If you were gripped by Luz and Ray rationing water, dodging paramilitary checkpoints, and dreaming of escape across a desiccated California, you’ll sink right into The Water Knife. Bacigalupi drops you into Phoenix and Las Vegas as states wage cutthroat battles over the last rivers. Like the Mojave exodus and the cultish oasis around Levi, the book shows how charismatic power brokers weaponize hope when resources vanish—and how desperate choices to protect a found child or a scrap of future can turn you into someone you barely recognize.

If the sand-choked highways, encampments, and scavenged communities in Gold Fame Citrus drew you in—especially Luz’s fragile vision for Ig’s future—Parable of the Sower will resonate. Lauren Olamina walks a burning California, much like Luz and Ray do, gathering a small, wary cohort and shaping a hard-won philosophy to keep them alive. Where Luz weighs belief and survival under Levi’s sway, Lauren forges her own, testing what hope can mean when the land itself has turned against you.

If the shifting dunes and mirage-like ‘dune sea’—with its strange fauna cataloged and its cultish aura around Levi—hooked you, Annihilation offers that same uncanny pull. The Biologist’s expedition into Area X is as dreamlike and destabilizing as the desert visions Luz experiences, filled with organisms and terrains that feel sentient and intent on remaking those who enter. It’s that same blend of eerie wonder and existential threat you felt crossing the Amargosa with Ig in tow.

If what stayed with you was Luz’s fierce, sometimes fearful attachment to Ig—the way every decision in the wasteland becomes a meditation on motherhood—then The End We Start From is your next read. In spare, luminous scenes, a new mother navigates a flooded Britain, confronting the same intimate calculus Luz faces: how to keep a child safe when every refuge (from Levi’s compound to makeshift camps) carries its own quiet threats.

If you were compelled by the uneasy ethics in Gold Fame Citrus—from taking in Ig to falling under Levi’s manipulative charisma—American War digs just as deeply into muddy morality. Sarat Chestnut grows up amid climate-ravaged conflict, and like Luz and Ray, she’s shaped by scarcity, propaganda, and survival bargains that corrode who she meant to be. You’ll recognize the book’s refusal to offer easy judgments, only the human cost of living through a broken world.