Books like Never Alone — picked by fans

The secret to mastering your apocalypse experience is to think of it not as surviving, but as thriving—in the way that humans did for over 300,000 years as hunter-gatherers.

This book will drop you into that mindset as you read about how far our modern civilization has deviated from our original lifestyle, and the huge price we have paid for all of our comforts, conveniences, and technological wizardry.

This book may make you want to adopt an apocalypse-ready lifestyle even in the absence of societal collapse, since the new path he proposes offers so much in terms of improved health and wellbeing, rewarding outdoor activities, and IRL interaction (enjoy more sex, he says).  

This is the book you want on your shelf if you plan to escape to the woods when SHTF (sh** hits the fan).

You can learn easy shelters to build, various friction-fire methods, cooking methods for campfire meals, and how to fashion just about any basic tool or useful item from wild materials, including weapons. You’ll also get acquainted with basic wilderness medicine and what the real threats are when you’re living outside full time.

But the true key to making this book useful is to really do and make the stuff. You can read all you want about the best knot for securing the poles of your tipi, but you won’t really get it until you try it (17 times). 

Foraging is my favorite survival skill. Discovering food in the wild provides the perfect dopamine rush, and it’s exactly what we evolved to do as humans.

Nicole’s comprehensive guide covers so many edible plants and also gives fun, inventive recipes, so that even if it’s not the apocalypse, you might want to experiment with things like pickled magnolia leaves or elderberry pancakes.

When I find wild plants I intend to eat, I always like to double check with another field guide or the online citizen science database iNaturalist to make sure I did the ID correctly – nobody wants to end up like Into the Wild’s Christopher McCandless in that bus in the Alaska wilderness!

One thing I realized in my rewilding journey was that I was totally dependent upon GPS – even when I was on an extended wander in nature and trying to feel at home in the wild.

Yet there are so many directional clues available to use for natural navigation, and Gooley makes it easy to learn how to read trees, water, animal sign, and plant growth to find our way. While paper and online maps give us a two-dimensional understanding of where we are, navigating with nature puts us in the center of the living world, engaged with everything around us.  

This novel is a sequel to Julie of the Wolves and Julie by the same author, but what sets this third book apart is that it is from the perspective of Julie’s wolf pack featured in the previous novels. George studied Inuk and Eskimo culture as well as the relationships of wolves in a pack, which led to a visceral and fascinating story of how wolves survive and interact with one another and with the courageous titular character. Vivid scenes transport readers to the Alaskan tundra, where they can consider a relationship of understanding between humans and animals.

Alistair MacLean’s thrillers have been a guilty reading pleasure of mine since high school, when MacLean churned out bestsellers like The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare every year. MacLean creates tough, grim heroes who do whatever they have to do to get the job done. The writing is clumsy but effective, with heavy-handed humor and world-weary cynicism. The women are barely defined. And yet...

The plot, mood, and setting of each book provide one heck of an adventure. Like the crash-landing of a passenger airliner on the Greenland ice cap in Night Without End. A nearby team of scientists rushes to save the survivors. Among whom are the murderous criminals who caused the plane crash. A thoroughly riveting tale of survival in an Arctic wilderness.

Humanity has been divided between the Haters and the Unchanged. The Haters fly into a blind rage and attempt to kill any Unchanged they happen upon. But after the resulting nuclear war, there are only a few Unchanged left in the world. But Danny can hold the Hate and he uses this profound ability to blend with the Unchanged and find their hidden acloves. But as their numbers dwindle, Danny’s loyalty to the Haters comes into question. Besides just being an entertaining and chilling story, Moody sheds light on the destructive nature of an emotion that I see as the defining trait of our new societal landscape. 

This book is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are living in domes to keep them safe from the deadly radiation of the planet. The story follows: Aria is a young woman living in the safety of one of these domes, and her quest to find her mother, whom she lost contact with recently after her mother was sent out to repair damage to a pod in the outer wastelands. She knows she likely won’t survive, but she ventures out into the unknown anyway, finding help from a young man named Perry. Perry is an outsider, one of the few humans left able to survive the planet’s harsh conditions. His people are referred to as uncivilized savages.

This story has a great plot twist, and Aria finds out that the savages might not be the people who live outside the domes but within them. I love a good plot… show more.

After the Snow follows the adventures of a boy who finds his family is missing when returning home in the snow-bound hills. The settings and atmosphere in the book are beautifully worked, as is the voice, which I found to be bold, fluent, and captivating. The characters are strong and the plot bumps along at a good pace. Another must-read!

Emma Watson firmly places herself in the mind of the protagonist Renata Ghali. Through this semi-reliable narrator, we learn that in this perfect planned society, a lot is happening beneath the still surface. This novel unfolds slowly, layering the pieces on scene by scene until something startling (which I don’t want to ruin for you) happens to the main character. Often in sci-fi, you see the character make some monumental decision, and then they win, and everything’s happy. This book doesn’t do that. Instead, it looks at the very real-feeling impact of said “monumental decision” on those who made it. And despite all of the character depth, Emma Watson manages to deliver a juicy, thick alien world that will leave you salivating for more!