If the way Girolamo weighs sin, grace, and intervention in Florence—bargaining with holiness while fending off demons and trying to save his flock from the Bonfire of the Vanities—grabbed you, you’ll love how Cazaril must decide when and how to invite the gods’ perilous attention. In The Curse of Chalion, miracles aren’t shiny; they’re risky acts with debts attached, much like Savonarola’s attempts to steer the Medici and the Signoria toward righteousness. Watching Cazaril accept a saint’s burden to break a dynastic curse echoes Lent’s question: what do you owe your city and your soul when meddling with the sacred might damn you—or redeem everyone?

You watched Savonarola die, awaken, and try again—loop after loop—wrestling with conscience as Florence teetered through ordeal and pestilence. Doomsday Book sends Kivrin back to the Black Death, where she, like Girolamo, discovers that mercy and truth matter most when the world burns. The intimate, parish‑by‑parish courage she finds among villagers mirrors the moments in Lent when sermons and small acts of grace contend with terror far better than spectacle. If the second half’s “do it right this time” urgency moved you, Kivrin’s desperate attempts to save a few souls will, too.

If you relished how Lent braids demons and miracles into real events—Lorenzo de’ Medici’s deathbed test, the Signoria’s maneuvers, the failed trial by fire—then Clarke’s alternate Napoleonic Britain will feel perfect. In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, magic returns to the corridors of power, and every conjuration has political consequence, much like Girolamo’s visions warping Florence’s fate. The scholarly rigor, theological‑adjacent debates about the nature of the unseen, and the slow, inexorable way enchantment reshapes history echo the careful, consequential wonder you admired in Walton’s Florence.

Loved the Signoria’s backroom deals, the pulpit’s power, and the way Savonarola’s purity becomes a dangerous political force? Kay’s The Lions of Al‑Rassan lives where faith and ambition meet the sword. Physicians, poets, and captains navigate shifting alliances as city‑states teeter—much as Florence does when Girolamo faces the Medici and the Bonfire. The book’s moral knots—when to compromise, when to stand like Savonarola at the stake—are as tense and human as the debates that define Lent.

If what held you in Lent was Girolamo’s monastic life—confession, study, the daily offices—and the sense that history repeats until we learn how to live rightly, A Canticle for Leibowitz will resonate. Across centuries, monks preserve fragments of lost wisdom, arguing—like Savonarola and his brothers—about what the faithful owe a fallen world. Its wry relics, miracles of uncertain provenance, and recurring moral tests echo Lent’s demons and visions, asking whether sanctity can survive politics and whether any cycle can finally be broken.