If what gripped you was Lyra and Will cutting windows with the subtle knife, stepping from Oxford into Cittàgazze and back while dodging Spectres and Lord Boreal’s stalking, you’ll love the way A Darker Shade of Magic tosses you between parallel Londons with rules that bite. Kell’s world-hopping isn’t just flashy—it has consequences, and Lila’s sharp-edged courage will scratch the same itch as Lyra’s fearless trespasses. The tension of crossing forbidden thresholds—and paying for it—mirrors every risky slice Will makes through the fabric of reality.

If you were moved by how Lyra and Will go from circling each other in Oxford and Cittàgazze to trusting one another—Will taking up the burden of knife-bearer, Lyra reading the alethiometer to keep them alive—then Todd and Viola’s partnership will hook you. In The Knife of Never Letting Go, two teens on the run are hunted across a hostile world, forced to make awful choices while learning to lean on each other the way Will and Lyra do under Mrs. Coulter’s schemes and Boreal’s traps. It’s that same scrappy, growing loyalty forged under relentless pursuit.

If the parts that stayed with you were the heady, unsettling ideas—Dust, daemons as soul made flesh, the Magisterium’s claims, and Mary Malone’s inquiries—A Wizard of Earthsea will resonate. Ged’s journey is an adventure that doubles as a meditation on identity and power; when he unleashes a shadow, he must understand and name it, much like Lyra and Will wrestle with what Dust means and what responsibility they bear. It’s thoughtful, spare, and profound in the same way those philosophical currents run beneath Will’s search for his father and Lyra’s questioning of authority.

If Will accepting the mantle of knife-bearer—learning its rules, paying its cost, and using it carefully to protect Lyra—hit you hard, Sabriel offers that same moral weight. Sabriel inherits necromantic bells and must cross into Death to rescue her father, much as Will braves Cittàgazze’s Spectres and seeks John Parry across worlds. Every choice Sabriel makes about when and how to wield power echoes the knife’s ethics: it’s potent, it’s perilous, and it demands a conscience.

If you loved the wonder of finding a window in Oxford that opens onto the empty plazas of Cittàgazze, and the thrill of Mary Malone’s research blossoming into revelations about Dust, The Ten Thousand Doors of January channels that same sense of discovery. January stumbles on a book that is itself a key to real Doorways—mystery layered with scholarship, secret societies, and the aching pull of elsewhere. It captures the awe you felt as Lyra and Will stepped through, realizing the world (worlds!) was far larger and stranger than they’d been told.