Apocalyptic & Dystopian audiobooks

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

By: Becky Chambers

Narrated by: Em Grosland

Length: 4 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

"Narrator Emmett Grosland conjures the essence of a troubled soul in search of peace in this gentle audio."—AudioFile Magazine

In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Hugo Award-winner Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk and Robot series gives us hope for the future.

It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their... Read more

How High We Go in the Dark

By: Sequoia Nagamatsu

Narrated by: Julia Whelan, Brian Nishii, Keisuke Hoashi, Mac...

Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • ROXANE GAY'S AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK • FINALIST FOR THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE""Moving and thought-provoking . . . offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits."" — New York Times Book Review""Haunting and luminous . . .... Read more

The Legend of the Last Library

By: Frank L. Cole

Narrated by: Bailey Carr

Length: 8 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

In a world where paper is extremely scarce and books are priceless, Juni undertakes a dangerous quest to find a legendary lost treasure—the last library. Juni lives in a world without books. The Blight killed off all the trees, and since then, paper is worth more than just about anything else. Juni’s parents were killed in an archeological dig... Read more

Chain Gang All Stars: A Read with Jenna Pick

By: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Narrated by: Shayna Small, Aaron Goodson, Michael Crouch & L...

Length: 13 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own in this explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York... Read more

Hum

By: Helen Phillips

Narrated by: Ariel Blake

Length: 7 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

A Most Anticipated Book for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Goodreads, LitHub, and Book Riot
A Best Book of the Summer for Esquire, Electric Lit, and Town & Country
A People Book of the Week

From “one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction” (The New York Times), this “tense dystopian thriller” (Time) and “tender... Read more

Sea of Tranquility

By: Emily St. John Mandel

Narrated by: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey & Kirsten P...

Length: 5 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best... Read more

Station Eleven

By: Emily St. John Mandel

Narrated by: Kirsten Potter

Length: 10 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. Now an original series on HBO Max. Over one... Read more

I Who Have Never Known Men

By: Jacqueline Harpman

Narrated by: Nikki Massoud

Length: 6 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Deep underground, 39 women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the 40th prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the... Read more

The Ministry for the Future

By: Kim Stanley Robinson

Narrated by: Jennifer Fitzgerald, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Ramon de O...

Length: 20 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a remarkable vision of climate change over the coming decades. 

The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but... Read more

Bright I Burn

By: Molly Aitken

Narrated by: Avena Mansergh-Wallace

Length: 6 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK • IRISH BESTSELLER • A fierce, electrifying novel inspired by the true story of the first woman to be condemned as a witch in Ireland

In thirteenth-century Ireland, a woman with power is a woman to be feared.

Alice, the daughter of a wealthy innkeeper in Kilkenny, grows up watching her mother wither under the constraints... Read more

Good Omens

By: Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

Narrated by: Rebecca Front, Michael Sheen, David Tennant, Ka...

Length: 12 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

A brand new full cast audiobook production of the classic collaboration from internationally bestselling authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett starring Rebecca Front as the Narrator, Michael Sheen as Aziraphale, and David Tennant as Crowley!""Good Omens . . . is something like what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins and Don... Read more

The Obelisk Gate

By: N. K. Jemisin

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Length: 13 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Essun's missing daughter grows more powerful every day, and her choices may destroy the world in this "magnificent" Hugo Award winner and NYT Notable Book. (NPR)

The season of endings grows darker, as civilization fades into the long cold night.

Essun -- once Damaya, once Syenite, now avenger -- has found shelter, but not her daughter. Instead... Read more

Severance

By: Ling Ma

Narrated by: Nancy Wu

Length: 9 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

"Narrator Nancy Wu delivers an outstanding performance of this cheeky satirical novel...Listeners will be entertained by the world building; cast of amusing, eccentric characters; and bizarre charm of the aloof heroine." — AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award Winner

Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial,... Read more

1984

By: George Orwell

Narrated by: Theo Solomon

Length: 12 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the most celebrated classics of the twentieth century, this cautionary tale of a man trapped under the gaze of an authoritarian state is more relevant now than ever before.“Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get... Read more

The Memory Police

By: Yoko Ogawa

Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama

Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

*** 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ***
*** LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE AND THE 2020 TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD ***
*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ***

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.

On an unnamed island off an... Read more

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

By: Becky Chambers

Narrated by: Em Grosland

Length: 3 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

“Tender and healing... I’m prescribing a preorder to anyone who has ever felt lost. Stunning, kind, necessary.” —Sarah Gailey on book 1: A Psalm for the Wild-Built

"This hopeful listen, full of humor, illuminates a world listeners will yearn to return to." -AudioFile on A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a story of kindness... Read more

Moon of the Turning Leaves

By: Waubgeshig Rice

Narrated by: Billy Merasty

Length: 9 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

“Waubgeshig Rice's stories are good medicine. Moon of the Turning Leaves is a restorative balm for my spirit.” — Angeline Boulley, New York Times bestselling author of Firekeeper's DaughterIn this gripping stand-alone literary thriller set in the world of the award-winning post-apocalyptic novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, a scouting party led by... Read more

Dawn

By: Octavia E. Butler

Narrated by: Julienne Irons

Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

One woman is called upon to rebuild the future of humankind after a nuclear war, in this revelatory post-apocalyptic tale from the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower.

When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali—a seemingly benevolent... Read more

Always Coming Home

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by: Yareli Arizmendi & Isabella Star LeBlanc

Length: 23 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

“One of [Le Guin's] most radical novels. . . . A study in what a complete and utter rejection of capitalism and patriarchy might look like—for society and for the art of storytelling.""—The MillionsReissued for a new generation of readers, Always Coming Home is Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent work of imagination, a visionary, genre-crossing... Read more

Julia

By: Sandra Newman

Narrated by: Louise Brealey

Length: 14 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

A PEOPLE Magazine Must-Read Book for Fall 2023 | An Esquire Best Book of Fall 2023 | A Guardian Biggest New Book of 2023 | A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2023An imaginative, feminist, and brilliantly relevant-to-today retelling of Orwell’s 1984, from the point of view of Winston Smith’s lover, Julia, by critically acclaimed novelist Sandra... Read more

Everything for Everyone

By: M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi

Narrated by: Charli Burrow & Soneela Nankani

Length: 7 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth... Read more

Tender is the Flesh

By: Agustina Bazterrica

Narrated by: Joseph Balderrama

Length: 6 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore.

His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made... Read more

The School for Good Mothers

By: Jessamine Chan

Narrated by: Catherine Ho

Length: 11 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Longlisted for the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence
Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize
Selected as One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022!

In this New York Times bestseller and Today show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick, one lapse in judgement lands a young... Read more

Seveneves

By: Neal Stephenson

Narrated by: Mary Robinette Kowal & Will Damron

Length: 31 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.What would happen if the world were ending?A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against... Read more