If what lit you up in Nona the Ninth was the way Nona builds a home out of scraps—sharing meals with Pyrrha, puzzling over the world with Camilla-and-Palamedes, walking the dog, and protecting her school friends even as the city teeters—then you’ll love the Wayfarer crew’s tender, day-to-day intimacy. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet trades sieges and Resurrection Beasts for starship errands and cultural road trips, but it delivers that same balm of people choosing each other, joking through danger, and making a family out of odd pieces.

Like Nona’s guileless voice—her dream-chats with the man she calls “Blue,” her incomplete memories, and the way the truth of who she is lands like a tectonic shift—Piranesi invites you into a narrator’s gentle, meticulous observations that don’t add up until they do. The House’s endless halls echo the way Nona’s city feels both safe and haunted; as the journal entries accrete, revelations reframe everything you thought you were reading, much like the late-book turns in Nona the Ninth.

If Nona’s slow dawning self-knowledge—those off-kilter dreams, the slip of names, and the final, identity-upending reveal—was your jam, The Fifth Season delivers a similarly devastating click-into-place. As catastrophes mount (think the city under siege and Blood of Eden crosscurrents), the book peels back layers of personhood and power until the protagonist’s truth hits with the same emotional whiplash as Nona’s last-act revelations.

If the dreamlike weirdness in Nona the Ninth—the unsettling visions, the sense that rules are being enforced by something cosmic and not-quite-explained, and Nona’s body not matching who she is—thrilled you, Vita Nostra doubles down. It’s all ominous assignments, transformations you can’t quite parse, and the creeping realization that meaning itself is the curriculum. You’ll recognize that eerie, awe-tinged confusion Nona feels as reality bends around her.

Miss the way Nona the Ninth lets jokes and sweetness puncture the end-of-the-world—Pyrrha’s dry asides, Nona’s earnest dog obsession mid-crisis, the gallows humor as Blood of Eden and the Cohort close in? Meet Murderbot. Its sardonic, self-aware commentary slices through firefights and corporate sabotage with the same relief-valve energy, delivering action plus that laugh-in-spite-of-it-all tone that made Nona’s birthday-planning-in-a-warzone so endearing.