Physiognomy

Another recommendation, but this one I really liked. It might not have been so much recommended as a date of mine was reading it and the title really appealed to me. Luckily, the prose was fun and diegesis compelling. Only con was that all the elements of the book seemed similar to others I had run into before, though not directly stolen like some children books do. For example, the main Physiognomist was clearly a Dickens' villain. The book's cover compares it to The Penal Colony and 1984.
Will definitely read the rest of the trilogy.