Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” set the template for modern feminist dystopia: a near-future where women lose control of their own bodies, and the smallest act of defiance becomes revolutionary. If you tore through the novel (or the Hulu series) and came out craving more stories about reproductive rights, oppressive regimes, and women who refuse to stay quiet, this list is for you.
I’ve deliberately mixed in several queer and sapphic dystopian novels alongside the classic comps, because some of the genre’s most vital, unflinching voices are telling these stories through LGBTQIA+ eyes. Here are seven books like “The Handmaid’s Tale” worth adding to your shelf.
1. “Red Clocks” by Leni Zumas
In Zumas’s near-future United States, abortion is illegal, IVF is banned, and a “Personhood Amendment” grants full legal rights to every embryo. The novel braids together the lives of five women in a small Oregon town. Among them is a single teacher desperate to have a child, a pregnant teenager, and a forest-dwelling healer put on trial for helping women. It’s the most direct heir to Atwood’s reproductive-rights nightmare, told with quiet, simmering fury.
Read it if: Gilead’s control over women’s bodies is the part of “The Handmaid’s Tale” that stays with you.
2. “Vox” by Christina Dalcher
Overnight, the women and girls of America are fitted with wrist counters that allow them only 100 spoken words per day. Exceed the limit and you’re shocked. Neurolinguist Dr. Jean McClellan watches her young daughter grow up in enforced silence, until the government suddenly needs her expertise and hands her a narrow chance to fight back. A fast, furious page-turner about how quickly rights can be stripped away when no one’s paying attention.
Read it if: you want a propulsive, thriller-paced take on feminist dystopia.
3. “The Power” by Naomi Alderman
Teenage girls around the world wake up able to release electric jolts from their fingertips, and the balance of power between the sexes inverts almost overnight. Alderman follows four characters across a turbulent decade as the new order curdles into a tyranny of its own. Sharp, provocative, and unsettling in the way it refuses easy answers about gender and who abuses power once they have it.
Read it if: you like dystopias that flip the premise and ask harder questions.
4. “Shadows in Dream Stone” by Kelly K. Branyik
In a world where miscarriage is prosecuted as a crime, teacher Abaddon Ordell is sentenced to nine years in the brutal Dream Stone prison after losing her pregnancy. Consumed by grief and a deep rage at a regime that governs women’s bodies, she finds unexpected strength—and love—in a fellow prisoner, and begins plotting to bring the whole oppressive system down. The first book in the “Dark Stars” series, it’s a sapphic dystopian sci-fi that reads like “The Handmaid’s Tale” by way of “Orange Is the New Black”, with a beating heart of tenderness underneath the darkness.
Read it if: you want Gilead’s reproductive politics fused with a queer love story and a prison-break pulse.
5. “An Unkindness of Ghosts” by Rivers Solomon
Aboard the generation ship “Matilda”, a rigid caste system mirrors the antebellum South: dark-skinned lower-deckers labor under a white ruling class enforcing brutal religious law. Aster, a brilliant, gender-nonconforming healer, uncovers a link between the sovereign’s death and her own mother’s long-ago suicide, along with a possible way off the ship. Literary, harrowing, and rich with queer and neurodivergent characters, it’s one of the most original dystopias of the past decade.
Read it if: you want feminist dystopia with intersectional depth and queer protagonists front and center.
6. “The Water Cure” by Sophie Mackintosh
Three sisters are raised on a remote island by parents who insist the outside world—and men in particular—is toxic to women, subjecting the girls to strange purifying rituals meant to keep them safe. When three men wash ashore, the sisters’ carefully guarded reality begins to crack. Dreamy, menacing, and shot through with charged tenderness between the women at its center.
Read it if: you like your dystopia literary, atmospheric, and slow-burn unsettling.
7. “The Grace Year” by Kim Liggett
In Garner County, sixteen-year-old girls are banished to the wilderness for a year to burn off their supposedly dangerous “magic” before they’re allowed to return and marry—if they survive the wild, the poachers hunting them, and one another. Part survival thriller, part feminist parable, it’s often described as “Lord of the Flies” meets “The Handmaid’s Tale”.
Read it if: you want the rage and ritual of Gilead in a propulsive, crossover-friendly package.
Find Your Next Feminist Dystopian Read
Feminist and queer dystopian fiction keeps growing because the questions at its core—who controls women’s bodies, whose humanity gets recognized, what resistance actually costs—never stop feeling urgent. If “The Handmaid’s Tale” lit that fire for you, any of these seven will keep it burning.
