If Vance’s jewelled sentences—lingering over Suldrun’s secret bower, or King Casmir’s ceremonials—were what entranced you, Peake’s lush style will feel like home. In Titus Groan, the rise of the cunning kitchen-lad Steerpike through the ossified rituals of Gormenghast mirrors the mordant pageantry and sly wit you savored when Casmir plotted marriages and treaties. The language itself is a feast, making corridors, titles, and petty cruelties shimmer just as Vance does in the Elder Isles.

Did King Casmir’s cold-blooded calculus—arranging betrothals, springing traps, and turning Suldrun’s love for Aillas into catastrophe—hook you? Tigana delivers that same blend of grand strategy and intimate heartbreak. Brandin of Ygrath and Alberico rule through fear and guile, while Devin, Alessan, and Catriana maneuver in masked halls and covert councils. As with Casmir’s court, every toast, treaty, and performance is a weapon, and the stakes are a nation’s soul.

If the Elder Isles’ layered past—its petty kingdoms, old roads, and the faerie-haunted margins where Tamurello and Murgen contend—was your delight, you’ll revel in Clarke’s England. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell builds a living tapestry of maps, footnotes, and legends where the Raven King looms and the gentleman with the thistle-down hair meddles like one of Vance’s perilous fair folk. The eerie bargainings echo the changeling swap that leaves Suldrun with Madouc, turning politics uncanny.

If the numinous, ill-defined sorcery—glamours in Suldrun’s garden, the quiet terrors around Madouc’s origins, and the wizards’ oblique contests—cast the spell for you, Lud-in-the-Mist will beguile. Mirrlees’ forbidden fairy fruit and dreamy incursions slip across borders and council chambers alike, pushing Mayor Nathaniel Chanticleer into dilemmas as fraught and uncanny as Casmir’s realm when faerie and policy collide.

If you enjoyed how Suldrun’s Garden braids Suldrun and Aillas’s clandestine love, Casmir’s espionage, and the shadow war of magicians into one tapestry of the Elder Isles, The Scar offers a kindred complexity. On the floating city of Armada, Bellis Coldwine and a tangle of factions chase designs as layered as Murgen and Tamurello’s intrigues, while the sea-born vistas echo Vance’s island cosmography—beautiful, perilous, and full of astonishing turns.