If the scenes where Lok’s small band is undone by the “new people” — Ha felled by the flying stick, Liku and the others terrorized by strangers with boats and fire — stayed with you, you’ll appreciate how Waiting for the Barbarians dissects the mechanics of conquest from the inside. Coetzee’s magistrate witnesses an empire manufacture fear and violence against an indigenous people, echoing the way Golding shows innocence crushed by an encroaching, organized power. It’s a stark, humane look at what happens when contact becomes domination.

If your heart clenched when Lok and Fa try to protect each other — and even cradle the human infant for a time — while slipping through forests, crossing the river on the log, and hiding from hunters, The Road will hit the same raw nerve. A father and son move through ash and danger, bound by small kindnesses in a world that no longer has room for them, much like Lok’s fragile attempts at care in the shadow of the “new people.” It’s spare, fierce, and unforgettable.

If you loved how Golding filters everything through Lok’s stripped, sensory language — where a canoe becomes a baffling marvel and an arrow a “stick that flies” — Riddley Walker will pull you in the same way. Hoban’s post-fall English makes you learn the world as Riddley does, decoding meaning from broken words and myth, just as you pieced together the “new people” from Lok’s innocent, exact observations.

If the intimate immediacy of The Inheritors — staying as close as breath to Lok and Fa as they slip through trees, fear water, and read the world by smell and touch — drew you in, The Bear offers that same closeness. After a brutal attack on a remote island, a young girl must guide her little brother through the Canadian backcountry. The child’s limited understanding turns the forest into both threat and wonder, much like Golding’s close-stitched, bodily view of nature.

If Golding’s fable-like arc — from Lok’s Edenic trust to the shattering final shift into the “new people’s” perspective on the boat — left you pondering what stories say about our nature, Life of Pi offers a kindred puzzle. Pi’s voyage with the tiger is a survival tale laden with symbol, and the alternative version he tells at the end reframes everything you thought you knew, much as the last chapter of The Inheritors snaps its earlier innocence into harsh focus.