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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
During the German occupation of France, a blind girl and her father flee Paris for the walled city of Saint-Malo, carrying a valuable jewel. In Germany, an orphan with a gift for radio repairs is drawn into the war machine. Their separate paths move slowly toward the same besieged town in August 1944.
Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is taken from his family to a battle school in space, where gifted children are trained to command fleets against an alien enemy. Ender's talent lifts him above his classmates, but the games meant to shape him may cost everything he is.
A British wireless operator and a pilot become close friends before a mission goes wrong over occupied France. Captured by the Gestapo, the operator is forced to write down what she knows, and her account of the two women slowly reveals more than it first seems.
A young man joins the mobile infantry and is shaped into a soldier through brutal training and interstellar war. Told as his reflections on duty, citizenship and violence, the novel follows his rise from recruit to officer against an enemy unlike humanity.
At seventy-five, John Perry joins the Colonial Defense Forces, leaving Earth for a new body and a war among the stars. What begins as a chance at a second life becomes a fight to understand the colonies, the enemy and what he is fighting for.
In a polluted future, most people escape into the OASIS, a vast virtual world. When its creator dies, he leaves his fortune to whoever finds the hidden egg, and teenager Wade joins a hunt that turns deadly.
Four young refugees cross a frozen East Prussia in the winter of 1945, each hiding a secret and hoping to reach a ship that will carry them west. Their paths merge among the crowds fleeing the advancing Soviet army, bound for a vessel whose fate none of them suspect.
Narrated by Death, the story follows Liesel Meminger, a girl sent to live with a foster family in Nazi Germany. She steals books, shares them with a Jewish man hiding in the basement, and grows up amid bombs, loss and small acts of kindness.
Same genre: “Young adult fiction” and “Science fiction”
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.
In a divided nation, two teenagers on opposite sides play a deadly game of cat and mouse. June, a military prodigy, hunts the Republic's most wanted criminal, Day, without knowing anything about the boy behind the legend.
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 a disease kills most American children, the survivors develop dangerous powers and are locked in government camps. Sixteen-year-old Ruby escapes and joins a group of runaways searching for a safe haven, while learning the cost of her own abilities.
With the gods at war, two young journalists compete for the same columnist post at a dying newspaper. Iris hides her family's troubles, and Roman, her rival, seems to have everything. When anonymous letters begin to pass between them, neither suspects who is writing on the other side.
Start with “Mortal Engines”, “Airborn”, “Boneshaker”: they are the closest to “Leviathan” 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 “Leviathan” these are Steampunk, War Fiction, Coming of Age), 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 “Mortal Engines”, “Airborn”, “Boneshaker”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
