If what gripped you in The New Wilderness was Bea schooling Agnes in tracking and foraging under the Rangers’ austere rules—migrating camp to camp and taking only what the land allows—then The Bear will resonate. A father and daughter navigate a near-empty world with a reverence for animals and place that mirrors those elk hunts and hard lessons in the Wilderness State. It’s spare, elemental, and tender, capturing the same ache of parent-child guidance pressed against a harsh, beautiful landscape.

You followed Bea and Agnes through punishing treks, rationing, and the constant calculus of when to move on and what to carry. Into the Forest channels that same survival grind: two sisters must learn to forage, mend, and adapt as society falls away. The day-by-day pragmatism—like choosing routes the way the Group in The New Wilderness lives by Migration directives—builds an absorbing rhythm of risk, scarcity, and hard-won self-reliance.

If the controlled brutality of the Wilderness State—Rangers setting rules, the Group negotiating power and safety, the memory of the smog-choked City—hooked you, Butler’s classic will, too. Lauren Olamina flees a burning neighborhood and, like Agnes on the move, assembles a small band bound by principles tested on the road. The tense encounters, moral tradeoffs, and community-building under threat echo the precarious alliances and rule-bound freedoms you saw in Bea and Agnes’s journey.

Agnes’s arc—from fragile child to capable navigator of the Wilderness State—makes The New Wilderness as much a coming-of-age story as a survival tale. In The Age of Miracles, Julia grows up as the planet’s rotation slows, and the small rites of adolescence—friendships, family strain, first loves—bend under cosmic stress. If you were moved by Agnes learning to read the land and outgrow her mother’s shadow, Julia’s quiet transformation amid a gentler apocalypse will strike the same chord.

Beyond the hikes and hunts, The New Wilderness digs into Bea and Agnes’s inner weather—their shifting loyalties, sacrifices, and the simmering tensions within the Group. Gold Fame Citrus leans hard into that psychological undercurrent: Luz and Ray drift through a desiccated California, making questionable choices, then fall into a cultish desert community that tests their identities and bonds. If you appreciated the way Agnes’s perspective sharpens and Bea’s choices haunt her, this novel’s intimate, unsettling psyche will feel familiarly riveting.