Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale builds a near-future America remade into Gilead, a theocracy that reduces fertile women to state property. Told by Offred in fragments and held breath, it's a dystopia whose horror comes from how plausibly it's assembled. For readers who want speculative fiction with real social bite.

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake opens with possibly the last man alive, sunburned and half-mad, narrating the end of the world from a tree. The first book of the MaddAddam trilogy is a savage, blackly funny vision of corporate biotech run to its logical extreme — speculation Atwood insists is only a step ahead of us.