Hugh Howey Books in Order

This illustrated children’s story follows Wanda Jane Rainer, a kid who decides she’s done being afraid of the monsters that lurk in the dark. With a mix of bravery and empathy, she learns how to face the creatures under the bed on her own terms.

In a fog‑shrouded, post‑apocalyptic landscape, a wary survivor follows the rule that has kept them alive: shoot anything unfamiliar. Bringing down a drifting balloon with a handwritten plea attached sends them on a quest to find the stranger who sent it.

A mischievous counting book, Ten ’Lil Cannibals uses short, sing‑song verses to follow ten tiny cannibals who disappear one by one. It’s a darkly playful twist on nursery‑rhyme style numbers practice, complete with hidden visual jokes.

This edition of Misty’s story brings the picture book to digital readers, following the same gentle arc of a cloud who can’t copy everyone else’s tricks but discovers a unique way to bring color and joy to the world below.

This sequel to The Balloon Hunter continues the Dear Apocalypse saga through notes, artifacts, and found pages. As new secrets surface about the world above the fog, the characters’ messages grow more urgent, darkly funny, and heartbreaking.

In this unconventional memoir, Howey structures his life story around near‑death experiences, big risks, and moments of accidental clarity. From childhood in North Carolina to bookstore jobs and ocean crossings, he reflects on how close calls shaped his sense of meaning.

Set in the same buried world as Sand, this standalone sequel follows a new cast, including determined survivor Anya and the original sand‑diving siblings, as nuclear devastation and old grudges threaten to shatter what’s left of civilization on the dunes.

Closing out The Dystopia Triptych, this anthology turns to what comes after the fall. Its stories imagine fragile new beginnings, hard compromises, and the lingering scars left by collapsed dystopias, asking what “better” might realistically look like.

First in The Dystopia Triptych, this anthology gathers stories set in societies sliding toward authoritarianism and unreality. Co‑edited by Howey, it asks how language, propaganda, and willful blindness pave the road to full‑blown dystopia.

The second Dystopia Triptych volume collects tales set during the height of oppressive regimes. Characters in these stories are already living under the boot, fighting to hold on to identity, loved ones, or a single act of rebellion in the middle of catastrophe.

Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against is a multi‑author anthology co‑edited by Howey, Gary Whitta, and Christie Yant. Its stories imagine oppressive futures and the people who push back, highlighting resistance in forms that range from quiet defiance to outright revolution.

This collection brings together more than twenty of Howey’s short stories, from fan favorites like Glitch and The Walk Up Nameless Ridge to new pieces and tales set in the Wool universe. It’s a tour of his obsessions: artificial intelligence, alien worlds, and messy human hearts.

The final Wayfinding book focuses on our instinct to divide people into 'us' and 'them'. Drawing on evolution, history, and his own travels, Howey explores how group identity can protect or poison us, and how noticing those patterns might help us choose differently.

The final Beacon 23 novella pits the keeper against the one thing he feared most: losing the small, hard‑won life he’s made out on the edge. When a visitor with their own agenda arrives, every compromise he’s made is tested.

Part of the Future Chronicles line, The Z Chronicles assembles original zombie stories from a line‑up of speculative‑fiction authors, including a contribution from Hugh Howey. The collection focuses on what undead plagues reveal about the living rather than just the gore.

This special volume in the Future Chronicles series collects standout science‑fiction stories from earlier themed anthologies and adds new pieces. Together they showcase a wide range of speculative futures, from AI and aliens to time travel and galactic war.

The final Apocalypse Triptych anthology jumps to the aftermath of disaster. From tentative communities in the ruins to strange new societies, its stories explore what rises from the ashes and how people rebuild—or refuse to—once the world they knew is gone.

This compact science‑fiction story imagines a world where cheap, customizable artificial intelligences arrive in unremarkable cardboard boxes. One customer’s attempt to define, label, and control what’s inside quickly spirals into a meditation on identity, ownership, and the danger of putting consciousness in a cage.

Opening the Wayfinding series, this nonfiction installment introduces Howey’s idea of wayfinding as a modern philosophy, blending evolutionary psychology with stories from his early days working on sailboats. It’s part science, part sea story, focused on noticing the forces quietly steering our lives.

After a disastrous accident on his watch, the beacon keeper is consumed by guilt and insomnia. When sensors detect unexpected life signs in nearby wreckage, his attempt to investigate pulls him into a situation that’s far more complicated than simple salvage.

In this volume, Howey argues that many of our modern frustrations come from living in environments our brains and bodies weren’t built for. He contrasts the old world we evolved in with the one we inhabit now, while recounting the nerve‑wracking maiden voyage of his first sailboat.

In the first Beacon 23 episode, a former soldier tends an isolated space beacon and finds the silence of deep space almost worse than combat. When small glitches and strange noises hint that something is wrong, he has to decide whether it’s the station failing—or his mind.

Wayfinding Part 3 looks at the so‑called 'lizard brain', emotional swings, and addiction. Moving between basic neuroscience and a near‑fatal early sailing trip, Howey explores why we react so strongly to threat and comfort—and how paying attention to those reactions can change our behavior.

In Part 6, Howey tackles depression and anxiety head‑on, offering his personal theory of why they exist and describing tools he uses to manage them. Stories from years spent refitting and living aboard a small sailboat give the ideas a lived‑in, practical feel.

In Wayfinding Part 2, Howey digs deeper into questions of free will and habit, using psychological experiments and a harrowing episode of being stranded on a broken‑down boat to examine how much control we truly have over our choices.

This Wayfinding special lays out the simple, sometimes controversial diet and exercise principles Howey used to get in shape for long passages at sea. It’s a short, opinionated guide that ties modern health advice back to how our bodies evolved to live.

Wayfinding Part 5 steps back from day‑to‑day tips to examine the tug‑of‑war between our conscious and subconscious minds. As he finishes a risky boat delivery offshore, Howey reflects on how those two layers of thought formed and how to get them working together.

In this fourth entry, isolation finally catches up with the man in the beacon as a new arrival disturbs the fragile balance he’s built with his AI companion. The thin line between welcome company and dangerous influence becomes harder to see in the dark.

Stationed at the edge of sector eight, the keeper believes his job is routine—until someone decides there’s money to be made in ships that never make it past his beacon. Facing mercenaries and corporate interests, he has to choose between survival and doing the right thing.

Combining the five Beacon 23 novellas, this novel centers on a solitary lighthouse keeper in deep space whose job is to prevent starships from smashing into unseen hazards. Haunted by war and trapped with an unreliable AI, he faces alien threats, corporate greed, and his own unraveling mind.

In a near future of rising seas and collapsing ecosystems, seashells have become rare luxury items worth fortunes. Journalist Maya Walsh investigates Ness Wilde, the world’s most famous shell hunter and oil executive, and soon finds herself torn between exposing him and understanding his part in a damaged ocean.

The second Triptych volume focuses on life during the apocalypse itself. As plagues spread, skies burn, and systems fail, these stories follow characters trying to hold on to love, decency, or simple survival while everything familiar collapses around them.

First in The Apocalypse Triptych, this anthology gathers original stories about the moments before various end‑of‑the‑world scenarios. Edited by Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams, it showcases people who sense disaster coming and the hard choices they make as the clock runs down.

Told from the perspective of a tentacled alien soldier, Second Suicide follows a weary invader on the final approach to a new target: Earth. As doubts spread through the ranks, loyalty, survival, and the morality of conquest collide aboard a living warship.

This omnibus stitches the Sand novellas into a single sweeping novel about a family of sand divers eking out a living above a buried Colorado. Between dangerous dives, shifting alliances, and a plot that could wipe entire towns from the map, it’s a story about survival, betrayal, and stubborn hope.

This brief, introspective story follows a man wandering London with a broken promise and a failed relationship behind him. As he thinks about love‑lock bridges and the weight of old vows, he has to decide whether some promises are meant to rust away.

Peace in Amber is a deeply personal novella that weaves Howey’s memories of September 11 with elements of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse‑Five. Moving between past and present, it grapples with trauma, guilt, and the slow work of finding peace after a shattering day.

In this picture book, a small cloud named Misty just wants to fit in with the other clouds’ fancy shapes and tricks. When she discovers a quieter talent that makes the valley below bloom, she learns that being herself is more than enough.

When a combat robot hesitates in the middle of battle, its creators fear a malfunction—and a scandal. As they investigate, the machine’s strange glitch forces them to confront questions about conscience, free will, and what happens when a weapon refuses to kill.

In the final Sand novella, converging storylines collide around an audacious plan to use buried technology beneath the dunes. As storms and armies close in, Palmer, Vic, and their family must decide what they’re willing to sacrifice to reshape the broken desert world.

Adapted by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Jimmy Broxton, this full‑color graphic novel retells Wool in comics form. It condenses Holston and Juliette’s story into striking panels, making the silo’s claustrophobic corridors and toxic landscape visually immediate.

As rumors of Danvar’s treasure spread, powerful factions move east across the desert, chasing storms and profit. The siblings are pulled in different directions—some running from the coming war, others straight into it—in a race against forces they barely understand.

The final Shift novella alternates between Donald’s latest awakening in Silo 1 and a teenager nicknamed Solo watching his own home silo collapse. As uprisings spread and one cleaner survives against all odds, the original plan behind the Silos begins to unravel.

In this first Sand novella, diver Palmer teams up with a brutal crew to plunge deeper into the dunes than ever before, searching the legendary Belt of the Buried Gods for relics of the old world—and uncovering a discovery powerful enough to destabilize the fragile towns above.

Collecting Legacy, Order, and Pact, Shift presents the full prequel arc to Wool, tracing how the Silo project was conceived, sold, and ruthlessly enforced. Moving between 21st‑century politics and far‑future awakenings, it shows how good intentions, fear, and secrecy built a world underground.

Backed by uneasy allies, Palmer’s family returns to the half‑mythical buried city of Danvar, where collapsed skyscrapers hide both impossible wealth and weapons best left untouched. What they recover in the deep sand could either save their towns or finish destroying them.

Stranded beyond the settled territories after a dive gone wrong, survivors must cross the deadly expanse known as No Man’s Land to make it home. Sandstorms, raiders, and failing gear turn the journey into a test of loyalty and nerve.

As the conclusion to the Silo trilogy, Dust braids Juliette’s struggle to unite two silos with Donald’s rebellion inside Silo 1. Digging tunnels, hijacking systems, and risking everything for a glimpse of the surface, their choices determine whether humanity stays buried or dares to start over.

On the airless world of Eno, an obsessed climber joins rival teams attempting the first ascent of a deadly, record‑breaking peak. As the air thins and bodies fail, he discovers that the hunger to be remembered may be more dangerous than the mountain itself.

In the second Shift novella, Donald wakes for another rotation in Silo 1, haunted by fragments of what he helped build. While he wrestles with orders from above, a young porter named Mission Jones tries to spark resistance down below, forcing both men to question who the Silos are really for.

This brutal, experimental novel tells the story of a zombie outbreak entirely from the point of view of the infected, trapped inside rotting bodies they can’t control. Their memories, shame, and dim flashes of humanity turn familiar horror tropes into a disturbing meditation on helplessness.

Set long before Wool, this Silo prequel follows freshman congressman Donald Keene, who is recruited to design an underground facility meant to protect a nation. As nanotech and memory‑wiping drugs come online, Donald slowly realizes his project may doom humanity instead of saving it.

This fix‑up novel collects the original Wool novellas into one volume about an underground silo where going outside is a capital crime. When Sheriff Holston and later mechanic‑turned‑sheriff Juliette start questioning the rules, they uncover secrets that shake the entire buried society.

By day Adam Griffey teaches literature; by night he raids simulated worlds, memorizing brilliant unwritten books and publishing them as his own. When one virtual author feels too real, Adam has to choose between protecting his career and admitting that the people he steals from might truly exist.

Daniel Stillman lives more online than off, with only a handful of followers and almost no real‑world connections. When a catastrophic hurricane barrels toward his coastal town, he’s forced to step away from the screen and decide who—and what—he’s willing to save.

Picking up after Parsona’s rescue, Molly and her crew journey to the dazzling yet perilous Land of Light, where reunions, buried memories, and an escalating alien conflict force her to question who to trust and what she’s willing to fight for.

In the climax of the Bern Saga, Molly and the Parsona crew reunite as two interstellar wars crash together, forcing them to broker fragile alliances, confront old enemies, and decide what sacrifices peace—and the survival of whole systems—are worth.

Separated from her friends and blamed for catastrophe on a remote world, Molly returns home to investigate a string of mass murders tied to her parents’ final mission, racing to expose a conspiracy that could cost billions of lives.

On a marginal planet where an AI has tried to abort a failed colony, fifty teenage vat‑grown settlers wake up fifteen years too early and half trained. Porter, programmed as the colony’s psychologist, must help them survive the world outside and the ruthless logic inside their own systems.

Expelled from the Naval Academy and desperate for answers about her missing parents, teen pilot Molly Fyde chases her father’s lost starship Parsona across the galaxy with former classmate Cole, uncovering dangerous secrets behind her family and the fleet.