card
On the list because it is about children processed by a system that has decided what they are for, though it is otherwise nothing like Oliver's book.
- A cure everyone waits for
- Evaluations, curfews and fences
- No romance, little feeling
Best for the endingThe Knife of Never Letting Go
Patrick Ness
Ness also stops his first book on a wound rather than a resolution, and he earns it. If Delirium's last page floored you, prepare yourself.
- An ending that cuts you off
- Portland as a closed city
- A mother who would not be cured
- Genuinely upsetting in places
What should you read after Delirium?
Delirium by Lauren Oliver 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 Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard — a girl sorted by a system that decided her worth before she was born, and a romance she is not supposed to have. Aveyard trades Oliver's lyricism for velocity.
If what stayed with you was evaluations, curfews and fences, read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins instead: the book that made this whole shelf possible, and the hardest-edged version of it: same fenced district, same girl radicalised, far less patience for feelings. Divergent by Veronica Roth is the other strong option — turning sixteen means a test that assigns your life, and the heroine's real secret is that she does not fit the categories. Lena's procedure with a different name.
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