The Best Political Fiction To Read After This Tumultuous Year

After this bizarre never-ending election year, you might be looking for a book that will take you away from it all. An escape from the everyday stranger than fiction political machine that has you looking to get caught up in someone else's diplomacy for a spell. Well, you're in luck, this list offers the best political fiction, focusing on new classics and a few older ones you might have missed the first-time around. Novels that follow in the footsteps of George Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, both of which you won't see on the list. Clearly, though, they are the godfather and godmother of these more recent novels that are not all about politics with a capital "P," but get at something deeper in our political landscape. Something personal.

Some novels are dystopian, like Leni Zumas' Red Clocks, which imagines an America where abortion is against the law. Others delve into the stronghold Big Tech has on all of us. Seriously, you'll never look at a Furby the same way again after reading Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin. Jenny Offill's Weather is all about climate change and the ways it intersects with our everyday lives. So many of these books put a fictional spin on real life people and events like the Mirabal sisters and the kidnapping of media heiress Patty Hearst. While Rodham asks a big what if about Hillary Clinton's marriage to Bill Clinton. Others look beyond America to terrorism in Sri Lanka, the Troubles in Ireland, and the jihadist terrorist group Boko Haram. These fictional takes on our very real world won't let you forget about politics all together, but these 20 books will make you think about them differently. It's what the best political fiction has always done.