Octavia Butler
Probably Octavia Butler's best-known novel, set in California in 2024 in a slowly but irreversibly decaying United States. Water is scarce, fire a growing threat, borders restricted, the most basic municipal services breaking down. Literacy is falling, and preventable diseases like measles returning. Cheap synthetic drugs exacerbate all the other problems. (Written twenty years earlier, it's disturbingly prescient.) The novel follows a ragtag collection of neighbors and acquaintances who make their way across this landscape and learn to accept and adapt to change when change is inescapable. The main character, Lauren, suffers from a "hyper-empathy" syndrome that forces her to viscerally experience the pain and suffering she sees in others around her.
A collection of short stories, also by Butler. These follow a theme along with Parable of the Sower of investigating human ability and limitation and in particular our relationship with our own biology. They are generally bleak, like Parable of the Sower, but still with glimmers of hope. The sci-fi aspects of Parable of the Sower are fairly restrained, but these stories branch out into weirder territory.