If you loved how The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock soaked you in 1780s London—from Jonah’s counting-house in Deptford to Angelica Neal’s glittering rooms and Mrs. Chappell’s brothel—then you’ll relish the marshy Essex villages and late-Victorian London salons of The Essex Serpent. Cora Seaborne’s hunt for a rumored serpent stirs the same heady mix of superstition, science, and society gossip that swirled around the mermaid specimen on display, with atmospherics rich enough to smell the river mud and lamp oil.

Jonah Hancock’s purchase of a "mermaid"—that unsettling, possibly fraudulent marvel—casts a subtle enchantment over very real Georgian lives. The Miniaturist works a similar spell: when Nella Oortman receives a miniature house whose mysterious artisan seems to foretell events, the uncanny nudges a meticulously rendered Amsterdam into sharper relief. If the mermaid’s eerie pull and the way its rumors reshape Angelica Neal’s prospects captivated you, the miniaturist’s cryptic interventions will feel just as irresistible.

You enjoyed how Angelica Neal maneuvers for patronage, how her fate entwines—gradually, messily—with Jonah after the mermaid’s debut, and how the novel lingers through Vauxhall nights and drawing-room bargains. The Crimson Petal and the White offers that same luxuriant, patient immersion: Sugar’s calculated ascent within William Rackham’s orbit unfolds over hundreds of finely observed pages, letting power, desire, and respectability shift as slowly—and inexorably—as fortunes in Mrs. Chappell’s house.

If Angelica Neal’s nerve and self-fashioning, or even Mrs. Chappell’s hard-bitten pragmatism, kept you rapt, The Fair Fight will hook you with Ruth—raised in a brothel and reinvented as a boxer—and Charlotte, a gentleman’s daughter fighting different cages. Like Angelica negotiating terms with would‑be protectors, these women scrap for agency in the same century’s grime and glitter, their choices cutting through gossip, spectacle, and the price of survival.

Beneath the mermaid’s spectacle, you felt the ache of conscience—Jonah wrestling with what he’s bought and what it means, Angelica crafting a self the world keeps pricing. The Confessions of Frannie Langton dives just as deep: Frannie, a Jamaican-born servant on trial for murder, narrates love, exploitation, and complicity in a voice as searingly introspective as any moment in Mrs. Chappell’s parlor or Angelica’s private reckonings. It’s the same candlelit psychology, laid bare.