If you loved how Jack Shaftoe’s odyssey ricocheted from Barbary corsairs to Mughal ports while Eliza’s moves at Versailles rippled across continents, you’ll relish the way Sea of Poppies carries you from Calcutta’s opium factories onto the Ibis bound for Mauritius. The ship’s motley company—zamindars, lascars, convicts, and traders—echoes the grand, intercontinental energy of Jack’s treasure-hauling escapades and Eliza’s market-shaking schemes.

Drawn to how The Confusion braids Jack’s high-seas heists with Eliza’s financial stratagems—gold shipments, stock manipulations, and shadowy alliances with men like Lothar von Hacklheber? Cryptonomicon mirrors that layered design: WWII codebreakers like Bobby Shaftoe chase buried treasure in the Pacific while modern cryptographers like Randy Waterhouse build data havens and hunt gold caches in Manila. It’s the same heady cocktail of clever schemes, peril, and payoff across timelines.

If Eliza’s tightrope walk through the courts of Louis XIV—jockeying against the duc d’Arcachon and outfoxing bankers like Hacklheber—was your catnip, Wolf Hall delivers that same pulse of brinkmanship. Watching Thomas Cromwell orchestrate alliances, manage rivals, and survive the volatile whims of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn scratches the same itch for ruthlessly intelligent court play with fortunes and lives on the line.

The way The Confusion alternates between Jack’s audacious “Bonanza” thread and Eliza’s scheming in “The Juncto” primes you for Pears’s quartet of narrators dissecting a 1660s Oxford murder. As each witness retells the story—embroiled in Restoration politics and religious plots—you get the same pleasure of shifting vantage points that upend your understanding, much like toggling between Jack’s exploits and Eliza’s machinations.

If you savored The Confusion’s painstaking dives into mints, stock exchanges, and the machinery of early-modern commerce—alongside curiosities that brush up against alchemy—you’ll adore Clarke’s faux-scholarly texture. From the salons of London to Wellington’s campaigns in Spain, and the eerie bargains of the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell wraps you in the same archival, world-spanning depth that made Eliza’s financial maneuvers and Jack’s global capers feel so tangible.