Recommendations by genre

Each list is ranked by how often a book actually gets recommended across NextBook, not by anyone’s personal top ten.

• Best dystopian novels

  Societies that went wrong on purpose. The best of these argue with each other — one state drugs you into compliance, the next one stamps on you.

  Starting with The Hunger Games, The Giver, The Maze Runner

  18 reading lists

• Best post-apocalyptic novels

  After the collapse. Some are about survival, some about what people carry with them when nothing else survives.

  Starting with Station Eleven, The Road, The Stand

  6 reading lists

• Best space opera novels

  Big ships, bigger politics. Star systems as settings and civilisations as characters.

  Starting with Ancillary Justice, Hyperion, Leviathan Wakes

  6 reading lists

• Best hard science fiction novels

  Science fiction that shows its working. The physics is load-bearing and the problem-solving is the plot.

  Starting with Altered Carbon, Aurora, The Left Hand of Darkness

  6 reading lists

• Best science fiction novels

  The whole shelf — first contact, far futures, and the ideas that come with them.

  Starting with Ender's Game, Dune, Hyperion

  22 reading lists

• Best cyberpunk novels

  High tech, low life. Networks, implants, and cities that never switch off.

  Starting with Dune, Ender's Game, Foundation

  3 reading lists

• Best dark fantasy novels

  Fantasy with the lights off. Morally grey, frequently bloody, rarely consoling.

  Starting with The Bear and the Nightingale, A Darker Shade of Magic, An Ember in the Ashes

  4 reading lists

• Best urban fantasy novels

  Magic running underneath a real city, usually knowing more than you do.

  Starting with The Name of the Wind, The Night Circus, A Darker Shade of Magic

  4 reading lists

• Best fantasy novels

  Everything from cosy to catastrophic, so long as the impossible is on the page.

  Starting with The Night Circus, Shadow and Bone, The Bear and the Nightingale

  42 reading lists

• Best mythology retellings

  Old stories handed to whoever was left out of them the first time round.

  Starting with Circe, The Song of Achilles, Spinning Silver

  10 reading lists

• Best dark academia novels

  Clever people, closed institutions, and something buried. Beauty treated as a moral problem.

  Starting with The Secret History, A Separate Peace, If We Were Villains

  7 reading lists

• Best psychological thrillers

  Unreliable narrators and domestic dread. The twist is usually a person.

  Starting with Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Before I Go to Sleep

  17 reading lists

• Best mystery novels

  A puzzle with fair clues, and someone stubborn enough to work it.

  Starting with Altered Carbon, Ancillary Justice, Big Little Lies

  14 reading lists

• Best horror novels

  Books that want something from you. Gothic, cosmic or uncomfortably close to home.

  Starting with Station Eleven, The Girl with All the Gifts, The Maze Runner

  16 reading lists

• Best literary novels

  Where the sentences are the point, and the plot takes its time.

  Starting with The Book Thief, A Little Life, The Bell Jar

  24 reading lists

• Best historical novels

  The past reconstructed closely enough to walk around in.

  Starting with Circe, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

  14 reading lists

• Best coming-of-age novels

  First everythings, and the particular cruelty of being young among other young people.

  Starting with Red Queen, Divergent, Legend

  32 reading lists

• Best romance novels

  Two people and the distance between them, closed slowly and on purpose.

  Starting with The Night Circus, Shadow and Bone, The Name of the Wind

  22 reading lists

• Best nonfiction books

  Memoir, history and essays that read with the momentum of a novel.

  Starting with The Golem and the Jinni, The Liars' Club, 14

  9 reading lists