Juno Dawson's Her Majesty's Royal Coven fantasy series blew us away and left Managing Director Deborah Maclaren begging for a place in the sacred sisterhood. Since the first book was released in 2022, the series has gone from strength to strength with the release of The Shadow Cabinet and the gripping novella Queen B in 2023 and 2024.

This July brings the release of Human Rites, the spectacular conclusion to this spellbinding series. A LoveReading Star Book and our Sci-Fi / Fantasy Pick for this month, Deborah proclaims it's a 5 out of 5 pentagrams read. High praise indeed!

"Every short chapter title is a delicious pun. Every paragraph brims with righteous rage, gory detail, and gut-punch one-liners. Human Rites is more than just the end of a fantasy series, it’s a powerful feminist manifesto wrapped within an apocalyptic showdown. It’s about sisterhood, trauma, growing up, growing angry, and finally letting go."

With the release of Human Rites we're thrilled that we get to also welcome Juno Dawson as our July Guest Editor. With Her Majesty's Royal Coven completed, she's looking ahead to her next project and heading into the realm of dystopian fiction. Read on to learn when we can look forward to Juno's dystopian debut as well as her book recommendations for the end times. 

Light Reading for the End Times by Juno Dawson

THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH is crudely spray painted on a church wall in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. A laboratory-bred virus rampages out of control and the world is infected with ‘Rage’. Girl, same.

War rages in the Middle East. An incompetent dictator (take your pick) has the nuclear codes. Minority groups are scapegoated for all of society’s ills. The populous recovers from a global pandemic. Sea levels rise out of control. Planes seemingly fall from the sky.

Nervous laughter? Readers, we are living in the dystopia. We might distract ourselves with Labubus and Stanley Cups, but we can deny it no longer. We are in Troubled Times, officially. With this in mind, it’s perhaps no wonder that the industry has very much declared that DYSTOPIA IS BACK. Why? Surely it’s the last thing we’d want to read about. One suspects it’d be easier to lose ourselves in Romantasy.

On the contrary, I wonder if dystopian novels give our minds a space to process the horrors we’re living through. My dystopian debut, Survival Show (2026), allowed me to process my discomfort with the media, with consumerism, with girl-boss feminism, with billionaires. 

I like to think I got in slightly ahead of the curve. In Survival Show, a desperate young woman auditions for a deadly TV talent show to save her impoverished family. If she wins, she’ll become the mouthpiece of an authoritarian regime, but if she’s eliminated, she will quite literally be eliminated. It’s Spice Girls meets The Hunger Games. Despite everything, I’ve had the best time writing it.

Clearly, I am not the first author to explore these themes. With that in mind, here are my favourite dystopian reads. Let’s get 1984 out of the way at the very top. Well done, George Orwell, you won. Enjoy the money. A classic for a reason, but honestly not my favourite novel in this sub-genre. I’ve not read The Road, and honestly what is there left to say about it? Here are my picks:

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Controversial opinion incoming. Dystopian novels can feel a little masculine somehow? Do you get me? I think this explains why I haven’t read the aforementioned Cormac McCarthy. It’s very much a personal preference, but even in the darkest of dystopias, I need that glimmer of hope. I suspect Mandel is the same, and I’ve not read anything quite like this. Her 2014 novel explores the resilience of human spirit. Following an eerily prescient covid-like virus, a troupe of actors travel an unrecognisable US, performing Shakespeare for survivors. This is a powerful story of hope, art and humanity. Mandel unfurls past and present cleverly as she brings the strands together with elan.

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

I think this counts as dystopia. In the 2001 YA classic, Blackman’s gently eviscerating series explores a world where Black people, Crosses, rule over white noughts. If there has been a cleverer way to exhibit just how systemically racism British society is, I don’t know of it. On the surface of things, this is a Romeo and Juliet story of a privileged Cross, Sephy, falling in love with the nought son of her cleaner, Callum, but through their eyes, Blackman holds up a mirror to the ugliness of race and culture. If the ending doesn’t punch your heart out, you are clinically dead.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Yes, The Handmaid’s Tale is a masterpiece, but I actually found this way more propulsive. The first part of a trilogy, we follow survivor Snowman as he explains how the world ended at the hands of his brilliant, but dangerous, friend Crake. Atwood, as you’d expect, crafts a wildly imaginative apocalypse, with blue-penised clones and genetically-modified meat. Ever the visionary, Atwood also foresaw the rise of the chilling tech billionaire as Crake evolves from basement-dwelling nerd to Musk-style villainy. Follow-up The Year of the Flood is every bit as good too.

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

I maintain there wouldn’t be the X-Men without Wyndham’s 1955 classic. Generations after some undisclosed nuclear disaster, the ‘Tribulation’, Davey is the son of a maniacal preacher in a strict religious community obsessed with genetic purity. All this would be OK if Davey and his friends weren’t secretly mutants with superhuman psychic gifts. By no means a perfect novel, but the premise here is gold, and surely the inspiration for much that followed.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Yes, Collins owes a phenomenal debt to The Running Man (Richard Bachman) and Battle Royale (Koushun Tamaki), but Katniss Everdeen was a creation all of her own, and very much the reason this series continues to reign the genre. Taciturn survivalist Katniss being thrust into the excess and artifice of reality TV speaks to a generation that grew up on America’s Next Top Model makeovers and understood the satire of reality TV. In 2008, it really did seem like a matter of time until teens were killing each other on Bravo and, sure enough, Love Island now has a body count. The best dystopian novels are the ones which tell uncomfortable truths.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Slightly dystopian in itself is the story of this little-known Belgian novella, published in 1995 but thrust to mega-success after it was ‘rediscovered’ by BookTok. Bleak and thoughtful, this skinny legend examines what happens when a group of women are unexpectedly freed from a highly allegorical cage and free to explore the strange wasteland they find themselves in – a world without men. The result wasn’t what I was expecting, and all the sadder for it.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

The newest title on the list, this was finally the novel that lives up to the ‘Hunger Games for Grown Ups’ promise. Another title that feels five minutes from now, prisoners in a deeply racist prison system are incentivised to combat on a reality TV show. A couple, Loretta and Staxxx have to navigate this system, faced with the choice to ‘play the game’ as decided by their oppressors, or attempt to overthrow the system itself. Hugely entertaining and very current.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguru

A YA novel! That is a hill I’ll die on! Like all the best YA fiction, an intricate world unfolds while the teenage characters are realistically preoccupied with seemingly mundane art projects, missing cassette tapes and boyfriends. Devilishly clever; right from the off, something isn’t quite right with the students at Hailsham boarding school. By the time you realise precisely what’s going on for the poor teens, you’re in love with Kathy and her manipulative best frenemy, Ruth. A sad, soulful novel that asks the reader to explore what it means to be human.

Header Photo credit: Eivind Hansen 2021

If you're looking for more dystopian reading recommendations, check out LoveReading's 25 Dystopian Fiction Books Everyone Should Read: Explore The Darker Side of Possible Worlds and Alternative Futures