What to read after “Good Morning, Midnight” by Lily Brooks-Dalton: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
After a flu wipes out most of humanity, a travelling theatre troupe moves between the small settlements that remain, performing Shakespeare. The story follows survivors across decades and asks what of civilization is worth carrying forward.
The Moon suddenly breaks apart, and a small group of people escapes to orbit while Earth becomes uninhabitable. They must keep a fragile space habitat alive long enough to preserve the human species, and decide what kind of society to build.
A millennial office worker in New York keeps showing up to her publishing job as a fever turns people into repetitive, wandering shells. Her account of the collapse moves between satire of work and the quiet end of the world.
After humanity's fall, a terraforming experiment leaves a world where evolved spiders build a growing civilisation. A last ark ship of humans arrives above the planet, setting the two species on a collision course across centuries of war, memory and first contact.
A plague kills nearly everyone on Earth. An ecologist emerges from the mountains to find empty cities and a few survivors, and spends the rest of his life watching a new, smaller society take shape without the old world's machinery.
A father and his young son walk through a burned America, pushing a cart of scavenged supplies and hiding from bands of survivors who hunt people for food. Their only aim is to keep moving south and stay alive while holding on to decency.
A wanderer in a ruined America puts on a dead postman's uniform and invents a story about a restored postal service. The lie gives scattered survivors hope, then grows into something he must defend.
In a future where the air outside is deadly, people live in a buried silo and are told that anyone who asks to go outside will be sent there to die. When a sheriff starts asking questions about the world beyond the walls, the silo's careful order begins to crack.
A colony ship bound for a distant star suffers an accident that leaves it unable to decelerate. As the crew repairs the engines, relativistic time dilation turns their journey into a passage through the far future, and they must decide whether to keep going.
A human ship arrives at a neutron star and finds intelligent life on its surface: the cheela, tiny creatures living and evolving a million times faster than humans. As the crew watches, the cheela build a civilization and reach for the stars.
A young woman joins the crew of a tunnelling ship that builds wormholes between distant worlds. The long haul to a new client planet is told through its mismatched crew, a pilot, a doctor, an engineer and an AI, all looking for somewhere to belong.
The Interdependency is bound together by the Flow, a network of routes that made the empire rich. When a scientist proves the Flow is shifting, an heir to the throne must hold together feuding houses before trade and power collapse.
After a series of waves wipes out most of humanity, sixteen-year-old Cassie is alone and running from an enemy that could look like anyone. To find her little brother she will have to trust a stranger, even as she learns how the invasion really works.
A religious sect called God's Gardeners expects a coming catastrophe and tries to live apart from the corrupt world around it. Two women, Toby and Ren, tell how they reached the group and what happened to them after the disaster they predicted.
A man wakes on a spacecraft with no memory of his name and two dead crewmates. As his past returns, he learns he is humanity's last hope against a dying sun, and that his only ally may be something he never expected.
Prospectors ride alien ships left behind at Gateway, gambling their lives on unknown destinations in search of fortune. A miner haunted by his past signs on for one more trip, and the station's robot therapist records the fears he cannot voice.
A gifted child lives in a military base, strapped into a chair for lessons while hungries roam outside. When the base falls, she and her teacher cross a broken England while she learns what she is and what she can choose to become.
Earth has been quietly taken over by souls, parasites who erase human minds and live in their bodies. Wanderer, inserted into the body of a resistant girl named Melanie, finds the girl's thoughts and feelings still present, along with her love for a man in hiding.
In a near-future California wrecked by drought and lawlessness, a teenage girl who feels the pain of others builds a new belief while her walled neighbourhood falls apart. She leads a small group north, looking for land and for something to hold on to.
In 1879 the USS Jeannette sails for the Arctic, chasing a theory about a warm open sea at the pole. Trapped and then crushed by the ice, the crew abandon ship and begin a desperate march across the pack toward Siberia.
An envoy from a galactic federation lands on the frozen world of Gethen to invite its nations into an alliance. Its people have no fixed gender, and as he crosses the ice with a disgraced politician, he learns how much of his own culture he took for granted.
Jeff Winston dies in 1988 and wakes in 1963 in his eighteen-year-old body, with every memory of the years ahead intact. He lives that span over and over, each replay starting later, and slowly realises he is not the only one caught in the loop.
A crew is sent to the edge of the solar system to meet an alien intelligence that has been watching Earth. Led by a man who has rewired his own brain, they discover that the visitor's mind works nothing like their own.
A meteor shower blinds most of humanity, leaving a few sighted survivors in a world where walking, venomous plants have escaped from farms. A young man and a small group try to reach safety and decide what kind of society can be rebuilt.
What should I read after “Good Morning, Midnight”?
Start with “Station Eleven”, “Seveneves”, “Severance”: they are the closest to “Good Morning, Midnight” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Good Morning, Midnight” these are Arctic, Post-Apocalyptic World, Space Ship), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Station Eleven”, “Seveneves”, “Severance”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
