Books like The Doomed City

Written well after the event, this is a memoir of Orwell’s experiences right in the thick of the Spanish Civil War. What I liked most was the way I got a fulsome, heads-down immersion into the action. Orwell describes with harrowing detail the skirmishes across hostile territory, the injuries of battle, and the comradery, as well as the suffering where food was in short supply and guns did not always fire.

It is only at the end of the book that I had a chance to see all this activity in context, with fifty-three pages of appendices to explain the various factions involved. But you could skip that if you wanted in order to enjoy a record of on-the-ground reporting of the complex conflict that was the Spanish Civil war. 

I’ve always loved Hong Kong New Wave movies, but they often emphasize action and flashy melodrama over historical context. For someone wanting to dig a little deeper, the graphic novel Boxers & Saints is a look into the parallel lives of two Chinese teenagers during the Boxer Rebellion—One is a red-blooded patriot eager to fight Western invaders. The other is a troubled girl who finds liberation in Christianity. Both characters are carried along, motivated, and then betrayed by fanaticism. When their paths cross, they are forced to learn the difference between religious faith and religious mania. The simple artwork isn’t meant to be lingered over…I read all 512 pages at breakneck speed.

If the other books on my list are about disillusionment, Asterios Polyp provides a good counterpoint as its message runs in the opposite direction. Sometimes people are better than you think. Asterios is an obnoxious architect whose worldview starts with the assumption that everyone else is wrong. After a series of crises (thrown out by wife, apartment fire) he has to flee the city and rent a room in the home of a rightwing redneck married to a hippie, just the sort of people he would never associate with by choice. He learns humility and goes about fixing his life. It’s all pretty predictable but the mix of elegantly cartoonish art and funny storytelling kept me engaged (even when I wanted to smack the hero.)

With an equal mix of strangeness and enigmatic philosophies, this short novel barely sold a hundred copies when it was first published in 1920, but has since been recognized as a unique work by noted critic Colin Wilson. Once you’ve read it, you’ll find it both hard to categorize and understand, but it sticks to you like the remnants of a drugged-out fever dream. 

The story of a mysterious man named Maskull, who travels to a planet called Tormance, a world both wondrous and strange. Even though it’s written as a travelogue, the sheer originality invokes an atmosphere of hidden, yet unattainable knowledge for both the protagonist and the reader. The abrupt ending itself neither answers anything nor brings the story to a conclusion, and it’s an experience you won’t soon forget.

A film noir in book form, Davis’ astute, visceral, and impassioned chronicle of Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium offers a dystopian view of future urban society.

I was recommended this book by my secondary school geography teacher shortly before starting university. Although my teacher did not know it, I had been questioning whether I’d made the right choice in choosing Geography for my degree, but this book captivated me like no other and assuaged my academic concerns. 

Los Angeles is a world-famous city that means very different things to different people. Davis shows how Los Angeles is simultaneously a utopia and a dystopia, a place of gated communities and private police forces, where libraries look like fortresses and prisons, on the outside at least, resemble futuristic hotels.

Over three decades after the first edition’s publication, this book remains essential reading for anyone seeking a sobering peek into… show more.

I have always been fascinated by Russian authors because of their command of presenting human nature and its fears. I picked up this book because the author is from Russia.

Yevgeny wrote this novel at the height of the Russian Revolution in the aftermath of the First World War. He projected a society in a distant future, fearing that complete control of the state would turn us into monotonous machines. Anyone daring to be different would be eliminated to ensure compliance and similarity.

My only reservation is that the book borders on science fiction rather than historical fiction.

As a fast-paced sci-fi dystopian book about the end times, Unbound took me by surprise. The main character is amusingly real in his unbelief in God and skepticism about the prophecies from the book of Revelation, telling things as they are and unable to comprehend the intense visions he experiences.

The storyline is compelling, and I could not help but continually compare it to the biblical prophesies because they were so eerily parallel and realistically portrayed. This book had my heart racing and made me want to read the next in the series as soon as I finished it.

Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian, magical realist novel delves into the darkness underneath our pursuit of—if not the normal—the routine. We witness a protagonist’s world shrink day by day through legally enforced forgetting. As the situation on the isolated island in which the protagonist lives deteriorates, perhaps the most terrifying part is that she finds herself complicit in her own isolation and near-total lack of agency.

A Time to Die is a gritty dystopian book with many unexpected twists and a unique, intricate world that transported me right into it from the first chapter. I loved how genuine and transparent the main character is in her approach to every new circumstance and her newfound relationship with God.

Each chapter is fast-paced, intense, and almost always ends on a cliffhanger. It is one of the most thrilling, raw survival stories I have read, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a book that will keep them engaged and begging for more when it is over.

A polarizing book for sure, Ballard was an early influence of mine, probably because I’ve always viewed reality from behind a sociological lens and Ballard famously (or infamously?) tackled increasingly dire sociological topics like technology, isolation, and repression. In High-Rise, which just might be his best novel, Ballard turns a high-rise apartment block into ground zero of a class war wherein the floors themselves are demarcated and stratified according to property values, which leads to all kinds of scenes readers get to tear apart and inspect like a social scientist.