The Thief

by George MacDonald

Like Gen, your protagonist here is an outsider thrust into a world of court politics and hidden agendas, but Addison takes the opposite approach—instead of a cynical trickster, you get someone genuinely trying to navigate impossible situations with integrity. The pleasure comes from watching someone clever figure out the rules of a game designed to exclude them, with the same sense of satisfying misdirection you loved in Turner's plotting.

by Scott Lynch

This one's the obvious cousin to *The Thief*, but Lynch goes further into the con-artist's mindset with a heist that unfolds across multiple timelines. Where Turner gives you a trickster playing a long game, Lynch gives you a found family of tricksters where the real magic is in how they think—the dialogue crackles with the same kind of intelligence that makes you want to reread scenes to catch what you missed.

by Diana Wynne Jones

Published in 1986, this is your cross-decade pick, and it shares Turner's gift for layering meaning beneath what seems like a straightforward adventure. Sophie's journey involves slowly uncovering what's actually true about the world around her, and like Gen, she's constantly working angles and figuring out how to survive with her wits. Jones writes with the same kind of sly humor where characters are always several steps ahead of what they're saying aloud.

by R. F. Kuang

Here's your genre-adjacent surprise: it's epic fantasy with military strategy, but it's grounded in real historical trauma and moral ambiguity in ways that feel more literary than adventure-driven. Like Turner, Kuang is interested in how power actually works—not through magic systems, but through the choices people make when they have it. The protagonist's journey from orphan to general has that same sense of someone playing a game with rules nobody's explained to them.

by Giambattista Piranesi

Clarke does something remarkable here: she creates a mystery where the reader and protagonist are both slowly realizing the world isn't what it appeared to be, and that revelation feels as satisfying as any heist. It's shorter and more dreamlike than *The Thief*, but it has that same quality of watching someone intelligent piece together a puzzle where the real game is figuring out what questions to ask. The prose is gorgeous but never gets in the way of the plot.