A traveller from the future changes 1840 and leaves behind an England divided between steam-driven Technologists and Eugenicists who reshape living things. Sir Richard Burton, an explorer whose reputation has been ruined, is sent to investigate the attacks of Spring-Heeled Jack and other strange events in London's East End.
In an alternate 1914, the Great Powers fight with two kinds of technology: the Clankers' diesel walkers and the Darwinists' genetically engineered beasts. Prince Alek, on the run after his parents' assassination, and Deryn, a girl disguised as a boy in the British airship service, meet when the whale airship Leviathan crashes in the Alps.
In an alternate 1878, Karen Memery works at a brothel in Seattle. When a badly injured woman arrives with a ruthless man on her trail, Karen is pulled into a hunt for a serial killer, a corrupt election and a mess of dangerous inventions.
Thousands of years after a war destroyed civilization, cities move on giant wheels and hunt smaller towns for fuel and parts. Apprentice historian Tom Natsworthy is thrown out of London after a girl named Hester tries to kill a powerful official, and the two must survive the wastelands together while a larger scheme takes shape inside the city.
After the Iron Duke broke the Horde's hold on England, Rhys Trahaearn became a hero, a merchant and a man used to taking what he wants. Detective Inspector Mina Wentworth has Horde blood and little place in London society, but a body dropped on Rhys's doorstep forces them to work together against a plot aimed at everyone in England.
In an electric-powered Victorian London, Dr. Eliza Jekyll works as a crime-scene investigator while hiding Lizzie Hyde, the reckless second self freed by her father's elixir. A killer is mutilating women across the city, and the case pulls Eliza into London's magical underworld as she tries to keep her secret and control Lizzie.
A gifted child lives in a military base, strapped into a chair for lessons while hungries roam outside. When the base falls, she and her teacher cross a broken England while she learns what she is and what she can choose to become.
In Victorian London, Tessa Gray is kidnapped by the Dark Sisters and learns she is a shape-shifter. Rescued by the Shadowhunters, she is drawn into a fight against a powerful enemy while navigating her feelings for two brothers, Will and Jem.
After a series of waves wipes out most of humanity, sixteen-year-old Cassie is alone and running from an enemy that could look like anyone. To find her little brother she will have to trust a stranger, even as she learns how the invasion really works.
Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a luxury airship that crosses the oceans. When a pirate raid and a storm leave the ship stranded on a remote island, Matt and a rich passenger's daughter, Kate, search for the flying creatures her grandfather claimed to have seen before the pirates close in.
A wanderer in a ruined America puts on a dead postman's uniform and invents a story about a restored postal service. The lie gives scattered survivors hope, then grows into something he must defend.
Robert Neville believes he is the last human in a world overrun by people transformed by a plague. By day he hunts them and repairs his house; by night they besiege it, and he tries to understand what the survivors have become.
In a future where the air outside is deadly, people live in a buried silo and are told that anyone who asks to go outside will be sent there to die. When a sheriff starts asking questions about the world beyond the walls, the silo's careful order begins to crack.
Edinburgh, 1844. Aileana Kameron hides a secret: she hunts the fae who murdered her mother, using her own inventions and a training she never speaks of. Her closest ally is Kiaran, a fae warrior who teaches her to fight, and the trail she follows leads toward something far older and more dangerous than she expected.
Earth has been quietly taken over by souls, parasites who erase human minds and live in their bodies. Wanderer, inserted into the body of a resistant girl named Melanie, finds the girl's thoughts and feelings still present, along with her love for a man in hiding.
A father and his young son walk through a burned America, pushing a cart of scavenged supplies and hiding from bands of survivors who hunt people for food. Their only aim is to keep moving south and stay alive while holding on to decency.
Something outside drives anyone who sees it to violence, so the survivors live blindfolded. Malorie has kept two children safe for years. Now she must row them downriver without looking, toward a refuge that may or may not exist.
Thomas wakes in a maze with no memory of who he is, surrounded by boys who arrived the same way. Each day the walls open and monstrous machines roam, and Thomas becomes sure he was part of the experiment that trapped them.
A man called Snowman may be the last human left, living in a tree above a ruined city and watching over a gentle new species. Through his memories the reader learns how his brilliant friend Crake and the woman they both loved brought the world to its end.
A plague kills nearly everyone on Earth. An ecologist emerges from the mountains to find empty cities and a few survivors, and spends the rest of his life watching a new, smaller society take shape without the old world's machinery.
The Moon suddenly breaks apart, and a small group of people escapes to orbit while Earth becomes uninhabitable. They must keep a fragile space habitat alive long enough to preserve the human species, and decide what kind of society to build.
Four women cross into Area X, a coastal region sealed off for decades, to survey it as the twelfth expedition. The biologist records the abandoned bunker, the writing on its walls and the animals that seem almost aware. She also knows her husband went in before her and came back changed.
An aging astronomer stays behind at a remote Arctic research station after the world loses contact with everyone else. Far above, the crew of a returning space mission hears nothing from Earth. Their two stories move toward each other across the ice and the dark.
A millennial office worker in New York keeps showing up to her publishing job as a fever turns people into repetitive, wandering shells. Her account of the collapse moves between satire of work and the quiet end of the world.
Start with “The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack”, “Leviathan”, “Karen Memory”: they are the closest to “Boneshaker” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Boneshaker” these are Steampunk, Survival, Missing Person), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack”, “Leviathan”, “Karen Memory”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
