#60 in Dystopian
The Maze Runner
- 375
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
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Editor’s note Thomas arrives in the Glade in a lift, remembering nothing but his name, and finds fifty boys who have built a settlement at the centre of a stone maze whose walls move every night and whose corridors hold the Grievers; the next day the lift brings a girl, the first ever, with a message that she is the last. James Dashner published it in 2009, The Scorch Trials in 2010 and The Death Cure in 2011, then two prequels, and the film of 2014 with Dylan O’Brien made it a franchise. It is the plainest of the big young-adult dystopias of those years, less a book about a society than a puzzle box with a death count, and the solution to the maze is the only one of its answers that holds up. For twelve and up; the sequels get darker.
About the book
The Maze Runner is a 2009 dystopian novel by American author James Dashner. It takes place in a world suffering from a coronal mass ejection and whose surviving civilians fight to avoid an apocalyptic illness called the Flare. It is written from the perspective of Thomas, a 16-year-old boy who wakes up with no memories inside an artificially produced maze. An organization called WICKED controls the world politically, seeks a cure to the Flare, and uses the youngest generation of civilians who are immune to it as test subjects.
Reading order · The Maze Runner
Full order & progress →- The Maze RunnerThis book
7.67.6 / 10 - The Scorch Trials
7.47.4 / 10 - The Death Cure
7.17.1 / 10 - The Kill Order
7.17.1 / 10 - The Fever Code
7.87.8 / 10
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.5 across 2,116 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 94% of the weight and the score stays at 7.6 — the Dystopian average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.0 | 158 | 8% |
| Google Books | 8.0 | 14 | 1% |
| Hardcover | 7.5 | 1.9K | 92% |
Frequently asked
What age is The Maze Runner for?
The Maze Runner sits on the Young adult shelf in the sources we use, which by convention means roughly ages 13 and up. This is a guide from the book’s category, not a publisher’s age rating. It has 375 pages — shorter than 70% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.4 and 7.7, closest to this book.
