When the World Seems Grim, Veronica Roth Will Always Turn to Dystopian YA

Author Veronica Roth spent the past few years trying to rediscover her joy for the series that made her a bestselling sensation: Divergent. While the trilogy became a runaway hit that sparked spinoff short stories and a film adaptation during the 2010s dystopian YA boom, she became overly self-critical of the prose she initially wrote during undergrad.

Roth faced those feelings head-on by writing The Sixth Faction, a reimagining of the first Divergent novel, which hit shelves on October 6. But even as the sci-fi author ventured into adult fiction and challenged herself to reembrace Beatrice Prior’s world, her deep love for dystopian YA never wavered.

The Carve the Mark novelist tells Marie Claire that, as a young reader and still today, she was drawn to dystopian stories because they follow characters as they begin to see the world more clearly and decide what to do about that—along with the reader. “Now that ‘dystopia’ feels a little closer to my reality, I also appreciate when dystopian stories show characters carving out little spaces for the good things—friendship and romance, art and beauty, respite and hope—even in the midst of the bad,” she says, noting how that concept served as inspiration for her early 2026 novel Seek the Traitor’s Son.

Current events also influenced how she revisited Tris’s journey in The Sixth Faction. Roth says, “While writing The Sixth Faction, I found myself thinking about how young teenagers actually are, and how troubling it is to indulge the sentiment ‘the youth will save us!’ when we should be working to repair things for them, instead.”

“Collective action, not a single heroine, is what drives change in the world of this novel,” she adds. “It’s maybe not the political landscape that’s changed in this regard—it’s always been unfair to place the burden of change on young people!—but rather my awareness of the world around me.”

Because dystopian YA has long inspired Roth to not just “believe that there’s room for good even when the world is in tumult,” but that “the good things remind us of what’s worth preserving, restoring, protecting,” she curated a list of some of her genre favorites. See her recommendations of modern classics and recent climate fiction and romantasy favorites below.