100 Books Like The Water Cure

What intrigues me about this book is the way the author, Margaret Atwood, took the (Genesis 30) story of Jacob, who impregnated his wife's handmaiden to produce the children which his wife could not conceive.

She then puts herself in the place of that handmaiden and asks some serious questions. Was that handmaid even given a choice in the matter? What would have happened to her if she had refused? She then rolls the same idea forward 4,000 years to a pseudo religious society in which the sole purpose of handmaidens is to use their bodies to conceive and gestate the next generation for those whom they serve.

I have never read a novel so close to prophecy.

Published in 1995, Parable starts in July 2024 amidst the election of an autocrat who, by the sequel Parable of the Talents, literally pledges to “make America great again.” I started my platform in 2015 in the same context.

This novel pulled me into its harrowing tale of how to survive civilizational collapse: the dismantling of systems, norms, and climate change that we are all currently going through.

The lesson is ultimately about embracing change, caring for and trusting each other in community, and coming up with our own ways of being together. So many of our ancestors have survived periods of collapse by the same principles. These ancestral lessons still guide me, and I believe are critical to surviving AI dystopia.

This is another book I came to via teaching; looking for new ecofictions, I put out a call on twitter and this title kept being mentioned by people I trust. When I read it, I was blown away by Hunter’s slim, powerful novel.

With the South of England underwater, Britons are forced to flee north to displacement camps, suddenly finding themselves fighting in supermarkets for supplies and walking the roads with their children.

I first read it for its depiction of eco-catastrophe and refugee crisis and its fascinating echoes of the fuel and food shortages of the pandemic. But as I reread it each year, I more insistently see it as a book depicting new motherhood as a crashing, overwhelming flood from which one emerges perhaps a year later, a haunted, dazed survivor.

I was recommended this novel by one of my students and loved it instantly. It has all the features you might expect of a dystopia: environmental damage, scant resources, and an authoritarian government controlling where people live, work, and travel.

I research contemporary women’s writing and the history of feminism, and I love Hall’s focus on how future dystopian scenarios might specifically affect women. Facing a world where women’s reproduction is controlled by the state, Hall’s narrator runs away to join a rebel women’s stronghold in the Cumbrian hills.

The experience is anything but gentle and sisterly; Hall is brilliant on both the brutal landscape of the north and the strength and violence of female resistance.

This book and the next on the list are interesting in that the setting becomes a character in and of itself. The town of Haven seems to have its own character arc, as a post-apocalyptic settlement that has gone from a watchful last outpost of mankind to a more complacent community where things that had once been necessities are now rituals. The human characters are fleshed out just as well, coming across as very much normal and well-realized people.

Altogether Stutznegger builds not only a cast but also a setting where you really care about their continued well-being; especially as threats from the outside world begin to sneak into the town. I would consider this possibly “soft fantasy”, with the semi-mystical mystery of the main character’s enhanced eyesight and a technically sci-fi explanation for the villainous Shadow Elves.

Hand’s sentences are always beautiful, and this novel, her first, is dense with new ideas and original imagery. She evokes a bizarre future in a post-apocalyptic city where twins go on a hallucinogenic quest. Reads like a somewhat disturbing mythology. Gods and talking animals, autistic prophets, feral children, and death is personified. Unforgettable.

Full disclosure, I blurbed this knockout of a novel, and I would do it one hundred times over. It takes place in a near-future dystopia ravaged by climate change. However, a billionaire TERF has started a new climate relief program called Inside, which promises a safe and hopeful future for its members (but we all know that’s far from the real story).

Following an unforgettable cast of diverse characters, including some who get accepted to Inside, this book is at once suspenseful, haunting, and revelatory. It’s about queer community, survival, chosen family, paternalism, the harms of white feminism, parenting, freedom vs. control, and hope, always, always hope. It’s highly propulsive, and you’ll probably read it in one sitting just like I did. 

As a huge fan of George Orwell’s 1984, I approached this book with trepidation. I was concerned that a retelling from Julia’s perspective may not work. I had nothing to worry about. The author does a great job of filling in gaps and expanding the story. There is much from a woman’s perspective that Orwell might never have considered. 

I loved this book at first because there are so many familiar threads to 1984, yet the feminist perspective brings the story even more to life. Julia, no longer a side character, breathes new, colorful life into a story I knew so well. Part of me wanted to re-read 1984 immediately to compare details. Then I realized, there was no need, it stands alone perfectly well.

This science fiction and mystery story is about an astronaut from a world without men crashes on Earth and blows all our minds… except we’re also reading a story about a woman living in our 1970s, and a parallel Earth where WWII never happened… it gets a little confusing, in a really fun way.

Russ uses this engaging, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic multiverse story to explore topics of sex essentialism and gender fluidity in a way that still feels bracing and mind-expanding today.

You could say this is as much a philosophical treatise as a novel but that makes it sound like it isn’t any fun, when in fact it’s a blast. If you’re open to a far-out read you will not be disappointed.

Witches and women and underground societies? Yes, please! I love this book, which explores the idea that the very qualities that often make women so special—their sensitivity, empathy and ability to connect to nature and others—is often seen as a threat by men in power.

Disagreeable, independent, outspoken women have long been called witches—what would it look like if they actually were? That kept me reading until my eyes were red and sandy and rooted for the protagonist who fears her own power as much as she craves it.