Books like Terry Pratchett

Lauren Olamina lives in a collapsing America and has already stopped believing what her preacher father believes. Like Mau, she responds to catastrophe not with passive despair but with fierce intellectual work: if the old answers have failed, what truths could help people endure, cooperate, and begin again?

Butler makes philosophy practical—belief is measured against hunger, violence, fear, and the difficulty of trusting strangers. The novel is far harsher than Nation, but it shares Pratchett’s conviction that communities are made through choices rather than inherited intact. Long regarded as one of Butler’s masterworks, it has only grown more urgent and influential. Lauren’s clear-eyed determination is unforgettable.

If you loved the way Nation turns argument, rebellion, and absurdity into adventure, meet Mosca Mye: a sharp, suspicious girl in a society crowded with minor gods, political factions, and people eager to control what others may read. She escapes home accompanied by a homicidal goose and falls in with a word-drunk con man whose eloquence is almost—but not quite—a substitute for principles.

Hardinge shares Pratchett’s gift for making invented institutions simultaneously hilarious and alarmingly plausible. Her sentences crackle, her world has intellectual bite, and Mosca’s education in freedom never becomes a tidy moral lesson. Hardinge’s debut won the Branford Boase Award; it already displays the verbal brilliance and moral seriousness that have made her one of Britain’s most admired writers for younger readers.

Faith Sunderly, the disregarded daughter of a clergyman and naturalist, is ravenous for scientific knowledge in a world that considers female intelligence embarrassing. As whispers of scandal close around her family, she begins observing the adults with the exacting attention they reserve for specimens.

Nation readers will recognize the deeper contest: not simply science against religion, but honest doubt against the stories people use to protect authority. Hardinge understands that discovering a lie can be exhilarating, dangerous, and personally devastating. Her eerie central invention gives deception a physical appetite, while Faith has something of Daphne’s curiosity sharpened into fury. The Lie Tree became the rare children’s novel to win the overall Costa Book of the Year—and its combination of gothic suspense, grief, and fearless inquiry fully earns that distinction.