Contents
- What Actually Makes a Book Feel Like The Maze Runner
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- Divergent by Veronica Roth
- Legend by Marie Lu
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
- Red Rising by Pierce Brown
- The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
- Gone by Michael Grant
- The Giver by Lois Lowry
- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
- The Scythe Trilogy by Neal Shusterman
- The Infinite Glade by James Dashner
- A Note on What These Books Share
- Final Rankings: Which to Read First
If you tore through The Maze Runner in a weekend and immediately found yourself staring at the wall wondering what to read next, you’re not alone. James Dashner’s series tapped into something that a lot of people didn’t even know they needed: a story built around confusion as plot architecture. Thomas wakes up in the Glade with nothing but his name, and that became the hook millions of readers couldn’t shake.
Let me give you the numbers first, because they matter. The Maze Runner series has sold over 7 million copies worldwide, and it stood on the New York Times Best Seller list for 100 weeks in 2014 alone, just two days after the release of the first movie. The film adaptation was released on September 19, 2014, to positive reviews, and the world it introduced readers to now spans a full sequel trilogy called The Maze Cutter, the most recent installment of which, The Infinite Glade, was published in 2025. This is not a franchise that peaked and faded. It’s still going.
So when readers come to me asking for books like The Maze Runner, I take it seriously. They’re not just asking for something with a maze or a dystopian government. They want that particular cocktail: amnesia and mystery layered over survival, with a cast of characters you’d genuinely grieve losing. That’s a harder thing to replicate than it sounds.
I’ve read widely across this genre, and I want to save you from the ones that disappoint. Here’s my honest, curated list.
What Actually Makes a Book Feel Like The Maze Runner
Before we get into recommendations, let me be clear about what we’re chasing. The Maze Runner works because of its commitment to withholding information. Dashner doesn’t explain the world to Thomas because Thomas doesn’t know the world. That parallel between reader and protagonist is something special, and it’s rarer than you’d think.
The best books in this space share at least three of the following qualities: a contained or oppressive environment the protagonist must escape, a mystery at the institutional or governmental level, survival that tests character rather than just stamina, and a group dynamic that fractures under pressure. Keep those four things in mind as we go through these picks, because I’ll tell you exactly which boxes each book checks.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Scholastic, 2008
I’m putting this first not because it’s the most obscure recommendation (it isn’t), but because it would be dishonest to bury it. If you loved the tension and survival challenges in The Maze Runner, The Hunger Games will grip you from the very first page.
What Collins does that Dashner doesn’t, though, is give Katniss Everdeen a fully formed identity from page one. She knows exactly who she is; the horror is that the system has decided it doesn’t matter. That contrast with Thomas’s blank-slate amnesia makes these two books feel like opposite sides of the same coin. Both protagonists are instruments of a larger experiment. One knows it; the other spends three books figuring it out.
The Hunger Games is the more politically conscious read. If you came to The Maze Runner for the action but found yourself thinking about the ethics of WICKED well after you finished, Collins will scratch that itch more deliberately.
“I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.”
Katniss’s defiance was never physical alone. That’s the thing readers remember most.
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Katherine Tegen Books, 2011
In dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions: Abnegation (the selfless), Amity (the peaceful), Candor (the honest), Dauntless (the brave), and Erudite (the intelligent). Anyone without a faction lives on the streets as outcasts.
Divergent and The Maze Runner share a fascination with the idea that the worst villains aren’t monsters. They’re administrators. People with clipboards and justifications. Tris Prior, like Thomas, is dangerous to the system specifically because she doesn’t fit its categories. That’s a theme that hasn’t gotten old, and Roth executes it with real propulsive energy in the first book especially.
My honest opinion: the series loses some steam by book three, which is a criticism I’d actually level at The Maze Runner trilogy as well. But the first Divergent novel is as tightly constructed as anything in the genre. Read it; evaluate the sequels for yourself.
Legend by Marie Lu
Putnam, 2011
This is the recommendation I give most often to readers who want something that matches The Maze Runner‘s pace without feeling like a carbon copy. Two teenagers on opposite sides of a divided nation, one a genius soldier, the other a wanted criminal, find their worlds colliding in ways they never expected. Legend combines high-stakes action with mystery and secret plots, and the pacing is relentless, just like in The Maze Runner.
What Lu adds that Dashner doesn’t prioritize is dual perspective done right. Chapters alternate between June and Day, and rather than making you impatient to get back to your preferred narrator, the technique makes you genuinely uncertain who to root for. That ambiguity is sophisticated stuff for a YA novel, and Lu pulls it off without straining.
The Republic, the fractured nation Lu builds, is one of the more credible dystopian governments in the genre. It doesn’t feel like a thought experiment. It feels like an extrapolation.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Tor Books, 1985
This book is older than most of the others on this list, and that’s precisely why I think Maze Runner fans underestimate it. Ender’s Game follows Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, a young boy enlisted in an advanced military school in order to prepare for an impending alien invasion. As Ender navigates intense training, complex interpersonal relationships, and ethical dilemmas, the book explores themes of leadership, morality, and the effects of war on youth.
The core engine of Ender’s Game is the same as The Maze Runner: children placed into a controlled environment by adults who insist the stakes are something other than what they actually are. The betrayal at the heart of Card’s novel is genuinely one of the most effective gut-punches in science fiction. If you’ve only encountered it through its movie adaptation, do yourself the favor of reading the source material.
The prose is leaner and more clinical than Dashner’s, which some readers will prefer. It demands more from you, and it delivers more back.
The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
Hyperion, 2012
A mysterious disease kills most children, leaving survivors with strange powers and a world that fears them. Ruby must navigate danger, distrust, and her own abilities while fighting to stay alive. The Darkest Minds captures the same pulse-pounding, dystopian energy as The Maze Runner, with characters you care about, challenges that feel real, and suspense that keeps you turning pages into the night.
Ruby is one of the more genuinely frightened protagonists in this genre, and Bracken doesn’t rush her toward confidence. She earns it, slowly, through a story that keeps raising the price of survival. The government in The Darkest Minds is overtly monstrous in ways that WICKED is not, which gives the book a rawer emotional texture. If Thomas’s experience in the Glade made you angry on his behalf, Ruby’s story will make you furious.
This one hit me harder than I expected, and I don’t say that lightly about YA fiction. Bracken earned her readership.
Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Del Rey, 2014
Here’s where I veer a little older in my recommendations, because some readers who came to The Maze Runner as teenagers are now adults with adult reading appetites, and Red Rising is the book for them.
Darker, more brutal and emotionally deep, Red Rising by Pierce Brown is in a league of its own. The premise involves a color-coded caste system on a colonized Mars, with protagonist Darrow infiltrating the ruling class after a devastating personal loss. What makes it feel like The Maze Runner is its arena structure: Darrow is placed in a competitive environment designed by the powerful, with rules he doesn’t fully understand, and the game reveals itself to be something much grimmer than advertised.
This book is legitimately violent. It earns its comparisons to Game of Thrones in terms of what it’s willing to do to characters readers love. If you found The Death Cure emotionally brutal, Red Rising won’t let you off any easier. But the payoff is extraordinary.
The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
Putnam, 2013
With an alien invasion as the catalyst for its dystopian setting, The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey brings a science fiction twist to the genre. Cassie Sullivan is surviving the aftermath of four waves of increasingly devastating alien attacks, trying to reach her younger brother while trusting no one.
The paranoia in The 5th Wave is its strongest quality. Yancey builds a world where the fundamental problem is that humans and invaders can look identical, which means Cassie’s survival hinges on a kind of radical suspicion of everyone around her. That echoes Thomas’s uncertainty about his fellow Gladers in ways that feel true to the genre’s best instincts.
The book loses some of its discipline in the later volumes, which is a recurring problem with these sprawling YA trilogies. But the first novel is a clean, well-executed thriller.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Faber and Faber, 1954
I include this one because Entertainment Weekly described The Maze Runner as “a mysterious survival saga that passionate fans describe as a fusion of Lord of the Flies, The Hunger Games, and Lost.” That’s not accidental. Dashner was clearly in conversation with Golding’s masterpiece.
Lord of the Flies was first published in 1954 and, over time, became one of the most popular young adult-oriented novels in the English language. A plane carrying a class of English schoolboys crash-lands on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They’re alone, hungry, and have no immediate hope of rescue.
What Golding understood that a lot of modern YA writers sidestep is that group dynamics under pressure don’t produce heroes automatically. The Gladers function with more heroism than Golding’s boys do, but the friction between order and chaos that Dashner threads through the Glade has its roots in this novel. Read them together and you’ll understand The Maze Runner more deeply.
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Simon Pulse, 2005
The stark similarity between The Maze Runner and Uglies is that both protagonists want to escape from a place. Uglies mirrors the modern-day societal pressure we face to look and act in a certain way.
Tally Youngblood lives in a future where everyone undergoes surgery at sixteen to become “pretty.” It’s a premise that sounds gimmicky until Westerfeld starts pulling on it, and you realize the surgery isn’t just aesthetic. It’s neurological. The beauty is the control.
Uglies is more interested in complicity than The Maze Runner is. Tally wants things the system offers. Thomas never wanted anything from WICKED except answers and escape. That difference in protagonist motivation makes Uglies a useful companion read, not because it’s similar, but because it asks the same questions from a different angle.
A Netflix adaptation has been in development, which may bring a new wave of readers to this underrated series.
Gone by Michael Grant
HarperCollins, 2008
If you want something that matches The Maze Runner‘s intensity and willingness to put teenage characters in actual mortal danger, Gone is your book.
Everyone over fifteen years old vanishes from a small California town, leaving the children to form a society inside what they come to call the FAYZ, a bubble cut off from the outside world. It’s Lord of the Flies meets superhero fiction meets small-town California, and Grant does not blink when it comes to consequences.
For intense survival challenges, Gone by Michael Grant focuses on characters navigating dangerous environments, fighting for their lives, and making tough moral decisions under pressure.
My personal take: the later books in the Gone series are more uneven than anything in the Maze Runner sequence, but the first three volumes are as grip-inducing as anything in this genre. Grant has a genuinely dark imagination, and he uses it.
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin, 1993
This is the short recommendation on the list, but it’s earned. Jonas’s world seems perfect at first, safe, controlled, and free of pain, but as he learns the truth behind the society’s “Sameness,” he realizes freedom and individuality come at a cost. The Giver is quiet but intensely cinematic, with thought-provoking tension and a dystopian atmosphere that Maze Runner fans will find hauntingly familiar.
The horror of The Giver is not external. It’s institutional and mundane. Everything terrible about Jonas’s society has been built by committee, ratified by consensus, carried out by ordinary people. That insight is what makes The Giver still feel essential more than thirty years after publication. Dashner is playing in territory Lowry mapped.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Crown, 2011
I’ll be honest: Ready Player One is a more comfortable, more nostalgic reading experience than The Maze Runner. Wade Watts isn’t in physical danger in the same visceral way Thomas is. But the puzzle-solving logic of the OASIS, the layered challenges built by a designer who’s no longer present, creates a structural echo that Maze Runner fans will find satisfying.
With its fast pace, clever challenges, and life-or-death tension, Ready Player One delivers the same heart-pounding adventure and immersive world-building that makes books similar to The Maze Runner irresistible.
If the maze itself was your favorite character in Dashner’s novel, this is the book for you. The OASIS is a puzzle box built by a genius, and navigating it is genuinely fun to read.
The Scythe Trilogy by Neal Shusterman
Simon & Schuster, 2016
In a world without death, scythes are the only ones who can end life. Citra and Rowan learn this grim duty amid political intrigue, navigating moral dilemmas and deep philosophical queries.
What Shusterman does here is something ambitious: he builds a seemingly utopian future where technology has solved death, and then reveals that this solution has created a different, more interesting catastrophe. The Scythe trilogy is the most philosophically sophisticated entry on this list, and it’s one I’d recommend to readers who found The Maze Runner‘s later books frustrating in their relative lack of answers. Shusterman answers everything, and the answers are uncomfortable in exactly the right ways.
Scythe has also found a passionate audience on BookTok, which has introduced a new generation of readers to it. That’s not a mark against it. The enthusiasm is earned.
The Infinite Glade by James Dashner
Delacorte Press, 2025
Since we’re here in 2025, it would be wrong not to mention that Dashner’s sequel trilogy called The Maze Cutter concludes with The Infinite Glade, published in 2025, taking place 73 years after the events of The Death Cure.
If you finished the original trilogy and felt the ending left threads dangling, this new trilogy addresses a world that has moved past WICKED but hasn’t moved past the damage WICKED caused. The emotional texture is different from the original books; the new protagonists don’t carry Thomas’s amnesia-as-plot-device, which is both a relief and a slight loss. But for readers who have been living in this world since 2009, The Infinite Glade is a meaningful return.
Here’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the years of reading in this space: the best dystopian YA fiction is not really about governments or mazes or arenas. It’s about the moment a young person realizes that the adults who built the world they live in made choices, and that those choices were not inevitable, and that different choices were possible.
Thomas figures this out. So does Katniss. So does Ender, belatedly and devastatingly. The maze is always a metaphor, and the metaphor is always the same: the world you were handed is a construction, and you are allowed to question the architects.
That’s why these books matter, and why readers return to them not just in adolescence but across their lives. They aren’t just good adventure fiction, though many of them are that too. They’re practice runs for a certain kind of critical thinking that the real world requires, and they disguise that practice as something irresistible.
Final Rankings: Which to Read First
If you’ve read The Maze Runner and nothing else on this list, I’d tell you to start with Legend by Marie Lu. It most closely matches the pacing, the dual-protagonist tension, and the institutional-conspiracy layer that makes The Maze Runner so compulsive. From there, go to The Darkest Minds for emotional depth, then Red Rising when you’re ready for the adult-level version of the same story.
Ender’s Game is your homework assignment. Lord of the Flies is your context. The Giver is what Dashner was building on top of.
The rest of the list is dessert. Very good dessert.
Read widely. Stay suspicious of institutions. Keep running.