If you loved how The Crimson Petal and the White immerses you in 1870s London—from William Rackham’s perfumery parlors to Sugar’s grim lodging house and the hush of Agnes’s sickroom—then Fingersmith will scratch that same itch. Waters builds a teeming world of thieves’ kitchens, madhouses, and drawing rooms with the same tactile specificity. Like watching Sugar navigate the brothels and then the Rackham household, you’ll move through con games and country estates so vividly rendered you can smell the gaslight and damp wool.

If it was the probing interiority—the way Faber lets you into Sugar’s calculating tenderness, Agnes Rackham’s laudanum-hazed terror, and William’s self-justifying vanity—that hooked you, Alias Grace offers a similarly deep dive. As Grace Marks recounts her past to a doctor, layers of memory, desire, and survival tactics peel back with the same careful attention Faber gives Agnes’s fractured perceptions and Sugar’s secret strategizing as she becomes Sophie’s governess.

If you were drawn to the novel’s bleak underside—the brothels Sugar claws her way out of, Dr. Curlew’s cold authority, and the casual cruelties that doom Agnes—then The Meaning of Night will grip you. Cox plunges you into fog-choked streets and compromised souls, following a narrator whose ruthless confession echoes the moral shadow that hangs over William Rackham. It’s the same grimy gaslight world, just as intoxicating and dangerous.

If Sugar’s fierce intelligence and resourcefulness—her secret writings, her transformation into Sophie’s protector, her tactical reading of men—were what you loved, meet Bessy Buckley. In The Observations, Bessy’s sly, funny, and tough narration recalls Sugar’s blend of vulnerability and grit as she navigates a mistress with troubling “experiments.” It’s that same feeling of a woman carving agency inside a society determined to deny it.

If the pleasure for you was the slow build—the way Sugar’s position in the Rackham household evolves, secrets around Agnes fester, and each chapter ratchets tension by degrees—The Quincunx delivers a grand, patient web of wills, inheritances, and betrayals. Like watching Henry Rackham’s piety corrode and William’s schemes entangle him, you’ll feel the noose of circumstance tighten page by page until the payoff lands with Victorian inevitability.