There’s a particular kind of silence that settles over you after finishing The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not the emptiness that follows entertainment, it’s the weight of recognition. Margaret Atwood didn’t invent a nightmare; she held a mirror to fragments of history and asked us to look more closely at the present.
Published in 1985, the novel imagined a theocratic America where women are stripped of their names, their money, their bodies, their voices. Fertile women become Handmaids: walking wombs in red cloaks, reduced to their biological function. The horror of Gilead isn’t its implausibility. It’s how familiar it feels. Every law in that world has a real-world precedent. Every cruelty has already happened somewhere, to someone.
That’s why readers don’t simply finish The Handmaid’s Tale, they carry it. And that’s why so many of us search for books similar to The Handmaid’s Tale, not because we want to relive the trauma, but because we need stories that take the questions seriously. Stories about power, about who controls bodies and narratives, about what remains of selfhood when systems try to erase it.
If you’ve been searching for dystopian feminist books that offer the same intensity, the same refusal to look away, you’re not alone. These seven novels continue the conversation Atwood started, each in its own voice, each with its own warning.
1. 1984 by George Orwell
Before Gilead, there was Oceania. George Orwell’s 1984 remains the definitive novel about totalitarianism: a world where the Party controls not just behavior but thought itself.
Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history to match the Party’s current narrative. He begins to question. He begins to love. Both are crimes.
Why Handmaid’s Tale Readers Will Love It
Atwood herself has cited Orwell as an influence. Both novels understand that authoritarian regimes don’t survive through violence alone: they survive through language, through the systematic destruction of memory and meaning. If The Handmaid’s Tale showed you how patriarchy weaponizes religion, 1984 shows you how any ideology can weaponize truth.
Surveillance, propaganda, the mutability of truth, forbidden love as rebellion, the erasure of individual identity.
Published in 1949, 1984 has never gone out of print. Sales spike every time the news feels too familiar, after the Snowden revelations, after certain elections. The terms “Big Brother,” “doublethink,” and “thoughtcrime” have entered our permanent vocabulary.
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy grow up at Hailsham, an English boarding school where students are encouraged to create art, to form friendships, to fall in love. Slowly, we learn why they’re there. Slowly, we understand what they’re being prepared for. And the most terrifying thing isn’t the revelation—it’s how calmly they accept it.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is a dystopia without jackboots or propaganda posters. Its horror is bureaucratic, polite, almost invisible.
Why Handmaid’s Tale Readers Will Love It
If you loved Atwood’s quiet but devastating prose, Ishiguro offers a similar restraint. Both novels explore what happens when society decides certain bodies exist only to serve others. Both ask how people learn to accept the unacceptable. The emotional devastation here is slower, softer, and somehow worse.
Bodily autonomy, the ethics of exploitation, memory and nostalgia, complicity, what it means to have a soul. Melancholic, tender, heartbreaking. The beauty of the prose makes the subject matter almost unbearable.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a 2010 film starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, with the committee praising his ability to uncover “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
The students at Hailsham never rebel. They never run. Understanding why is the entire point of the novel.
3. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
It’s 2024. Climate change has devastated California. Gated communities offer fragile protection against the chaos outside. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina suffers from hyperempathy syndrome: she literally feels the pain of others. When violence shatters her world, she begins walking north, gathering followers, and developing a new belief system she calls Earthseed.
Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993, but it reads like prophecy.
Why Handmaid’s Tale Readers Will Love It
Both novels feature women navigating collapsed societies, but Butler’s vision centers a Black protagonist whose survival requires invention, not just endurance. Where Offred records her story in secret, Lauren builds something new. If you want feminist dystopian fiction that imagines resistance as creation, this is essential reading.
Climate collapse, economic inequality, religious formation, community building, the cost of empathy, race and survival in America. Harrowing but ultimately hopeful. The violence is unflinching, but so is Lauren’s determination.
Butler was the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Parable of the Sower has experienced a resurgence in recent years, with readers noting its uncomfortable prescience. The sequel, Parable of the Talents, won the Nebula Award.
4. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Atwood returned to her most famous creation in 2019, thirty-four years after The Handmaid’s Tale.
The Testaments is told through three voices: two young women on opposite sides of the Gilead border, and Aunt Lydia (the terrifying enforcer from the original novel) whose secrets could bring the regime down.
Why Handmaid’s Tale Readers Will Love It
This is the obvious choice, but it earns its place. If you’ve wondered how Gilead might fall, if you’ve wanted to understand Aunt Lydia’s compromises, if you’ve needed something more than Offred’s ambiguous ending, The Testaments delivers. It’s more plot-driven than its predecessor, but the questions remain the same: What does survival cost? Who gets to be forgiven?
Complicity and resistance, the mechanics of authoritarian collapse, motherhood, identity, the stories we tell to survive. More propulsive and occasionally darkly funny. There’s hope here, earned, hard-won, but real.
Aunt Lydia’s perspective transforms her from monster to something more complicated, a woman who made terrible choices to survive and spent decades waiting for her chance at revenge.
5. The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Three sisters live on an isolated island with their parents, protected from the toxic outside world. Men are dangerous. The air beyond the water is poison. Their father has built rituals to keep them safe, or so they believe. Then their father disappears, and three men wash ashore.
Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel is a fever dream, more atmosphere than plot, more feeling than explanation.
Why Handmaid’s Tale Readers Will Love It
If you want another novel that blends dystopia with intimate emotional storytelling, The Water Cure offers something singular. Like Atwood, Mackintosh is interested in how control presents itself as love, how protection becomes imprisonment. The novel doesn’t explain its world, it makes you feel trapped inside it.
Patriarchal control disguised as care, bodily autonomy, sisterhood, inherited trauma, the stories families tell to maintain power. Dreamlike, claustrophobic, unsettling. The prose is sparse and poetic, the dread constant.
Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Mackintosh was praised for creating a new kind of feminist fable, one that doesn’t rely on world-building explanations but trusts readers to feel the truth beneath the surface.
The “water cure” itself, a ritual the sisters undergo to purge toxins and emotions, becomes a metaphor for every way women are taught to doubt their own perceptions.
Making the Choice: Which Book Is Right for You?
Choosing among these novels like The Handmaid’s Tale depends on what you’re seeking. Here’s a guide:
If you want the most direct continuation: Start with The Testaments. It’s Atwood returning to her own creation with three decades of additional perspective.
If you want the classic that influenced everything: Read 1984. Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism remains the template against which all dystopias are measured.
If you want feminist dystopian fiction with a revolutionary twist: The Power flips the script on gender and asks uncomfortable questions about what women would do with dominance.
If you want something quieter and more devastating: Never Let Me Go will break your heart without raising its voice.
If you want a survival story that imagines building something new: Parable of the Sower offers both unflinching darkness and genuine hope.
If you want atmosphere and feeling over explanation: The Water Cure is a haunting, poetic exploration of control disguised as love.
If you want urgency and anger: Vox is a thriller that will make you grateful for every word you speak freely.
Literature as Witness, Literature as Resistance
Every book on this list understands something essential: dystopia isn’t fantasy. It’s extrapolation. These authors looked at the world as it is and asked what would happen if certain tendencies continued unchecked. The answers are warnings.
But there’s something else these books share—something that might matter even more than their warnings. They insist on the interior lives of people under oppression. They refuse to let readers see victims as symbols or statistics. Offred, Winston, Kathy, Lauren, the sisters on the island, Jean with her word counter—each of them thinks, hopes, fears, loves. Each of them remains a person, even when their societies try to make them otherwise.
That insistence is itself a form of resistance. Every reader who picks up The Handmaid’s Tale and asks for books to read if they liked it is participating in something important. We’re refusing to look away. We’re keeping the conversation alive.
Margaret Atwood once said she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in part because she wanted to answer a question: “If the United States were to become a dictatorship, what kind would it be?” These seven novels ask their own versions of that question. Some imagine collapse. Some imagine revolution. Some imagine the long, quiet work of survival.
All of them believe that stories matter—that the act of witnessing, of recording, of refusing silence is never meaningless. In Gilead, the Handmaids whisper to each other in the dark. In these pages, we listen.