This adult dystopian science fiction series is set in a collapsing near-future America where a young woman develops a personal philosophy she calls Earthseed — centered on the idea that God is change — and begins gathering followers as she leads a community northward through a dangerous and lawless landscape. The two-book series is considered one of the most prescient and powerful works of American dystopian fiction, dealing with survival, community-building, and the creation of meaning in a world that has lost its way.
In a collapsing near-future America of drought, corporate towns, and violent gangs, eighteen-year-old Lauren Olamina who has hyperempathy, feeling others' pain as her own survives the destruction of her community and leads a small band of survivors north, beginning to formulate a new philosophy she calls Earthseed. Written as Lauren's journals, the novel is a prescient and shattering portrait of American social collapse. One of the most important dystopian novels of the twentieth century.
Lauren Olamina has established Acorn, a small Earthseed community, but a fascist Christian nationalist movement seizes power over America and violently destroys her settlement, enslaving its adults and taking children to be re-educated and re-named. The second and final Parable novel is darker and more politically direct than its predecessor, tracing Lauren's survival and the fractures within her own family. A deeply disturbing prophetic novel.