Books like The Handmaid’s Tale
What should you read after Margaret Atwood’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Margaret Atwood
- 1986
- 325 pages
- Dystopian fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Handmaid’s Tale
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Giver
Lois Lowry
The same trick played gently: a society that solved suffering by deleting choice, and one person handed the memory of everything it threw away.
- Memory of the world before
- Scripture used as law
- A woman rented for her womb
- Written for younger readers
Worth a look — with a warningThe Road
Cormac McCarthy
If what held you was Offred's flat, careful voice describing unbearable things, McCarthy does the same at a lower temperature and with nothing left to lose.
- Memory of the world before
- Small acts of contraband
- Bleaker, with no institutions to blame
Worth a look — with a warningThe Maze Runner
James Dashner
Another closed system with rules nobody explains and a newcomer piecing them together, though here the puzzle is literal and the prose does not linger.
- Scripture used as law
- How fast it all happened
- Action plot, not interior life
Best for reproduction as state policyBrave New World
Aldous Huxley
Huxley got there first on the same question: who owns the birth rate. His state manufactures children in bottles rather than assigning them to wives.
- A woman rented for her womb
- Scripture used as law
- Women policing other women
- Satirical rather than intimate
Great matchFahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
A regime that burns the written word, told by someone inside the machinery who starts smuggling. Offred's stolen Scrabble tiles have a cousin here.
- Small acts of contraband
- Memory of the world before
- Scripture used as law
- Male protagonist, fewer bodies at stake
Great matchThe Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
State violence staged as ritual, with a young woman surviving by performing exactly what is expected of her. Gilead's Ceremony has a televised sibling.
- A woman rented for her womb
- Scripture used as law
- Women policing other women
- YA pacing, plot over atmosphere
Best for the machinery of control1984
George Orwell
The standard against which Gilead gets measured, and Atwood measured it deliberately: surveillance, an official language, and a private rebellion the state is patient about.
- Scripture used as law
- A final chapter that reframes it
- How fast it all happened
- Colder, more argumentative
Best for a body owned by the stateNever Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's narrator also recounts a life spent as a resource, in the same mild retrospective tone that makes you do the outrage on the book's behalf.
- A woman rented for her womb
- Memory of the world before
- A name that belongs to a man
- Almost no resistance in it
Best for memory of the world beforeStation Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Half of this novel is people remembering electricity and aeroplanes with the same ache Offred spends on hand lotion and her own name.
- Memory of the world before
- How fast it all happened
- Small acts of contraband
- Collapse, not a regime
Best for more AtwoodOryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
Atwood running the same engine on a different fuel: corporate biotech instead of theocracy, one survivor narrating, the collapse reconstructed from before and after.
- How fast it all happened
- Memory of the world before
- Colder, more satirical
Great matchAnimal Farm
George Orwell
The fastest lesson available in how a stated principle gets edited overnight and everyone agrees it always read that way. Gilead's scripture works the same.
- Scripture used as law
- How fast it all happened
- Women policing other women
- A fable, not a novel of interiority
Best for the original blueprintWe
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The book Orwell and Huxley both read first: a glass city, citizens with numbers instead of names, and a diarist coming apart on the page.
- A name that belongs to a man
- A woman rented for her womb
- Scripture used as law
- 1921 modernist prose, hard going
Worth a look — with a warningA Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Also about a state that decides what a body is for, told in a voice you have to learn. The argument overlaps; almost nothing else does.
- A final chapter that reframes it
- A name that belongs to a man
- Sustained sexual violence, narrated gleefully
What should you read after The Handmaid’s Tale?
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 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 The Giver by Lois Lowry — the same trick played gently: a society that solved suffering by deleting choice, and one person handed the memory of everything it threw away.
If what stayed with you was memory of the world before, read The Road by Cormac McCarthy instead: if what held you was Offred's flat, careful voice describing unbearable things, McCarthy does the same at a lower temperature and with nothing left to lose. The Maze Runner by James Dashner is the other strong option — another closed system with rules nobody explains and a newcomer piecing them together, though here the puzzle is literal and the prose does not linger.
Loved something else?
Start from any book and we’ll build the list around your reasons.
Find my next book →NextBook is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. We earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t affect which books we recommend or how we rank them.
More “what to read next” lists
- Books like 1984
- Books like 2312
- Books like A Clockwork Orange
- Books like A Darker Shade of Magic
- Books like A Gentleman in Moscow
- Books like A Little Life
- Books like A Man Called Ove
- Books like A Memory Called Empire
- Books like A Wrinkle in Time
- Books like All Systems Red
- Books like All the Bright Places
- Books like Altered Carbon