Also of interest...in dystopian debut novels

The Blueprint by Rae Giana Rashad (Harper, $30)

“The past is never far from the surface in Rae Giana Rashad’s debut,” said Tochi Onyebuchi in The New York Times. In an alternate-history America, the descendants of slaves were returned to bondage after a second civil war in 1954. Eighty years later, the book’s 20-year-old Black protagonist is a concubine to an ambitious white politician. Can there be love in such an unbalanced affair? “When the novel explores these questions, it is at its most fascinating. And its most impressive.”

Plastic by Scott Guild (Pantheon, $28)

Scott Guild’s first novel may give you “Barbenheimer” flashbacks, said Maren Longbella in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In its invented world, Barbie-like dolls use drugs, TV, and virtual reality to distract themselves from such looming threats as nuclear war and climate collapse. One figurine in Plastic is coping with multiple personal blows when she’s called upon to help a blind figurine after a terrorist bombing. “It’s a weird, sometimes puzzling book, but an affecting one with way more depth than its title would let on.”

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase (Erewhon, $28)

In this novel, the action is fastpaced “but the dread builds with disquieting slowness,” said Jenna N. Hanchey in the Los Angeles Review of Books. In a near-future Botswana, the protagonist, Nelah, is living her third life, in a body that’s been microchipped so that authorities can monitor her every thought and action. When she cheats on her husband, “circumstances spin violently out of control,” and Nelah decides the whole misogynistic system must be toppled.

After World by Debbie Urbanski (Simon & Schuster, $28)

“Debbie Urbanski, with her debut novel, has created a beautiful end for the human race,” said Urban Waite in the San Francisco Chronicle. Hundreds of years in the future, after a virus has rendered all humans infertile, an artificial intelligence tells of the last person on Earth, an 18-year-old in upstate New York who has been tasked with sharing the changes she witnesses in the world around her. Love, in this remarkable work, “bridges the gaps between life and death, past and present, digital and physical.”