Books like The Hunger Games
A pulse of danger, fury at systems that make cruelty ordinary, and the ache of watching young people decide what they refuse to become run through these books.
If you liked The Hunger Games, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Hunger Games, and we tell you exactly what.
If the Capitol’s transformation of punishment into mass entertainment was what chilled you most, this is essential. In a near-future America, incarcerated people fight in televised death matches while crowds buy merchandise and cheer. Adjei-Brenyah makes the spectacle horribly exciting, then forces us to confront our appetite for it.
At its center are two formidable women whose love and moral agency survive inside a system designed to turn them into products. A National Book Award finalist, the novel is furious, inventive, and emotionally devastating—one of the strongest recent descendants of Collins’s critique of violence as entertainment.
Few novels reproduce The Hunger Games’ combination of breathless momentum and moral urgency as powerfully as this first volume of the Chaos Walking trilogy. Todd lives in a settlement where everyone can hear men’s thoughts in an inescapable torrent called Noise. When he discovers a patch of silence, he is forced to run.
Ness’s jagged typography and feverish first-person voice put you directly inside Todd’s fear, confusion, and dawning suspicion of everything he has been taught. Like Katniss, he must remain humane while adults weaponize his ignorance. Winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, it has become a modern YA landmark—and its final pages make stopping after one volume nearly impossible.
Lauren Olamina has Katniss’s defining gift: she sees the world as it is while everyone around her clings to comforting illusions. In a collapsing near-future California, she prepares for dangers her protected community refuses to acknowledge. Her intelligence is practical—packs, maps, water, weapons—but Butler is equally interested in the beliefs that might help people build rather than merely survive.
The result is harsher and more adult than Collins, yet it carries the same fascination with reluctant leadership, chosen family, and the moral cost of staying alive. Published in 1993, this once-futuristic novel has acquired an almost unnerving reputation for prescience. Butler’s clear-eyed masterpiece shows what comes after recognizing that the system is broken: imagining something worth replacing it with.