Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Dystopian

Sixteen-year-old Koral and her older brother Emrik risk their lives each day to capture the monstrous maristags that live in the black seas around their island. They have to, or else their family will starve. In an oceanic world swarming with vicious beasts, the Landers—the ruling elite, have indentured Koral's family to provide the maristags for the Glory Race, a deadly chariot tournament reserved for the upper class. The winning contender receives gold and glory. The others—if they're lucky—survive.

Girls in New America must have a chaperone with them at all times. Because of this, Stella is never alone. She can't go out by herself or learn about the world. She can't even spend time with boys except at formal Visitations. Still, Stella feels lucky that her chaperone, Sister Helen, is like a friend to her. And then the unthinkable happens. Sister Helen dies suddenly, and Stella feels lost. Especially when she's assigned a new chaperone just days later.

Ruti is Markless. In a society where worth is determined by the pattern on your palm and the magic it grants you, this also deems her worthless. But she’s a hardened survivor, a protector of the lowest class … and the most powerful witch in Somanchi. With a single song, she can ask the spirits to grant her unimaginable powers. Dekala’s Mark is strong, a Mark fit for the future queen of Somanchi, but it’s also unstable. She knows the only solution is to be bonded with another, but that would mean relinquishing control over her throne and kingdom.

Lauren DeStefano’s Wither was called a “thought-provoking debut, reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale” by Kirkus Reviews. Its chilling follow-up, Fever, continues 16-year-old Rhine’s tale - set in a dark future in which men and women die by age 25, and young girls are sold into marriage to keep the population growing. Rhine has finally escaped her marriage. But what hope can the outside world offer when death looms ever closer?

The powerful forces of group pressure that pervaded many historic movements such as Nazism are recreated in the classroom when history teacher Ben Ross introduces a "new" system to his students. And before long "The Wave", with its rules of "strength through discipline, community, and action," sweeps from the classroom through the entire school. And as most of the students join the movement, Laurie Saunders and David Collins recognize the frightening momentum of "The Wave" and realize they must stop it before it's too late.

In Compound Eleven, the hierarchy of the floors is everything. My name is Eve Hamilton, and on my floor, we fight. Which at least is better than the bottom floor, where they toil away in misery. Only the top floor has any ease in this harsh world; they rule from their gilded offices. Because four generations ago, Earth was rendered uninhabitable—the sun too hot, the land too barren. Those who remained were forced underground. While not a perfect life down here, I’ve learned to survive as a fighter. Except my latest match is different.

Ever since she escaped the city within the Wall, Lark Ainsley's wanted one thing: to find her brother Basil. She's always believed he would be the one to put an end to the constant fear and flight. And now, hidden underground in the chaotically magical city of Lethe, Lark feels closer to him than ever. But Lethe is a city cowering in fear of its founder, the mysterious Prometheus, and of his private police force. To get the truth about what happened to Basil, Lark has no choice but to face Prometheus.

In Compound Eleven, freedom from tyranny is impossible. My name is Eve Hamilton, and I’ve managed the impossible. I am free. Until just like that, it is wrenched from my grasp. And this time, the corridors of the dark underground city are even more dangerous than ever before. But my brief taste of freedom has left me with something useful, something powerful, something that terrifies the leaders of Compound Eleven. And now I have a monster inside.

Princess Snow is missing. Her home planet is filled with violence and corruption at the hands of King Matthias and his wife as they attempt to punish her captors. The king will stop at nothing to get his beloved daughter back - but that's assuming she wants to return at all. Essie has grown used to being cold. Temperatures on the planet Thanda are always sub-zero, and she fills her days with coding and repairs for the seven loyal drones that run the local mines.

Neo Beijing, 2201. Two years after the Battle of Neo Seoul, eighteen-year-old telepath Ama works in a cafe by day and moonlights as a lounge singer in a smoky bar at night. She’s anonymous, she’s safe from the seemingly never-ending war, and that’s how she’d like to stay. But then PHNX, a resistance group specializing in espionage, approaches her with an offer to expose a government experiment exactly like the one she fled. Soon, Ama is traveling with PHNX on a series of dangerous assignments, using her telepathic powers to bring down the authoritarian Alliance.

In the first book of Michael Buckley's Undertow Trilogy, the Alpha arrived, and the world was never the same. At the start of the second book, most of South Brooklyn is in ruins, and the nation is terrified. Nearly everyone that Lyric Walker loves is either missing or presumed dead, including the mesmerizing Prince Fathom. It's up to Lyric to unite the Alpha before the second wave of a cataclysmic invasion wipes out mankind for good.

Morgan Stockhour knows getting too close to the edge of Internment, the floating city in the clouds where she lives, can lead to madness. Even though her older brother, Lex, was a Jumper, Morgan vows never to end up like him. If she ever wonders about the ground, and why it is forbidden, she takes solace in her best friend, Pen, and in Basil, the boy she's engaged to marry. Then a murder, the first in a generation, rocks the city. With whispers swirling and fear on the wind, Morgan can no longer stop herself from investigating, especially once she meets Judas.

The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders live in a luxurious, climate-controlled biodome. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with black-market robotics, in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs. Ashiva works for the Red Hand, an underground network of revolutionaries fighting the government, which is run by a merciless computer algorithm. As a smuggler with the best robotic arm and cybernetic enhancements the slums can offer, her cargo includes the city’s most vulnerable abandoned children.

My name is Eve Hamilton. I spent my entire life in Compound Eleven as a fighter. Surviving in an underground city filled with violence, oppression, and tyranny. We were told the world above was scorched, an immediate death sentence. I should have died never knowing the truth. Instead, when I fought Wren—a boy from the top floor, a Preme—I fell for him. And eventually learned that my reality was an insidious lie. Escaping Compound Eleven nearly killed me and Wren. Now we’re aboveground, where the world is anything but a toxic, burning wasteland.

Winner of the National Book Award, Pete Hautman pens a futuristic satire brimming with wry humor and honored by a Booklist starred review. Welcome to the United Safer States of America in 2076! Here, prisoners perform all manual labor. And the country is finally safe. Sixteen-year-old Bo ignores governmental protective devices capturing every action and word. He endures the avalanche of safety regulations. But when he’s accused of spreading a rash at school, anger and jealousy threaten to override his daily dose of calming Levulor and earn him a "job" in the Canadian tundra.

There’s a catfish under Japan, and when it rolls the land rises and falls. At least that’s what Sora was told after she lost her mother to an earthquake so powerful that it cracked time itself. Sora and her father are some of the few who still live near one of these “zones”—the places where time has been irrevocably sped up or slowed down. Sora’s father leads a research team studying the zones, and even as his colleagues begin to fall ill, he refuses to stop entering the zones himself. Sora finds herself stuck and increasingly alone as her father starts behaving strangely.

At night, Las Mal Criadas own these streets. Sixteen-year-old Nalah leads the fiercest all-girl crew in Mega City. That role brings with it violent throwdowns and access to the hottest "boydega" clubs, but Nala quickly grows weary of her questionable lifestyle. Her dream is to get off the streets and make a home in the exclusive Mega Towers, in which only a chosen few get to live. To make it to the Mega Towers, Nalah must prove her loyalty to the city's benevolent founder and cross the border in a search of the mysterious gang the Ashe Riders.

Sarah and her people sojourn the land, searching for a city none have seen but believe exists as an escape from these troubling times. Elliott follows an army with a mandate calling for the purging of all that would hinder a glorious global rebirth.

It’s the year 2052. Stevie Henry is a Cherokee girl working at a museum in Texas, trying to save up enough money to go to college. The world around her is in a cycle of drought and superstorms, ice and fire … but people get by. But it’s about to get a whole lot worse. When a mysterious boy shows up at Stevie’s museum saying that he’s from the future—and telling her what is to come—she refuses to believe him. But soon she will have no choice.

In this richly imagined dystopic future brought by global warming, mass human migrations are constant, water and food are scarce, new babies are illegal, and the disintegrating society is run by corporates who feed the people a steady diet of "pharma" to keep them happy. Usually, 17-year-old Nat doesn't let it get her down too much: this, after all, is the life she's used to; and though she is nostalgic for the ancient world she's heard about, she's also realistic, cheerful, and tough. But now her family have come to Hawaii for their parents' Final Week.