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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 Blameless

anchored on:steampunkparanormal romance19th centuryfantasyidentityeurope+3 more

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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 centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • 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 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 The Prestige
                  The Prestige

                  Christopher Priest · standalone novel · 1995

                  similar byidentity19th centurybritish isles+2 more

                  A magician called Borden (at least in private) writes his own version of his life as a magician. There's a lot of focus on a trick, where he seems to move across any width of stage in an instant, and on a feud with another magician, Angier. The account includes passages, where he can't decide what exactly to write, arguing with himself. 3 generations later a Borden (at least biologically) learns about his ancestor. He's also convinced, he somehow has a twin brother, who's happy about this development.

                • Cover of The Sea Lady
                  The Sea Lady

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1902

                  similar by19th centurywhimsicalbritish islesfantasy+1 more

                  The Sea Lady is a fantasy novel by British writer H. G. Wells, incorporating elements of a fable. It was serialized from July to December 1901 in Pearson's Magazine before being published as a volume by Methuen. The inspiration for the novel came when Wells caught a glimpse of May Nisbet, the daughter of The Times drama critic, John Ferguson Nisbet, in a bathing suit during her visit to Sandgate. Wells had agreed to pay her school fees after her father's death.

                • Cover of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club
                  The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club

                  series · 3 books · 2017

                  similar by19th centuryeuropebritish isles+3 more

                • Cover of The History of Mr. Polly
                  The History of Mr. Polly

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1910

                  similar byidentity19th centuryfunnybritish isles

                  The History of Mr. Polly is a 1910 comic novel by H. G. Wells.

                • Cover of The Difference Engine
                  The Difference Engine

                  William Gibson & Bruce Sterling · standalone novel · 1990

                  similar by19th centurypolitical intriguesteampunkbritish isles

                  The computer age arrives a century early with Babbage's perfection of his 'analytical engine'. The industrial revolution is accelerated by the development of steam-driven cybernetic 'Engines'. An advanced Great Britain prepares to better the world's lot. An example of the 'steampunk' sub-genre of the cyberpunk movement.

                • Cover of Nights at the Circus
                  Nights at the Circus

                  Angela Carter · standalone novel · 1984

                  similar byidentitywhimsicaleuropebritish isles+1 more

                  Nights at the Circus is a novel by British writer Angela Carter, first published in 1984 and the winner of the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The novel focuses on the life and exploits of Sophie Fevvers, a woman who is – or so she would have people believe – a Cockney virgin, hatched from an egg laid by unknown parents and ready to develop fully fledged wings. At the time of the story, she has become a celebrated aerialiste. She captivates the young journalist Jack Walser, who runs away with the circus and falls into a world that his journalistic exploits had not prepared him to encounter.

                • TB
                  The Bookman Universe

                  series · 6 books · 2010

                  similar by19th centurypolitical intriguesteampunkbritish isles+1 more

                • Cover of Sylvie and Bruno
                  Sylvie and Bruno

                  series · 4 books · 1867

                  completed

                  similar by19th centurywhimsicalfantasybritish isles

                • Cover of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
                  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

                  James Hogg · standalone novel · 1824

                  similar byidentity19th centurybritish isles

                  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor is a novel by the Scottish author James Hogg, published anonymously in 1824.

                • Cover of England, England
                  England, England

                  Julian Barnes · standalone novel · 1998

                  similar byidentityfunnybritish isles+1 more

                  England, England is a satirical postmodern novel by Julian Barnes, published and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1998. While researchers have also pointed out the novel's characteristic dystopian and farcical elements, Barnes himself described the novel as a "semi-farce".

                • Cover of Every Inch a King
                  Every Inch a King

                  Harry Turtledove · standalone novel · 2005

                  similar byidentitypolitical intrigueeuropefantasy+2 more

                  Every Inch a King is a 2005 fantasy novel by Harry Turtledove, published by ISFiC Press. It is a fictional account of the story of Otto Witte, who allegedly spent five days pretending to be the King of Albania. The title is a quotation from Shakespeare's King Lear, Act IV scene 6, wherein the insane King, crowned with weeds, makes futile assertions of his now usurped power.

                • Cover of Coyote Blue
                  Coyote Blue

                  Christopher Moore · standalone novel · 1994

                  similar byidentityfunnywhimsicalfantasy

                  Coyote Blue is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 1994. It has been widely reviewed.

                • Cover of George Dower / Infernal Devices
                  George Dower / Infernal Devices

                  series · 3 books · 1987

                  similar by19th centurysteampunk+3 more

                  K. W. Jeter's trilogy, whose 1987 original helped coin the term 'steampunk,' follows clockmaker George Dower as he's dragged into escalating Victorian conspiracies involving mechanical devices, secret societies, and inventions that shouldn't work but do. Infernal Devices, Fiendish Schemes, and Grim Expectations mix dark comedy with the gears-and-brass aesthetic the series helped establish before it had a name.

                • Cover of Gloriana, or, the Unfulfill'd Queen
                  Gloriana, or, the Unfulfill'd Queen

                  Michael Moorcock · standalone novel · 1978

                  similar byidentitypolitical intriguebritish islesfantasy

                  Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen is a work of literary fantasy by British novelist Michael Moorcock. It was first published in 1978 and has remained in print ever since.

                • Cover of Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul
                  Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1905

                  similar byidentity19th centurybritish isles+1 more

                  An orphan's life suddenly changes when he discovers he is the inheritor of a wealthy gentleman. Thrown into high society, he struggles to learn about etiquette and its rules, discovering that to be a "true gentleman" is not just a question of money.

                • Cover of The Raven King
                  The Raven King

                  series · 13 books · 1996

                  similar by19th centurybritish isles+2 more

                  Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell reintroduces magic to an alternate nineteenth-century England, centering on the prickly rivalry between the two title magicians as they revive a lost English tradition. The linked collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which includes the earlier story "Mr Simonelli, or the Fairy Widower," explores the same magical history from other corners of England and refers back to the legendary Raven King, said to have created English magic centuries before. The two books share a setting and mythology rather than a single sequential plot.

                • Cover of The Wonderful Visit
                  The Wonderful Visit

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1895

                  similar by19th centurywhimsicalbritish islesfantasy+1 more

                  The Wonderful Visit is an 1895 novel by H. G. Wells. With an angel—a creature of fantasy unlike a religious angel—as protagonist and taking place in contemporary England, the book could be classified as contemporary fantasy, although the genre was not recognised in Wells's time. The Wonderful Visit also has strong satirical themes, gently mocking customs and institutions of Victorian England as well as idealistic rebellion itself.

                • Cover of The Napoleon of Notting Hill
                  The Napoleon of Notting Hill

                  G. K. Chesterton · standalone novel · 1904

                  similar bypolitical intriguefunnywhimsicalbritish isles

                  The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a novel written by G. K. Chesterton in 1904, set in a nearly unchanged London in 1984.

                • Cover of The Blithedale Romance
                  The Blithedale Romance

                  Nathaniel Hawthorne · standalone novel · 1852

                  similar byidentity19th century+2 more

                  In the utopian community of Blithedale Farm, in the mid-1800s, Miles Coverdale embarks on a quest for betterment of the world, in a plot of veils, masks, and control by mesmerism.

                • Cover of Kate and Cecelia Universe
                  Kate and Cecelia Universe

                  series · 4 books · 1988

                  similar by19th centuryfantasy+4 more

                • Cover of Mary Reilly
                  Mary Reilly

                  Valerie Martin · standalone novel · 1990

                  similar byidentity19th centurybritish isles

                  Mary Reilly is a 1990 parallel novel by American writer Valerie Martin. It is inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's classic 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1990 and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1991. Martin's novel was the basis for the 1996 film of the same name starring Julia Roberts in the title role.

                • Cover of Orlando: A Biography
                  Orlando: A Biography

                  Virginia Woolf · standalone novel · 1928

                  similar byidentitywhimsicalbritish isles+1 more

                  Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928, inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover and close friend. It is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.

                • Cover of Sexing the Cherry
                  Sexing the Cherry

                  Jeanette Winterson · standalone novel · 1989

                  similar byidentitywhimsicaleuropebritish isles

                  Sexing the Cherry is a 1989 novel by Jeanette Winterson.

                • Cover of Lady Athlyne
                  Lady Athlyne

                  Bram Stoker · standalone novel · 1908

                  similar byidentity19th centuryeurope

                  "Joy Ogilvie, the beautiful young daughter of a Kentucky colonel, plays a joke with her friends, pretending to be "Lady Athlyne", after hearing a story about the dashing Irish nobleman Lord Athlyne. Little does she know that half a world away, the real Lord Athlyne is a prisoner of war in a South African camp, where word reaches him that a woman in America is impersonating his wife. Upon his release, he decides to investigate the situation and travels to New York, where a near-fatal accident introduces him to Joy and her father. Athlyne and Joy fall instantly in love-but a series of misadventures and dangerous obstacles threatens to prevent their marriage. And when Colonel Ogilvie learns of their affair and challenges Athlyne to a duel to the death, their love just may end in tragedy!" --quoting the Amazon product page for the 2007 Valancourt Books edition as of 2017-08-29