Happy New Year! Now fasten your seat belts: Given the dire state of our world at present, 2025 promises to be a bumpy ride. In such ominous times, you’d expect readers to seek out escapist fare—cozy mysteries, breezy rom-coms, books with magic and dragons galore.

But booksellers found the opposite trend in effect in the days immediately following the U.S. presidential election—the results of which, let’s face it, depressed roughly half the electorate. As Kirkus and many other outlets reported in November, consumers were seeking out dystopian fiction. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s prescient 1985 novel of life in a theocratic regime where women are second-class citizens forced to bear children, was the No. 2 seller on Amazon, while George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—classic depictions of totalitarianism—also saw dramatic spikes in sales.

Sometimes you just have to embrace the darkness, I guess.

During those uncertain postelection weeks, I picked up an advance reading copy of Ali Smith’s forthcoming novel. In her acclaimed Seasonal Quartet, the Scottish-born author offered a real-time snapshot of the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, written rapidly as events were unfolding. It was politically engaged writing—Summer won the Orwell Prize for political fiction—set firmly in our current-day society.

Now, in Gliff (Pantheon, Feb. 4), Smith imagines a future (not so distant?) where the government compiles vast troves of data on its citizens and renders certain people “unverified,” literally painting red lines around their homes. We encounter this world through the eyes of tween siblings whose existence becomes precarious after their mother departs to work in an “art hotel” and her boyfriend abandons them. The reader, like young Rose and Briar, is trying to decipher the rules and meanings of this inscrutable society. Our starred review calls it a “dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer.”

Gliff, while often philosophical and high-minded (one thematic strain has to do with the slipperiness of language and meaning in an authoritarian state), will satisfy readers seeking out dystopian scenarios. Here are two more books, also out soon, that take readers to the dark side.

Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay (Soho, Jan. 7): This epic new novel, by the Nepalese American author of Mad Country and other books, imagines a fictional Himalayan nation ruled by an autocrat known as PM Papa. After a devastating earthquake destroys half the country, a state of emergency is declared—and “all political activities [are] immediately banned.” Our starred review likens the book to “Pynchon by way of Rushdie…Dizzyingly complex and dazzlingly written, full of rewards and arch humor for the patient reader.”

The Capital of Dreams by Heather O’Neill (Harper Perennial/HarperCollins, Jan. 7): In the fictional country of Elysia, young Sofia Bottom-Zier, daughter of a leading intellectual, is sent on a “Children’s Train” to the countryside after the invading “Enemy” promises children safe passage out of the besieged capital. But are they actually being sent to their executions? In a starred review, our critic praises this “fairy tale–adjacent bildungsroman” as “heartbreaking, magical, and real.”

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.