If you liked
Books like The Sparrow
Loved The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from science fiction, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
The Children of Men
In 2021, no child has been born anywhere on Earth for twenty-five years, and humanity is dying in a fog of despair and authoritarian order under the Warden of England. Theo Faron, a historian, is drawn reluctantly into a resistance group that may have discovered a woman who is pregnant. James's dystopian novel is also a theological meditation on hope, despair and what makes life meaningful.
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2
Neuromancer
A washed-up hacker pulled into one last job in cyberspace; the book that named and shaped cyberpunk.
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3
The Three-Body Problem
First contact tangled up with a doomed alien civilisation and hard physics; ambitious, mind-stretching SF.
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4
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Earth is demolished for a bypass and an ordinary man hitchhikes the cosmos; the funniest book in science fiction.
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5
Kindred
A Black woman in 1976 is pulled back in time to a slave plantation; time travel used to devastating effect.
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6
The Fifth Season
On a planet racked by catastrophic geological events — the Fifth Seasons that periodically end civilisations — a woman searches for her daughter across a world that fears and enslaves people with the power to control the earth itself. Jemisin's first Broken Earth novel won the Hugo Award and announced the arrival of one of the most important voices in speculative fiction.
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7
The Stone Sky
The concluding volume of the Broken Earth trilogy brings Essun and her daughter Nassun toward an inevitable confrontation over the fate of a world wracked by recurring apocalypses — and reveals the deep history of the Stillness and the Obelisk Gate. Jemisin's trilogy made history as the only series to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years running, with this final volume completing one of the most acclaimed achievements in contemporary fantasy.
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8
A Memory Called Empire
Mahit Dzmare arrives as ambassador to the vast Teixcalaanli Empire carrying the memories of her predecessor — who has died under suspicious circumstances — implanted in her brain. Martine's Hugo Award-winning novel is space opera built on questions of cultural assimilation, imperial seduction and what it means to love the empire that is erasing your home.
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9
A Song for a New Day
In a near-future America where mass gatherings have been banned after a wave of attacks and a pandemic, a touring musician who refuses to stop performing live encounters a young scout for a tech company that has built an empire on virtual concerts. Pinsker's Nebula Award-winning novel — written before COVID-19 but eerily predictive — is about live music, isolation and what gets lost when everything moves online.
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10
The City in the Middle of the Night
On a tidally locked planet where one side burns and the other freezes, two cities cling to survival in the narrow habitable zone — and a young woman exiled from one of them encounters the planet's indigenous, possibly sentient inhabitants. Anders's Locus Award-finalist novel is about colonialism, communication across genuinely alien difference, and what survival costs a society over generations.