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Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like A Distant Magic

anchored on:19th centurytime travelrevengeslaverybritish islesmediterranean+2 more

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories driven by the pursuit of vengeance for a wrong, and what the pursuit costs the avenger.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of Kindred
                  Kindred

                  Octavia E. Butler · standalone novel · 1979

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                  Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses.

                • Cover of The Anubis Gates
                  The Anubis Gates

                  series · 3 books · 1983

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                  The Anubis Gates is a single time-travel fantasy novel by Tim Powers, following a present-day academic who takes part in a time-travel experiment and ends up stranded in early nineteenth-century London. It won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1983 and the Science Fiction Chronicle Award the following year.

                • Cover of Legend
                  Legend

                  Jude Deveraux · standalone novel · 1996

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                  Her wedding fast approaching, celebrated chef Kady Long knew she was the luckiest woman alive...until she slipped into a delicate satin wedding dress she found in an antique flour tin and was overcome by an odd dizzy spell. When she came to, Kady was in the dusty western town of Legend, Colorado -- where a hanging was about to commence! With quick wits and more than a little moxie, Kady halts the proceedings, much to the relief of one Cole Jordan, a tall, thankful, and very appealing man. Now it's Kady's turn to enlist his help to find a way back home. But before long, Kady discovers a passion that she knows can only live in Legend -- until Cole reveals a secret that unites them in a way Kady never could have imagined.

                • Cover of Passenger
                  Passenger

                  series · 2 books · 2016

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                • Cover of Playing Beatie Bow
                  Playing Beatie Bow

                  Ruth Park · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: A lonely Australian girl from a divided family is transported back to the 1880's and an immigrant family from the Orkney Islands.

                • Cover of Desperado
                  Desperado

                  Sandra Hill · standalone novel · 1997

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                  Major Helen Prescott had always played by the rules. That was why Rafe Santiago had nicknamed her "Prissy" at the military academy years before. Rafe's teasing had made her life miserable back then, and, with his irresistible good looks, he was the man responsible for her one momentary lapse of self-control. So when a stint in the National Guard brought him under her command, Helen laid down the law -- she would stand for no macho moves or bedroom looks in HER platoon. But then a routine sky dive went awry, and all bets were off as they parachuted straight into the 1850 California Gold Rush. Mistaken for a notorious bandit and his infamously sensuous mistress, they found themselves on the wrong side of the law. In a time and place where rules had no meaning, Helen found Rafe's hard, bronzed body strangely comforting, and his piercing blue eyes left her all too willing to share his bedroll. Suddenly, his teasing remarks made her feel all woman, and she was ready to throw caution to the wind if she could spend every night in the arms of her very own... Desperado.

                • Cover of The Door Into Summer
                  The Door Into Summer

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1957

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                  From the first page of the Signet 6th printing: "An electronics engineer invents a wizard robot... only to find himself shanghaied by his ruthless partner and his gold-digging fiancee. The crafty pair forces him to submit to the "long sleep" - suspended animation for thirty years. But when he wakes up in the year 2000 A.D. the inventor makes a startling discovery. He learns that it is possible now to twist time forwards or backwards. And so he returns to the past bent on a mission... of revenge."

                • Cover of Bring the Jubilee
                  Bring the Jubilee

                  Ward Moore · standalone novel · 1953

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                  From the flaps of the Farrar, Straus and Young first edition: ""Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921." So Hodge Backmaker begins his story of the harsh and curious world he lived in, a world in which the South won the Civil War and the all-powerful Confederacy dominated the poor and backward North; a North that had neither a transcontinental railroad, and where television was undreamed of. Like most Northerners, Hodge was poor - but he had ambition. A printer's handyman in 1938, he had since become an eminent historian. Hodge's special interest was the American past, when the States had been united and had seemed to be on the brink of prosperity and technical progress. And then he was offered an opportunity no historian could resist - he could go back in time. Hodge chsoe to return to a certain field near Gettysburg on a day in July, 1863... Bring the Jubilee is a novel of curious events, of adventures and reflection, of passions and comment. It at time Hodge's world, its horse-carriages and gas-lights, minibles and tinugraphs and the Great Emperors' War of 1914 faintly resembles our own, it is perhaps, because that world might well become a reality: on the battlefield of Gettysburg there is a small hill called Little Round Top. One July morning in 1863 the Confederate Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a mistake that cost them victory in a battle which - in the view of many historians - was the turning point of the Civil War."

                • Cover of Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
                  Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

                  series · 26 books · 1991

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                  Outlander is a series of historical fantasy novels by American author Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon began the first volume of the series, Outlander, in the late 1980s; it was published in 1991. She has published nine out of a planned ten volumes. The ninth novel in the series, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, was released on November 23, 2021.

                • Cover of Oxford Time Travel
                  Oxford Time Travel

                  series · 6 books · 1982

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                  Connie Willis's Oxford Time Travel novels are set at a near-future Oxford University where historians travel into the past as observers, constrained by a version of history that resists any change large enough to alter real events. Doomsday Book sends a medieval historian to what should be 1320 but turns out to be the Black Death year of 1348, intercut with a present-day epidemic at Oxford; To Say Nothing of the Dog returns to the same time-travel program for a lighter, Victorian-set story with different characters. The two novels share their setting and rules rather than a directly continuing plot.

                • Cover of The Root Cellar
                  The Root Cellar

                  Janet Lunn · standalone novel · 1981

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                  The Root Cellar is a children's historical novel by Janet Lunn that is set in the 1980s, although much of the action takes place in the 1860s. It follows Rose Larkin, an orphan, who travels temporally back and forth between Ontario, Canada, of the 1980s and various settings of U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. This time travel is done through the root cellar of the title.

                • Cover of Fabian Time Fantasies
                  Fabian Time Fantasies

                  series · 2 books · 1908

                  completed

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                  E. Nesbit's Edwardian time-travel duology follows two children who use a magic device to slip between their own era and the past. The House of Arden sends young Edred and his sister into English history in search of a family treasure, while its sequel, Harding's Luck, follows a poor orphan boy who travels back to the reign of James I and briefly lives another child's privileged life, before choosing to return and help the man who raised him, in a story pointedly concerned with poverty and welfare.

                • Cover of The Girl from Everywhere
                  The Girl from Everywhere

                  series · 2 books · 2016

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                • Cover of Sirens of the Scottish Borderlands
                  Sirens of the Scottish Borderlands

                  series · 3 books · 2015

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                • Cover of Timeline
                  Timeline

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1999

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                  Timeline is a science fiction novel by American writer Michael Crichton, his twelfth under his own name and twenty-second overall, published in November 1999. It tells the story of a group of history students who travel to 14th-century France to rescue their professor. The book follows in Crichton's long history of combining science, technical details, and action in his books, this time addressing quantum and multiverse theory.

                • Cover of Flirting with Forever
                  Flirting with Forever

                  Gwyn Cready · standalone novel · 2010

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                  Unlike her readers, art historian and biographer Ava Stratford uses a long-lost time portal to uncover the secrets of history's bad boy artists. When she sees the breathtaking and provocative portraits of half-clothed noblewomen produced by Sir Peter Lely, Ava dons her period travel garb, determined to dig up a great story. What she doesn't know is that Lely has been recruited to return to his life on Earth, intent on protecting his secrets and mastering the woman who has captured his heart.

                • Cover of Until Forever
                  Until Forever

                  Johanna Lindsey · standalone novel · 1995

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                  Rosleen White, professor of medieval history and collector of Antique weapons gets more than she counted on when she acquires a sword named "Blooddrinker's Curse". For when she cuts her finger on the blade (feeding her blood to the blade) an ancient accursed Viking appears in her lecture hall and sweeps her back in time with him to the Viking past.

                • Cover of The Time Traveler's Wife
                  The Time Traveler's Wife

                  Audrey Niffenegger · standalone novel · 2003

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                  The Time Traveler's Wife is the debut novel by American author Audrey Niffenegger, published in 2003. It is a love story about Henry, a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably, and about Clare, his wife, an artist who has to cope with his frequent absences. Niffenegger, who was frustrated with love when she began the novel, wrote the story as a metaphor for her failed relationships. The tale's central relationship came to Niffenegger suddenly and subsequently supplied the novel's title. The novel has been classified as both science fiction and romance.

                • Cover of Desperado's Gold
                  Desperado's Gold

                  Linda Winstead Jones · standalone novel · 1996

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                  Jilted at the altar and stranded in the Arizona desert by a blown gasket in her Mustang convertible, Catalina Lane hoped for a tow truck and a lift to the nearest gas station. She certainly didn't expect a real, live desperado, swathed in black, to appear and carry her off into the sunset. But suddenly, catapulted back in time to the days of the Old West, Catalina was transported into a world of blazing six-guns and ladies of the evening. What could she do but go along for the ride? When Jackson Cady, the infamous gunslinger known as "Kid Creede," returned to Baxter, it was to kill a man and earn a reward, not to use his gold to rescue a naïve librarian from the clutches of a greedy madam. He never would have dreamed that the beauty who babbled so incoherently about the twentieth century would have such an impact on him. But the longer he spent with her, the more he found himself captivated by her tender touch and luscious body --- and when he looked deep into her amber eyes, he knew that the passion that smoldered between them was a treasure more precious than any . . . .

                • Cover of Time-Kept Promises
                  Time-Kept Promises

                  Constance O'Day-Flannery · standalone novel · 1988

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                  Kristine Gavin was depressed about turning thirty until she received a most unusual gift from her brother. It was a portrait he'd found in the attic of their family home in Virginia, a portrait of a woman who must have been their ancestor, judging from Kris' resemblance to the beauty. But it wasn't the painting that intrigued Kris... An old newspaper clipping about the woman's strange disappearance caught within the frame drew her in. Just as Kris was uncovering a fascinating secret from the past she sensed a change in the air - and found herself thrown back in time into a strange room, staring into the eyes of the sexiest man she had ever seen! Sean O'Mara frozen when he saw his wife Christina standing before him. She had vanished and the news had been written about in all of the papers - he had even been charged with her murder! But now he had living proof of his innocence, and Sean was not about to let her get away. No matter that the woman was claiming to be someone named Kristine; she still caused his blood to boil. Yet despite their differences, Sean wanted to hold the fiery vixen in his arms, caress her satiny skin, kiss her ruby lips and pledge his love forever with TIME-KEPT PROMISES

                • Cover of The Dancer from Atlantis
                  The Dancer from Atlantis

                  Poul Anderson · standalone novel · 1971

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                  The Dancer from Atlantis is a science fiction novel by American writer Poul Anderson, first published in 1971 by Doubleday.

                • Cover of A Tale of Time City
                  A Tale of Time City

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1987

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                  In 1939 an eleven-year-old London girl is kidnapped to Time City, a place existing outside the stream of time and manipulating the history of humanity, where she finds the inhabitants facing their worst hour of crisis.

                • Cover of Highlander (Karen Marie Moning)
                  Highlander (Karen Marie Moning)

                  series · 8 books · 1999

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                • Cover of A Ghost of a Chance at Love
                  A Ghost of a Chance at Love

                  Terry Spear · standalone novel · 2011

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                  Lisa Welsh only wishes to leave a messy divorce behind for a couple of days stay in Salado, Texas but wakes to nightmares and a cowboy in her bed, and she has no earthly idea how he got there. But the situation gets worse when she learns she & apos;s now living in 19th Century Salado. Even more worrisome is the tall dark stranger, and everyone else in town believes she & apos;s some woman named Josephine Rogers who is supposed to be dead. Jack Stanton can & apos;t believe the clerk gave him an occupied room at the Shady Villa Inn, but worse, he was ready to ravage the woman in that bed-until he realized his mistake. Now the woman he thinks is Josephine claims to be some other woman-and though he could never abide by Josephine & apos;s fickle ways, this Lisa Welsh intrigues him like no other. Still, if she isn & apos;t Josephine, he figures he best help her find her way back to where she really belongs no matter how much he wants to keep her with him. Together, Lisa and Jack must solve the mysteries and face the troubles in their worlds or they will never be free to share the love that binds them across the ages.