If roaming the Tower's ringdoms—from the hedonistic Baths to the scripted relationships of the Parlour—was your favorite part of Senlin Ascends, you'll love sinking into New Crobuzon. Miéville layers neighborhoods, guilds, and grotesque bureaucracies with the same sense of discovery that kept you turning pages as Senlin climbed after Marya. And where the Tower sprang marvels and terrors at every landing, New Crobuzon answers with Remade outcasts, rogue thaumaturgy, and slake-moths that turn curiosity into dread.

Senlin’s relentless search for Marya pushes him through cons, disguises, and perilous social games—from playing along with the Parlour’s roles to outfoxing petty tyrants in the Tower. If that forward momentum hooked you, The Lies of Locke Lamora channels the same energy as Locke orchestrates audacious heists across Camorr’s canals and noble houses, each scheme tightening like the Tower’s ladders until there’s no way but through.

If you were moved by how a mild schoolmaster like Senlin learns to read a dangerous system and grow a spine amid the Tower’s graft and spectacle, you’ll click with Maia. In The Goblin Emperor, a shy, sidelined prince is thrust into a cutthroat court; like Senlin improvising through the Tower’s ringdoms, Maia learns etiquette, leverage, and compassion as tools to survive and change the world around him.

Did Senlin’s dry observations and the Tower’s satirical set-pieces—like the Parlour’s manufactured romances and the Baths’ cheerful predation—make you grin even as the stakes climbed? The Blacktongue Thief has that same sly sparkle. Kinch’s sardonic voice cuts through assassins, giants, and debt-collecting guilds, using wit the way Senlin used manners and masks: as a blade hidden in plain sight.

If Bancroft’s lush sentences and the towering pageantry of Babel—its byzantine rules, rituals, and theatrical illusions—enchanted you, Titus Groan is a feast. Peake’s Gormenghast, a labyrinthine castle ruled by ossified ceremony, evokes the same hypnotic grandeur; you’ll feel the stones, corridors, and customs pressing in as vividly as the Tower did on Senlin’s climb.