If what gripped you in Warchild was living inside Jos’s head—from the pirate raid to the aftermath of grooming and divided loyalties—you’ll be transfixed by Father Emilio Sandoz’s journey in The Sparrow. The mission to Rakhat looks like a triumph until it becomes a nightmare, and the novel painstakingly unspools what happened and what it cost him. Like Jos, Sandoz survives the unthinkable and then has to make sense of who he is when the mission, the war, and everyone’s expectations have chewed him up.

You followed Jos from terrified child to hardened survivor and reluctant go-between—so you’ll likely connect with Binti. On her way to Oomza University, Binti survives a massacre aboard her transport and must negotiate with the jellyfish-like Meduse to stay alive. Like Jos mediating between warring sides, she leverages culture, language, and nerve to broker peace, all while carrying the scars of what she’s endured.

If the disorienting, second-person opening of Warchild and the way Jos’s broken memories surface pulled you in, The Fifth Season will hit the same nerve. Jemisin weaves Essun’s second-person chapters with other timelines to reveal identity and history in gut-punch turns, using form the way Warchild uses perspective—so you feel the trauma and revelation in your bones.

If what lingered from Warchild was Jos’s entanglement with predatory mentors and the necessity of morally gray choices to survive, Ninefox Gambit offers that in spades. Captain Kel Cheris allies with the resurrected strategist Shuos Jedao—legendary, charismatic, and monstrous—to win an impossible siege. Their bond is as riveting and unsettling as any coercive tutelage Jos endures, forcing you to weigh victory against the cost to one’s soul.

If you were drawn to how Jos becomes a linguistic and cultural intermediary amid human–alien war, Foreigner drops you into that role with both feet. Bren Cameron serves as paidhi to the atevi, navigating lethal etiquette, assassination threats, and mistranslations that could spark conflict. The slow-burn tension of negotiating survival between species echoes Jos’s precarious balancing act.