If you were gripped by how Castrima’s survival hinges on geology, rationing, and the land’s cruelty—while Essun learns to live with a world literally tearing itself apart—then you’ll find the parched American Southwest of The Water Knife just as relentless. As comms in The Obelisk Gate scramble to secure water, power, and safety under Ykka’s leadership, Bacigalupi’s characters fight over dwindling aquifers and weaponized water rights. It’s the same brutal calculus of ecosystems-as-antagonist, where every choice to keep your people alive reshapes the map.

You felt the moral shockwaves when Alabaster’s earlier choice broke the world, Essun risks the obelisk network’s annihilating potential, and Nassun learns from Schaffa that saving someone might mean destroying everything else. The Poppy War follows Rin as she taps godlike fire that can end armies—but at a cost that mirrors Essun and Nassun’s hardest questions: When power can shatter nations, who gets to decide what survival is worth? If the moment Essun reaches for the gate made your stomach drop, Rin’s worst decisions will hit the same nerve.

If you admired Essun’s iron will, Nassun’s terrifying brilliance, and Ykka’s principled leadership of Castrima, you’ll be drawn to Onyesonwu—another formidable woman in a brutal world. Like Essun protecting her comm while wrestling with rage and grief, Onye fights systemic violence and learns magic that can rewrite her people’s fate. The intimate, often harrowing choices—much like Nassun’s bond with Schaffa and Essun’s strained alliances—center complex women whose power and love can both save and scorch.

If the shifting lenses between Essun in Castrima, Nassun on the road to Found Moon, and Schaffa’s unsettling guardianship kept you riveted, The Bone Shard Daughter uses a similarly layered mosaic. Lin’s palace intrigue, Jovis’s ground-level struggles, and other threads reveal an empire’s rot the way The Obelisk Gate reveals continent-scale secrets through personal journeys. The interplay of perspectives steadily recontextualizes what power costs—much like learning what the Guardians are, or why the obelisks matter.

Castrima’s siege and ash-thick marches through a dying land echo in The Girl With All the Gifts, where a fungal plague has toppled society and a small band navigates ruin with a child who might change everything. If the tense, mobile survival of The Obelisk Gate—Essun weighing who to save, and at what cost—hooked you, Melanie’s journey with Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks delivers the same grim hope, ethical lines crossed, and end-of-the-world tenderness.