Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

How do we know we are real and not just some character in an elaborate game? In the virtual world of Saga, Ghost is a 15-year-old airboarding anarcho-punk, with no past, no memories, only a growing realization of her own strange abilities. But who is she really and why is she becoming embroiled in a battle with the warped leader of Saga - the Dark Queen? How have Erik and Cindella Dragonslayer fared since their adventures in Epic.

They injected me with a VR chip, a GPS tracker, and my first Seed. They gave me unbelievable powers. Then they sent me to fight. The monsters here are alien and vicious. There is a second moon in the sky. I watched a tree start moving and kill someone. And the other Players…? They're even worse.

They thought escaping the undead hordes was their ticket to freedom. They couldn't have been more wrong. Now Wren and Robyn must face a new enemy and a kind of danger like no other they have encountered. Their success means a chance of survival for everyone they care about. Their failure means the end of everything they have fought for. For these two sisters time is running out fast and the sun is setting on the longest day of their lives. Just one question still remains, will they get to see the dawn?

If the melt-down, flood, plague, the third World War, new Ice Age, Rapture, alien invasion, clamp-down, meteor, or something else entirely hit today, what would tomorrow look like? Some of the biggest names in YA and adult literature answer that very question in this short story anthology, each story exploring the lives of teen protagonists raised in catastrophe's wake - whether set in the years soon after the change, or in decades far in the future.

In the near-future United States, a one-child policy is ruthlessly enforced. Everyone follows the Rule of One. But Ava Goodwin, daughter of the head of the Texas Family Planning Division, has a secret - one her mother died to keep and her father has helped to hide for her entire life. She has an identical twin sister, Mira.

After seven months as a captive of Minerva, the insane Alpha queen, Lyric Walker has escaped to the surface. Her only goal is to warn the world about the Great Abyss. When she finally arrives back in Coney Island, she discovers a world she never expected, one where humans and Alpha are finally working hand in hand to rebuild the country. But she soon discovers that an old enemy allied with an old friend may kill them all before the monsters get their turn.

When she lost her soul mate, Caleb, Eve felt like her world had ended. Trapped in the palace, forced to play the part of the happy, patriotic princess of The New America - and the blushing bride of her father's top adviser - Eve's whole life is a lie. The only thing that keeps her going is Caleb's memory, and the revolution he started. Now, Eve is taking over where Caleb left off. With the help of Moss, an undercover subversive in the King's court, she plots to take down The New America, beginning with the capital, the City of Sand.

Robin is pleased to hear from his old school friend Alan Adele, not least because Alan's father is Guy Gisborne's top henchman. Now that Gisborne is in the running to be elected Sheriff of Nottingham, he needs to keep his criminal activities under wraps. So when Alan tips off Robin and the rebels at Sherwood Castle that Gisborne's waste disposal business is costing its workers lives, the stakes become very high. Robin is soon literally digging the dirt on his arch enemy to finally bring him down in this latest high-octane adventure.

Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated polygamous community without questioning her father's three wives and her twenty brothers and sisters. Or at least without questioning them much—if you don't count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that Kyra must marry her 60-year-old uncle—who already has six wives—Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family.

Lucy's life by the pond has always been full. She has water and friends, laughter and the love of her adoptive mother, Lynn, who has made sure that Lucy's childhood was very different from her own. Yet it seems Lucy's future is settled already - a house, a man, children, and a water source - and anything more than life by the pond is beyond reach. When disease burns through their community, the once life-saving water of the pond might be the source of what's killing them now.

Ever since the war ended, the United English Cityships have had equality. The rules are clear. You are born, you live and the day following your sixtieth birthday, you are sent off for your final sleep. Lock is a firm believer in the system. It means that everyone is truly treated equally. It’s only when she checks in an attendee who claims to be younger than her chip says that Lock starts to realise there may be someone gaming the system.

Scarb are the enemy. The enemy. The enemy. I told myself this over and over. They murdered my parents. They rape the land and kill humans as if they are the vermin. They took Ray. I ran water over my face, looked at my eyes with their double lenses like two blue lakes: one navy, one ice. The enemy. And now I'm one of them.

A scorned god. A mysterious acolyte. A forgetting drug. A dangerous forest. One girl caught between the freedom she always wanted and a sister she can't bear to leave behind. Under the cover of the Night Forest, will Lucha be able to step into her own power...or will she be consumed by it?

Acadia - the last human city, a fact all of its citizens were told from birth. For 200 years, a countless host of creatures have laid siege to Acadia, leaving the land rough with the bodies of the fallen. For Cojax becoming a Validated, a true defender of the city, is his greatest ambition. That all changes when Jessica appears - a girl from outside the city walls - from a land that supposedly held no life.

After faking her own death to escape her term as an indentured assassin for Valor Savings Bank, Patsy is on the run with her boyfriend, Wyatt. All she wants to do is go home, but that's never going to happen - not as long as Valor's out to get her and the people she loves. Left with no good choices, Patsy's only option is to meet with a mysterious group that calls itself the Citizens for Freedom.

The group of survivors head for the Faroe Islands in the hopes of reaching safety. But their journey won't be easy, as the dead are following them every step of the way, and not everyone is destined to make it. The infection now covers most of mainland Europe, edging still closer to becoming a worldwide pandemic ...

A year ago, Flynn Cormac and Jubilee Chase made the now infamous Avon Broadcast, calling on the galaxy to witness for their planet and protect them from destruction. Some say Flynn's a madman; others whisper about conspiracies. Nobody knows the truth. A year before that, Tarver Merendsen and Lilac LaRoux were rescued from a terrible shipwreck - now they live a public life in front of the cameras and a secret life away from the world's gaze.

The year is 2195. The place is New Victoria - a high-tech nation modeled on the manners, mores, and fashions of an antique era. A teenager in high society, Nora Dearly is far more interested in military history and her country’s political unrest than in tea parties and debutante balls. But after her beloved parents die, Nora is left at the mercy of her domineering aunt, a social-climbing spendthrift who has squandered the family fortune and now plans to marry her niece off for money.

After a Departure Ceremony releases the eleven oldest girls back to the Mainland, Wren becomes their new leader, and she's desperate to do a good job. So when one of the girls goes missing only a few hours into her new position, Wren makes the fateful decision to leave the Hill in search of the girl—only to encounter boys for the first time in her life. Is it a coincidence, then, that the Hill is attacked while she's gone? In order to survive and lead her community, Wren must sort fact from fiction, ally from enemy, and opportunity from threat.

On the day she went silent, Speth never meant for anyone to follow her lead - or to start a rebellion of Silents. But after taking down the tyrant Silas Rog and freeing the city from his grasp, everyone is looking to Speth for answers she doesn’t have. All she wants is to find her parents, who are shackled to a lifetime of servitude in exchange for a debt they can never repay. But how can Speth leave her friends to fend for themselves when she’s the reason their city is in chaos?