The Sky So Heavy by Claire Zorn (2013)įin lives with his father, brother and step-mother in the Blue Mountains, when an unnamed country fires a nuclear missile, sparking a nuclear winter. Teenager Michael O’Sullivan must decide whether to attempt an escape through the wire and across the Nullarbor with new friend Rebecca, or stay and join the revolution to overthrow ‘classism, oppression and injustice’.ģ. The UN has intervened, items such as fridges, music and binoculars are rarities, and people are dying from inadequate medical assistance.

The ‘Western Third’ of Australia has been infested by ‘the fur’, an infectious and lethal fungus, and has been quarantined from the rest of the country by a twenty-metre-high razor wire fence and armed guards at each road crossing the border. Hungerford award for an unpublished manuscript, resulting in a publishing contract with Fremantle Press. The Fur by Nathan Hobby (2004)Īnother book I read while teaching was The Fur by Nathan Hobby, which won the 2002 T.A.G. They weren’t the only ones I looked forward to buying each new book as it was released, and the series remains one of my all-time favourites. I had recently begun teaching when I read the first in the Tomorrow series, and was excited to discover a book my reluctant readers might actually finish. Ellie and her friends must use their skills and wit to avoid capture, survive in occupied Australia and fight back against the enemy. Their family and friends have been rounded up in the town’s showgrounds, which has become a makeshift prisoner-of-war camp. Tomorrow When The War Began by John Marsden (1993)Įllie and her friends return from a weekend camping trip to discover the country has been invaded by the armed forces of a unspecified foreign country. Here are seven of them, in the order in which I read them.ġ. Series such as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Maze Runner by James Dashner and Divergent by Veronica Roth have become blockbusters, as books and movies, but there are also a number of well-written and intriguing novels set in a re-imagined Australian future. Of course there are more recent classics, such as The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925), Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and 1984 by George Orwell (1949).įast forward a few more decades and we have Z for Zachariah by Robert O’Brien, which was published in 1974, and Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, both of which have found their way onto the school curriculum at various times. With the current popularity of dystopian novels, it would be easy to think it’s a recent phenomena however, it apparently dates back to the eighteenth century, and includes Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

Ark by Veronica Roth