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The Light Ages

Ian R. MacLeod · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Gilded Cage

Vic James · 358 pages

"For readers of Victoria Aveyard and Kiera Cass comes a darkly fantastical debut set in a modern England where magically gifted aristocrats rule--and commoners are doomed to serve. NOT ALL ARE FREE. NOT ALL ARE EQUAL. NOT ALL WILL BE SAVED. Our world belongs to the Equals--aristocrats with magical gifts--and all commoners must serve them for ten years. But behind the gates of England's grandest es

Alternate HistoryClass StruggleClassismLondon
❤️

Notorious Sorcerer

Davinia Evans · 400 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistClass StruggleClassismAtmospheric
❤️

Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

Working-Class ProtagonistClass StruggleClassismAtmospheric
❤️

The Golem's Eye

Jonathan Stroud · 562 pages

In their continuing adventures, magician's apprentice Nathaniel, now fourteen years old, and the djinni Bartimaeus travel to Prague to locate the source of a golem's power before it destroys London.

Alternate HistoryClass StruggleClassismLondon
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Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier · 248 pages

This book "centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. The appointment of the quiet, perceptive heroine of the novel, the servant Griet, gradually throws the household into turmoil as Vermeer and Griet become increasingly intimate, an increasingly tense situation that culminates in her working for Vermeer as his assistant, and ultimately sitting for him as a model. Chevalier d

Class StruggleWorking-Class ProtagonistLyrical ProseAtmospheric
❤️

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante · 336 pages

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, "My Brilliant Friend" is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but

Class StruggleWorking-Class ProtagonistClassismSeries Starter
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Munmun

Jesse Andrews · 330 pages

In an alternate reality a lot like our world, every person's physical size is directly proportional to their wealth. The poorest of the poor are the size of rats, and billionaires are the size of skyscrapers. Warner and his sister Prayer are destitute—and tiny. Their size is not just demeaning, but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger richer people don't ever have to think

Class StruggleWorking-Class ProtagonistAlternate HistoryClassism
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Red Rising

Pierce Brown · 400 pages

"I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them." "I live for you," I say sadly. Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more." Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and hi

Class StruggleWorking-Class ProtagonistClassismSeries Starter
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Timekeeper

Tara Sim · 414 pages

In an alternate 1875 England, seventeen-year-old clock mechanic Danny, aided by the boy he loves, must discover who is sabotaging the towers that control the flow of time and stop him or her before it is too late.

Alternate HistorySteampunkLondonFantasy
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The Raven Boys

Maggie Stiefvater · 439 pages

Though she is from a family of clairvoyants, Blue Sargent's only gift seems to be that she makes other people's talents stronger. When she meets Gansey, one of the boys from the expensive Aglionby Academy, she discovers that he has talents of his own--and that together their talents are a dangerous mix. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as "raven boys", they can only mean

ClassismWorking-Class ProtagonistLyrical ProseAtmospheric
❤️

Senlin Ascends

Josiah Bancroft · 368 pages

"The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel of the Silk Age. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake. It is a world of geniuses and tyrants, of airships and steam engines, of incredible animals and mysterious machines. While honeymooning in the Tower of Babel, Thomas Senlin loses his wife. A mild-ma

SteampunkAtmosphericLyrical ProseSeries Starter
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All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy · 301 pages

*All the Pretty Horses* is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Along with *The Crossing* (1994), and C*ities of the Plain* (19

ClassismClass StruggleAtmosphericLyrical Prose
❤️

The Bookman

Lavie Tidhar

Alternate HistorySteampunkLondonSeries Starter
❤️

Starling House

Alix E. Harrow · 347 pages

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK “This book has everything you could possibly want this fall...a cursed town, a haunted house, a vivid & eerie setting—plus, characters willing to risk everything.” —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club October ’23 Pick) Starling House is a gorgeous, modern gothic fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of Jan

Working-Class ProtagonistClassismAtmosphericLyrical Prose
❤️

The Iron Duke

Meljean Brook · 384 pages

After the Iron Duke freed England from Horde control, he instantly became a national hero. Now Rhys Trahaearn has built a merchant empire on the power-and fear-of his name. And when a dead body is dropped from an airship onto his doorstep, bringing Detective Inspector Mina Wentworth into his dangerous world, he intends to make her his next possession. But when Mina uncovers the victim's identit

Alternate HistorySteampunkLondonSeries Starter
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Fall of Giants

Ken Follett · 892 pages

It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian b

Class StruggleWorking-Class ProtagonistClassismLondon
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The Will of the Many

James Islington · 720 pages

"At the elite Catenan Academy, where students are prepared as the future leaders of the Hierarchy empire, the curriculum reveals a layered set of mysteries which turn murderous in this new fantasy by bestselling author of The Licanius Trilogy, James Islington. Vis, the adopted son of Magnus Quintus Ulcisor, a prominent senator within the Hierarchy, is trained to enter the famed Catenan Academy to

Class StruggleClassismSeries StarterFantasy
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Cold Magic

Kate Elliott

Alternate HistorySteampunkFantasyFirst Person Narrator
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The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss · 667 pages

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as "quothe." Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I've had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it's spoken, can mean The Flame, The Thunder, or The Broken Tree. "The Flame" is obvious if you've ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple of hundr

Class StruggleAtmosphericLyrical ProseFantasy
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No One Writes to the Colonel

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages

Class StruggleWorking-Class ProtagonistClassismLyrical Prose
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Perdido Street Station

China Mieville · 710 pages

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory

SteampunkClass StruggleAtmosphericFantasy
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Worldshaker

Richard Harland · 388 pages

Sixteen-year-old Col Porpentine is being groomed as the next Commander of Worldshaker, a juggernaut where elite families live on the upper decks while the Filthies toil below, but when he meets Riff, a Filthy girl on the run, he discovers how ignorant he is of his home and its residents.

Class StruggleSteampunkClassismSeries Starter
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Foundryside

Robert Jackson Bennett · 501 pages

Class StruggleWorking-Class ProtagonistClassismSeries Starter
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Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl

David Barnett · 351 pages

"Nineteenth century London is the center of a vast British Empire. Airships ply the skies and Queen Victoria presides over three-quarters of the known world, including the East Coast of America, following the failed revolution of 1775. London might as well be a world away from Sandsend, a tiny village on the Yorkshire coast. Gideon Smith dreams of the adventure promised him by the lurid tales of C

Alternate HistorySteampunkLondonSeries Starter

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