What to read after “Karen Memory” by Elizabeth Bear: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
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.
Irene is a professional spy for the Library, an institution that collects books from alternate worlds. Sent with her new assistant Kai to a chaos-infested version of London where airships, vampires and fey exist, she must recover a dangerous book that has already been stolen, and the mission quickly turns into a struggle over the nature of reality itself.
An early mining machine called the Boneshaker shattered Seattle and released a gas that kills people or turns the dead into rotters. Sixteen years later, Briar Wilkes enters the walled ruins after her son Zeke, who hopes to clear his father's name, goes in. She finds the ruined city ruled by a masked inventor and his followers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is sent to Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy, where proper young ladies learn dance, dress and etiquette, and also lock-picking, information gathering and the quieter arts of espionage. A stolen prototype and a plot against a schoolmate pull Sophronia and her new friends into danger.
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.
In 1870 Texas, an ageing widower who reads newspapers aloud to frontier audiences agrees to carry a ten-year-old girl south to her relatives. She was taken by Kiowa years earlier and has forgotten English, and the long journey is dangerous for them both.
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.
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.
Frontiersman Hugh Glass is mauled by a bear and left for dead by his companions, who take his rifle and supplies. He crawls out of the wilderness and sets out on a long journey to find the men who abandoned him.
A quiet stranger rides into a Wyoming valley and hires on with homesteaders Joe and Marian Starrett. The boy Bob idolises him, but Shane's skill with a gun pulls him back toward a past he wants to leave when a cattle baron moves against the settlers.
A nameless cowpuncher on a Wyoming ranch falls for the new schoolteacher from Vermont while feuding with a ranch hand named Trampas. His code of honour is tested by a cattle thief, a lynching and a duel, in a territory where the law is still being made.
After her father is shot dead in 1870s Arkansas, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross hires Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed U.S. marshal with a taste for whiskey, to hunt the killer into Indian Territory. A Texas Ranger joins them, and the three ride into a hard country where justice is personal.
In the vast industrial city of New Crobuzon, the scientist Isaac agrees to restore flight to a creature who has lost its wings. The experiment releases something that feeds on dreams and minds, and the city is soon sliding toward disaster.
Mary Jekyll, orphaned and poor, sets out to find her father's old colleague, the missing Doctor Hyde. Instead she gathers a family of young women who are the daughters or creations of famous scientists, from Moreau and Jekyll to Rappaccini. Together they investigate a series of murders in Victorian London.
Stolen from a comfortable California home, the dog Buck is sold into the Klondike gold rush and forced to haul sleds through frozen wilderness. Amid cruelty and hardship he discovers a wildness within himself that calls him away from men.
William Andrews leaves Harvard for a frontier town in Kansas, hoping to see the West for himself. He joins an old buffalo hunter on an expedition into Colorado, where the work becomes a brutal test of endurance and the hunters' ambitions strip the land bare.
In a militarised near-future American West, a young woman flees an arranged marriage and hides in a travelling library. The librarians turn out to carry banned books and help people cross the border, and she finds a purpose, a community, and a woman she loves.
Two former Texas Rangers drive a herd of cattle north to Montana, leading a ragged crew across rivers, drought and hostile country. The long journey tests the old friendship of the two men and the loyalties of everyone who follows them.
Alexia Tarabotti is a spinster with no soul, which makes her immune to the supernatural. When a rogue vampire attacks her in steampunk London and a werewolf lord is sent to investigate, the two uncover a plot against the city's vampires and werewolves—and a mutual attraction neither of them expected.
After Comanche raiders kill his brother's family and carry off his niece Debbie, Amos Edwards and Martin Pauley, the orphan the Edwards family took in, spend years searching the Texas plains for her. The long hunt hardens Amos's hatred and strains his bond with Martin, who wants to bring the girl home.
Start with “The Diabolical Miss Hyde”, “The Invisible Library”, “Boneshaker”: they are the closest to “Karen Memory” 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 “Karen Memory” these are Steampunk, Wild West, Found Family), 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 Diabolical Miss Hyde”, “The Invisible Library”, “Boneshaker”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
