If the wary, ever-shifting bond between Anyanwu and Doro—full of negotiation, constraint, and hard-earned trust—hooked you, you’ll love how Chava (a golem) and Ahmad (a jinni) circle each other in 1890s New York. Like Anyanwu learning how to survive under Doro’s rules and still keep her selfhood, Chava and Ahmad test each other’s boundaries on rooftops and in tenement workshops, trying to balance freedom with belonging amid Little Syria and the Lower East Side. The result is a tender, prickly relationship that evolves scene by scene, much like the uneasy truces and breakthroughs you remember from Wild Seed.

If Doro’s chilling breeding calculus and Anyanwu’s painful compromises fascinated you, the choices Essun, Syenite, and Alabaster make will floor you. From the devastating decision at Meov to the obelisk-rending catastrophe at Allia, these characters wield terrifying power—and accept terrible costs—much like Doro enforcing his vision and Anyanwu bargaining for her people’s safety. The story’s relentless moral pressure and world-shaking consequences echo the queasy, riveting ethics that made Wild Seed unforgettable.

If Doro’s centuries-long breeding program and the way he grooms villages of the “talented” disturbed and enthralled you, this WWII dark fantasy will strike the same nerve. Nazi scientists manufacture superhumans like Gretel, whose eerie foresight steers lives as ruthlessly as Doro does, while British warlocks bargain with otherworldly entities to counter them. The book stares straight at the question How far will you go to shape the future?—the very dilemma at the heart of Wild Seed’s experiments, coercion, and contested destiny.

If Anyanwu’s West African origins and the novel’s confrontation with enslavement, diaspora, and power grabbed you, Onyesonwu’s journey will resonate. She’s an Ewu sorcerer who pushes back against genocide and a corrupted sacred text, much as Anyanwu resists Doro’s domination and the brutalities of the Atlantic world. Training in the desert, confronting ritual violence, and rewriting the rules of magic and society—this delivers the same defiant, culturally grounded fight for selfhood that animates Wild Seed.

If Doro’s predatory immortality and long-game manipulation fascinated you—as he hops bodies and shapes lineages while Anyanwu endures—the Anchorites’ soul-harvesting cult and the Horologists’ ethical, reincarnating opposition will feel eerily familiar. Following Holly Sykes across decades, you’ll see how ordinary lives get pulled into a hidden war, culminating in confrontations at places like the Chapel of the Dusk. It’s the same sweeping timescale and intimate cost that gave Wild Seed its haunting power.