The Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents challenge the concept of resilience with their unpredictable long-term impacts on humans and the environment as well as the persistent risk situation. Nevertheless, resilience is used as a category for assessing the impact of such events in disaster research and mass media discourses. Fictionalized scenarios in post-Chernobyl and post-Fukushima narratives also revolve around the question of how humans and other living beings can survive in contaminated environments. This chapter examines four novels with different cultural settings and different narrative strategies: Javier Sebastián’s El ciclista de Chernóbil [The Cyclist of Chernobyl], Alina Bronsky’s Baba Dunjas letzte Liebe [Baba Dunja’s Last Love], Nina Jäckle’s Der lange Atem [The Long Breath], and Adolf Muschg’s Heimkehr nach Fukushima [Returning Home to Fukushima]. The analysis shows that the characters’ ability to resist, adapt, and regenerate is influenced by the decision whether to leave or stay/return. It elaborates how different facets of resilience are staged in literature and essentially developed in the act of narrating the disaster. To contextualize the understandings of resilience articulated in the novels and recognize them as a counter-discourse, the chapter provides a selective and critical insight into the scientific, political, and journalistic discourses on resilience in the context of the two disasters. The chapter combines approaches from multidisciplinary resilience (especially psychological and sociological) research with the interests of literary studies and identifies characteristics of literary concepts of resilience.