Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

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 Alone

anchored on:our worldcontemporaryyoung adult

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 about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • 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 Misery
                  Misery

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1987

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalcontemporary+1 more

                  Novelist Paul Sheldon finishes the manuscript that will finally kill off Misery Chastain, the heroine who made his career, when a snowstorm sends his car off a Colorado road. He wakes with both legs shattered, in the care of Annie Wilkes, a former nurse and 'number one fan' with no intention of taking him to a hospital. Annie manages his pain with drugs he comes to depend on, and her moods swing between doting and violent. When she learns Misery doesn't survive his new manuscript, her reaction makes clear Paul isn't just her patient, he's her hostage. A Stephen King novel about a writer at his most devoted fan's mercy.

                • Cover of Departure
                  Departure

                  A. G. Riddle · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalour worldcontemporary+1 more

                  "The world's past and future rests in the hands of five unwitting strangers in this definitive edition of A. G. Riddle's time-traveling, mind-bending speculative thriller. En route to London from New York, Flight 305 suddenly loses power and crash-lands in the English countryside, plunging a group of strangers into a mysterious adventure that will have repercussions for all of humankind.Struggling to stay alive, the survivors soon realize that the world they've crashed in is very different from the one they left. But where are they? Why are they here? And how will they get back home? Five passengers seem to hold clues about what's really going on: writer Harper Lane, venture capitalist Nick Stone, German genetic researcher Sabrina Schroeder, computer scientist Yul Tan, and Grayson Shaw, the son of a billionaire philanthropist.As more facts about the crash emerge, it becomes clear that some in this group know more than they're letting on--answers that will lead Harper and Nick to uncover a far-reaching conspiracy involving their own lives. As they begin to piece together the truth, they discover they have the power to change the future and the past--to save our world. or end it. A wildly inventive and propulsive adventure full of hairpin twists, Departure is a thrilling tale that weaves together power, ambition, fate, memory, and love, from a bold and visionary talent"--

                • Cover of Jumper
                  Jumper

                  series · 6 books · 1992

                  similar bytensecontemporary+4 more

                  Jumper follows David Rice, a teenager who discovers he can teleport anywhere he's been and uses the power to escape an abusive home, only to find that ability alone doesn't solve the harder problems of finding his absent mother, building an honest relationship, or staying off the radar of people who'd exploit him. Steven Gould's series continues across Reflex, Impulse, and Exo, later following his and his wife's daughter as a second-generation jumper. A 2008 film loosely adapted the first novel.

                • Cover of Zom-B
                  Zom-B

                  series · 12 books · 2012

                  similar bytensesurvivalcontemporaryour worldyoung adult

                  Zom-B is a young adult zombie apocalyptic-thriller novel series by written by Irish author Darren O'Shaughnessy under the pen name Darren Shan. The series is told by first-person perspective of B Smith, a teenager turned into a zombie. Like Shan's previous series, Zom-B is notable for exploring themes of racism, xenophobia, and the sociological concept of "us and them".

                • Cover of Code Orange
                  Code Orange

                  Caroline B. Cooney · standalone novel · 2005

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalour worldcontemporaryyoung adult

                  Code Orange is a 2005 young adult novel by Caroline B. Cooney. The novel won a National Science Teachers Association recommendation and has been frequently used in classrooms. The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy also marked the book as one of their Young Adults' Choices for 2007.

                • Cover of Shane Schofield
                  Shane Schofield

                  series · 5 books · 1998

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalcontemporaryour world

                  Shane 'Scarecrow' Schofield is a US Marine captain who leads his unit through single-location, high-body-count action thrillers set in an Antarctic ice station, a disputed Pacific island, and a maximum-security prison built into a mountain, among others. Matthew Reilly's series opens with Ice Station (1998) and keeps escalating its set-pieces across Area 7, Scarecrow, Hell Island, and Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves. It's fast, gleefully over-the-top military action rather than realistic technothriller territory.

                • Cover of Feedback
                  Feedback

                  D. L. Richardson · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar bythriller & suspensetenseour worldcontemporaryyoung adultidentity+1 more

                  ● "Three teenagers have one thing in common: they're kidnapped two weeks after receiving life-saving organ transplants. Their abductor is a man who believes the memories of the host are retained in the organs. Extracting these memories is just the beginning. Something else is awakening inside their minds. If they trust this voice they might save the world. But it might also get them killed." ― paraphrased from this book's product page on Amazon.com as of 2024-04-03.

                • Cover of Invasion
                  Invasion

                  Robin Cook · standalone novel · 1997

                  similar bythriller & suspensetenseour worldcontemporary+1 more

                  Earth is bombarded from space by small disks which, in addition to having powerful physical armaments, when handled activate latent viral DNA which causes humans to mutate into alien beings; a small group recognize the danger and attempt to develop a biological counterweapon.

                • Cover of Firestarter
                  Firestarter

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensecontemporary+1 more

                  WorldCat: Innocence and beauty ignite with evil and terror... First, a man and a woman are subjects of a top-secret government experiment designed to produce extraordinary psychic powers. Then, they are married and have a child. A daughter. Early on the daughter shows signs of a wild and horrifying force growing within her. Desperately, her parents try to train her to keep that force in check, to 'act normal'. Now the government wants its brainchild back for its own insane ends.

                • Cover of Running Out of Time
                  Running Out of Time

                  series · 2 books · 1995

                  similar bytensecontemporary+3 more

                  Margaret Peterson Haddix's Running Out of Time follows Jessie, who believes she lives in the frontier village of Clifton, Indiana, in 1840 — until a diphtheria outbreak kills several children and her mother reveals the truth: it is actually 1996, and Clifton is a reconstructed historical tourist village cut off from the outside world. Sent by her mother on a desperate mission for real medicine, Jessie discovers a modern world stranger and more threatening than she imagined, with her own life on the line. Falling Out of Time continues her story.

                • Cover of Apocalypse
                  Apocalypse

                  Tim Bowler · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalour worldcontemporaryyoung adultidentity

                  Apocalypse is a young adult novel written by British author Tim Bowler. It was originally released in 2004 in the UK. The book deals with teenage Kit trying to find his parents after a storm blows them onto an island in which the local community is hostile and a mysterious man who resembles him in every detail in a series of events that turn his world upside down.

                • Cover of Bury Me Deep
                  Bury Me Deep

                  Christopher Pike · standalone novel · 1991

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensecontemporaryyoung adult+2 more

                  THE DEAD BOY WOULD NOT GO AWAY. Jean is on her way to Hawaii for a week of fun in the sun. But the vacation gets off to a gruesome start. The boy sitting beside her on the plane suddenly chokes and dies. Jean tries to push the incident out of her mind when she arrives on the island, but that's impossible. Part of the reason is because Mike keeps coming back to her in her dreams. Horrible dreams filled with cold blood. Two of Jean's friends are waiting for her in Hawaii -- Mandy and Michele. They have already made friends with two young men who teach scuba diving at the hotel -- Dave and Johnny. Jean and Johnny quickly become friends. But there are problems in paradise. Dave and Johnny have recently lost a partner in the ocean. No one knows how he died. No one can find his body. But then Jean finds Mike's body. It isn't where it's supposed to be, and it seems as if it's still got some life in it.

                • Cover of The Swarm
                  The Swarm

                  Frank Schätzing · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalour worldcontemporary

                  The Swarm is a science fiction novel by German author Frank Schätzing. It was first published in 2004 and soon became a bestseller.

                • Cover of Sphere
                  Sphere

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1987

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensecontemporary+1 more

                  Keeping Top Secret, the US Navy is guarding a gigantic spaceship that has been lying on the Pacific ocean floor for centuries, overgrown with corals. A group of highly qualified scientists is assembled to investigate this mysterious discovery. When the team boards the ship via an underwater station, they come into confrontation with the evil.

                • Cover of Richard Forthrast
                  Richard Forthrast

                  series · 2 books · 2011

                  similar byour world+3 more

                  Neal Stephenson's Richard 'Dodge' Forthrast novels open with Reamde, a globe-spanning thriller that starts when ransomware inside an MMORPG economy pulls Richard's extended family into a real-world hostage crisis involving hackers, jihadists and Russian mobsters. The sequel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell shifts registers entirely, following Richard's digitally preserved mind after death into an afterlife simulation built from his scanned brain. The two books share a protagonist and family but differ sharply in genre and scale.

                • ML
                  Meg / Loch Universe

                  series · 11 books · 1997

                  similar bytensesurvivalcontemporaryour world+1 more

                • Cover of The Devil's Game
                  The Devil's Game

                  Poul Anderson · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalour worldcontemporary

                  Seven people—including a porno star, a mercenary soldier, and a woman who cannot afford the treatment to save her child—come to Havener's Island to play a deadly game with a million tax-free dollars as the prize. But they are unaware their host is following the instructions of an inhuman creature—and even Havener doesn't know the real purpose of his demonic master's game.

                • Cover of Ancestor
                  Ancestor

                  Scott Sigler · standalone novel · 2007

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalour worldcontemporary

                  Ancestor is a science fiction thriller novel by American writer Scott Sigler. The novel was released in podcast format in 2006, with it also being released in print via Dragon Moon Press in 2007. Ancestor was later re-released by Crown Publishing in 2010.

                • Cover of Ascension
                  Ascension

                  Nicholas Binge · standalone novel · 2023

                  similar bythriller & suspensetenseour worldcontemporary+1 more

                  Ascension is a 2023 novel by Nicholas Binge, published in the UK by Harper Voyager, and in the US by Riverhead Books. It is published or forthcoming in twelve languages, and a film adaptation is in development. The novel tells the story of Harold Tunmore, a physicist, who joins a team to climb a mountain that has appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

                • Cover of Mount Dragon
                  Mount Dragon

                  Lincoln Child & Douglas Preston · standalone novel · 1996

                  similar bythriller & suspensetenseour worldcontemporary+1 more

                  A tech tycoon recruits a scientist to perfect a genetically engineered vaccine against all strains of influenza, but when he discovers a disastrous flaw he becomes the target of multiple attacks.

                • Cover of Zoo
                  Zoo

                  series · 2 books · 2012

                  similar bythriller & suspensetenseour worldcontemporary+1 more

                • Cover of Class Trip
                  Class Trip

                  Bebe Faas Rice · standalone novel · 1993

                  similar bythriller & suspensetensesurvivalour worldcontemporaryyoung adult

                  When Angie is chosen to join the in-crowd on a trip to Shadow Island, she can't believe her luck. But things go horribly wrong when a murderer with chilling determination begins to stalk them, one by one.

                • Cover of Gemini Game
                  Gemini Game

                  Michael Scott · standalone novel · 1993

                  similar bythriller & suspensetenseour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  When players of their virtual reality computer game fall into a coma, Liz and BJ O'Connor, teenage owners of a computer games company, flee from the police in an attempt to locate a copy of their game and correct the programming.

                • Cover of Little Tall Island / In the Path of the Eclipse
                  Little Tall Island / In the Path of the Eclipse

                  series · 4 books · 1989

                  similar bytensesurvivalcontemporary+2 more

                  Stephen King set three otherwise separate books on or near the fictional Little Tall Island off the coast of Maine: Gerald's Game, about a woman handcuffed to a bed after her husband's fatal heart attack; Dolores Claiborne, a housekeeper's decades-spanning confession narrated in a single unbroken monologue; and Storm of the Century, a novelization of King's own miniseries about a stranger who arrives during a historic blizzard demanding a terrible price from the town. The first two novels share a real total solar eclipse as a pivotal, connecting event despite having otherwise unrelated plots and characters.