Dystopian is back with a bang. Fable For the End of the World is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful and raw story that examines climate change, capitalism, commodification, and exploitation.
Ava Reid certainly knows how to break hearts. This is another beautiful, fraught and seemingly doomed story from the start. You are allowed moments of happiness and hope in a tender and beautiful narrative that makes you wish for how the world could be. Both of our central characters are just trying to survive but doing so necessitates breaking the cycle and going against these vast power structures. Ultimately these are two girls facing down the world and each other.
Inesa and Melinoë are trapped within the system—forced to play their designated role in this deadly game. Both of them have hopes and dreams and fleeting thoughts of love, fleshing them out into three-dimensional characters that find a crack in your heart. Their backgrounds have moulded them into who they are today. Inesa is battling a selfish hatred that places her in the Lamb’s Gauntlet. That aspect of her story is horrific and gets under your skin. Contrasting it, you have that core sibling bond that is full of heart and a wry sense of dark humour as a coping mechanism. They have been affected differently by their mum and their father’s abandonment.
Melinoë lives in a gilded cage of luxury on the other hand—endlessly modified for battle and aesthetics equally. Her survival is framed a little differently but is no less stomach-churning at the consequences she will suffer if she fails. When the two are pitted against each other, Reid leads you down a twisty and breathless game of cat and mouse. The way their dynamic shifts and changes is wonderful and balances chemistry and character development well. It feels like an extension of themselves in this strange connection.
This is a warning story around the increasing influence of capitalism on politics, intertwined with fascism and patriarchy. All of these ideologies work in tandem to oppress the masses and cause conflict between them, so they never pull together to see the true villain. Reid breaks down this horrific world where your debt can put you into these killer games. It does not even need to be your debt as is displayed here to great effect – this plotline really struck my heart. It epitomised the monstrosity of humanity and the depths to which people can sink to maintain their own fantasies.
Also within the pages, there are strong themes around autonomy and the possession of bodies, particularly in the exploitation and sexualisation of female bodies. The implications of this are disgusting and pure nightmare fuel. Reid illustrates how all of these themes intertwine in this society and how they reflect our own. For me, it captured that unsettling close feel that dystopian can deliver. The genre itself is an excellent vehicle for reflecting our reality back at us and forcing us to look, really look. Just look at some of the formative titles and see how they’re heralded as prophetic now but were always based in truth and reality. By taking us to a place that is familiar and yet not, Reid can explore these hard-hitting topics in a way that makes you sit up and pay attention. The Hunger Games revolutionised a generation and Reid follows in Collins’ footsteps here.
Fable for the End of the World is a scream into the void. It is heartfelt and horrendous, bringing a sense of humanity into this dystopian narrative.
Fable for the End of the World is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of March 4th 2025.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in this stand-alone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.
By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.
Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.
Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.
When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother, she might stand a chance of staying alive.
For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.
As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.
And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.
