Divergent
Book One of the Divergent Trilogy
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Buy on Bookshop.orgWhat Divergent is about
Divergent opens on Choosing Day, when every sixteen-year-old in a walled-off future Chicago must pick one of five factions to live in for the rest of their life: Abnegation (the selfless), Amity (the peaceful), Candor (the honest), Dauntless (the brave), or Erudite (the intelligent).
Beatrice Prior, raised in Abnegation, tests as Divergent — aptitude for more than one faction — a result she’s told to keep secret at any cost. She chooses Dauntless, renames herself Tris, and survives a brutal initiation while uncovering a conspiracy that threatens every faction at once.
Why fans still read it
Divergent remains one of the defining YA dystopian novels of the 2010s, credited alongside The Hunger Games with kicking off a wave of faction- and trial-based YA fiction. Its first-person, present-tense voice and fast-paced initiation sequences are frequently cited as reasons it holds up on reread.
Read next
Continue the story in Insurgent, or see how the 2014 film adaptation brought Tris’s choice to the screen.