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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 Bonesmith

anchored on:secondary worldyoung adultdark fantasy

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 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 mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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.

                • TO
                  The Old Kingdom / Abhorsen milieu

                  series · 11 books · 1995

                  similar bysecondary worldyoung adultfantasy+4 more

                  The Old Kingdom, or Abhorsen in North America and the UK, is a fantasy series written by Australian author Garth Nix. It originated in 1995 with the novel Sabriel and has continued in the novels Lirael (2001), Abhorsen (2003), Goldenhand (2016), and Terciel & Elinor (2021), as well as a prequel novel titled Clariel (2014). The Old Kingdom also consists of the novella The Creature in the Case (2005) and various other short fiction.

                • Cover of House of the Dead Duology
                  House of the Dead Duology

                  series · 2 books · 2023

                  similar bysecondary worldyoung adultfantasy+3 more

                • Cover of Malazan Book of the Fallen
                  Malazan Book of the Fallen

                  series · 20 books · 1999

                  part of Malazan

                  similar bydarkdark fantasysecondary worldfantasy

                  The Malazan Book of the Fallen is a series of epic fantasy novels written by the Canadian author Steven Erikson. The series, published by Bantam Books in the U.K. and Tor Books in the U.S., consists of ten volumes, beginning with Gardens of the Moon (1999) and concluding with The Crippled God (2011). Erikson's series presents the narratives of a large cast of characters spanning thousands of years across multiple continents.

                • Cover of The Scholomance
                  The Scholomance

                  series · 3 books · 2020

                  similar bydarkdark fantasysecondary worldmagic schoolscoming of agefantasy+1 more

                  The Scholomance Trilogy is a series of three fantasy novels written by American author Naomi Novik. The books follow the adventures of Galadriel "El" Higgins during and after attending a dangerous and magical boarding school for wizards named after the magic school Scholomance from Romanian folklore.

                • Cover of Earthsea Cycle
                  Earthsea Cycle

                  series · 18 books · 1964

                  completed

                  part of Earthsea

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasy+2 more

                  The Earthsea Cycle, also known as Earthsea, is a series of high fantasy books written by American author Ursula K. Le Guin. Beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972), the series was continued in Tehanu (1990), and Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. In 2018, all the novels and short stories were published in a single volume, The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, with artwork by Charles Vess.

                • Cover of The Ancestor
                  The Ancestor

                  series · 4 books · 2017

                  similar bydarkdark fantasysecondary worldmagic schoolscoming of agefantasy

                  The Book of the Ancestor trilogy is a series of three fantasy novels by Mark Lawrence. It comprises Red Sister (2017), Grey Sister (2018), and Holy Sister (2019). The three novels tell the story of Nona Grey, a peasant girl with mystical abilities. Red Sister was nominated for the 2018 David Gemmell Awards for Fantasy.

                • Cover of Nevernight
                  Nevernight

                  series · 3 books · 2016

                  similar bydarkdark fantasysecondary world+3 more

                  The Nevernight Chronicle is a trilogy of adult fantasy novels by Australian novelist Jay Kristoff.

                • Cover of A Song of Ice and Fire
                  A Song of Ice and Fire

                  series · 14 books · 1996

                  part of World of Ice and Fire

                  similar bydarksecondary worldfantasy+1 more

                  A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of high fantasy novels by the American author George R. R. Martin. Martin began writing the first volume, A Game of Thrones, in 1991, and published it in 1996. Martin, who originally envisioned the series as a trilogy, has released five out of seven planned volumes. The most recent entry in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011. Since then, Martin has been working on the sixth novel, titled The Winds of Winter. A seventh novel, A Dream of Spring, is planned to follow.

                • Cover of The Bone Witch
                  The Bone Witch

                  series · 3 books · 2017

                  similar bydarkdark fantasysecondary worldundeadyoung adultfantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Malazan
                  Malazan

                  universe · 36 books · 1999

                  Start hereMalazan Book of the Fallen · Start here

                  similar bydarksecondary world+2 more

                  Pity the historian who tries to map this world; pity more the god who thinks he rules it. The Malazan Empire marches across continents on the boots of its common soldiers, and above them move Ascendants — mortals grown into something like gods, and gods worn thin as old coin. Magic is drawn from Warrens, roads of power threaded through reality; the dead keep their grudges; and every empire, however vast, is a wager against time. This is epic fantasy told from the mud, where a sapper cracking a joke weighs as much as an immortal settling a feud older than the human race. The world began as a tabletop campaign two friends built in the 1980s, and it still moves by two hands. Steven Erikson's ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen is the spine — Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, on through The Crippled God — each book a near-standalone campaign that only later reveals how it locks together. Ian C. Esslemont walks the same years from a different vantage in his Novels of the Malazan Empire (Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard onward). Around them stand the prequels: Erikson's Kharkanas Trilogy, archaic and elegiac, chronicling a doomed elder people, and Esslemont's brisker Path to Ascendancy, following two adventurers before they became legends. Erikson's Witness sequence carries the tale forward, and novellas of the genial necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach supply the gallows comedy. Nothing is explained to you; comprehension is earned, and that is the pleasure. The themes run deep — compassion set against cruelty, the toll empires charge, civilizations that fall and are mourned. Begin where the saga does, with Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, and read the ten in publication order; the prequels are for the already-initiated. Trust that confusion is the price of entry.

                • Cover of Tender Morsels
                  Tender Morsels

                  Margo Lanagan · standalone novel · 2008

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                  Tender Morsels (2008) is a novel by Australian author Margo Lanagan. It won the Ditmar Award in 2009 for Best Novel and was joint winner of the 2009 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

                • Cover of Demon Cycle
                  Demon Cycle

                  series · 10 books · 2008

                  part of The Demon Cycle

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                  Peter V. Brett's Demon Cycle is set in a world where nightly demon attacks have driven humanity behind protective magical wards, following several point-of-view characters, including Arlen Bales and Leesha Paper, who each search for ways to fight back after centuries of retreat. The core story runs across five novels plus companion novellas.

                • Cover of Starblade Chronicles
                  Starblade Chronicles

                  series · 3 books · 2014

                  completed

                  part of Spook's Universe

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                • Cover of The Riftwar Universe
                  The Riftwar Universe

                  universe · 44 books · 1982

                  Start hereRiftwar Saga · Start here

                  similar bysecondary worldfantasy

                  On the world of Midkemia a tear opens in the air itself, a rift hung between stars, and through it march the armies of an empire from another world entirely. So begins the chronicle Raymond E. Feist has kept for three decades: the tale of Pug, a castle kitchen boy apprenticed to a magician on the very day the invasion lands, and of Tomas, his friend, who inherits the armor and the ancient fury of a dead dragon-lord. Around these two the Riftwar Cycle turns, widening book by book from one besieged frontier keep into the whole history of a world of kingdoms, guilds, thieves' dens and mage-towers. The cycle runs to roughly thirty novels, gathered into arcs a newcomer can enter and finish on their own. The founding Riftwar Saga (Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon) sets the board; the Serpentwar Saga, Krondor's Sons and the Conclave of Shadows carry the story down the generations; the Darkwar, Demonwar and Chaoswar sagas bring it toward its close. Crossing the rift to the rival world of Kelewan, Feist and Janny Wurts wrote the Empire trilogy, opening with Daughter of the Empire, a court intrigue told wholly from the invaders' side and for many the finest thing here. Shorter Legends of the Riftwar and the game-born Riftwar Legacy fill the corners; later still, Feist opens an altogether new world in the Firemane books. Feist writes fantasy in its most companionable key: apprentices who grow into archmages, tavern boys who become spies and dukes, a world you return to the way you return to an old inn. The mood is adventure before dread, friendship and rank and hard-won craft, wars that cost something, all of it rendered plainly and at a gallop. Begin where it began, with Magician, then follow the arcs in the order they were written, and the rift will carry you the rest of the way.

                • Cover of Sekenre
                  Sekenre

                  series · 15 books · 1994

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                • Cover of Thomas Cale
                  Thomas Cale

                  series · 4 books · 2010

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                  Paul Hoffman's Thomas Cale series opens with The Left Hand of God, following a boy raised by a brutal religious military order who escapes into a wider world he's been kept ignorant of. The subsequent books, The Last Four Things, The Beating of His Wings, and The White Devil, follow Cale as the skills that order trained into him make him useful, and dangerous, to larger powers. It's a bleak, war-driven coming-of-age arc rather than a conventional chosen-one fantasy.

                • Cover of The Thin Executioner
                  The Thin Executioner

                  Darren Shan · standalone novel · 2010

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                  The Thin Executioner is young adult and dark fantasy novel written by Irish novelist Darren O'Shaughnessy under the pen name of Darren Shan, published in April 2010. Inspired by and partially adapting Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and The Firework-Maker's Daughter by Philip Pullman, Shan cited Middle Eastern influences for the novel's tone, describing the novel as his "favourite out of all his books [to have written]."

                • Cover of The Demon Cycle
                  The Demon Cycle

                  universe · 18 books · 2008

                  Start hereDemon Cycle · Start here

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                  When the sun goes down, the ground breathes out murder. Mist seeps up from the Core, hardens into flame and rock and wind given teeth, and the only thing between a sleeping family and the corelings is a ring of wards — glyphs scratched in the dust that hold as long as the lines stay unbroken. Miss one stroke and you are meat by morning. This is Peter V. Brett's world: a humanity three centuries into a losing siege, huddled in the dark, waiting on a Deliverer half of them no longer believe will come. The Demon Cycle runs five volumes — The Warded Man (published in Britain as The Painted Man), The Desert Spear, The Daylight War, The Skull Throne, and The Core — following a messenger who tattoos the lost combat-wards into his own skin, a healer, a fiddler whose music turns demons aside, and a desert warlord who claims the prophecy for himself. Around them sit shorter works (Brayan's Gold, Messenger's Legacy, Barren), and beyond them the ongoing Nightfall Saga — The Desert Prince, The Hidden Queen — carrying the next generation into a war their parents did not finish. At its heart is a quarrel over faith and fire: the mannered Free Cities against fanatic, sand-hard Krasia, two would-be saviors who cannot both be right, and a lost art of war-magic that could turn prey into hunters. Begin with The Warded Man and read straight through in publication order; the novellas keep, for later, once the dark is under your skin.

                • Cover of The Undertaken Trilogy
                  The Undertaken Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                • Cover of Witches Steeped in Gold
                  Witches Steeped in Gold

                  series · 2 books · 2021

                  similar bydarkdark fantasysecondary worldyoung adultfantasy

                • Cover of Demon Wars
                  Demon Wars

                  series · 4 books · 1997

                  part of Corona

                  similar bydarksecondary worldfantasy+1 more

                  The DemonWars Saga is a series of high fantasy novels by R. A. Salvatore. It is set in the world of Corona, primarily in the kingdoms of Honce-the-Bear and Behren, and amongst the nomadic To-gai-ru. The series is separated into two trilogies connected by a single book, Mortalis. The saga has an accompanying roleplaying game entitled Demon Wars.

                • Cover of The Bone Houses
                  The Bone Houses

                  Emily Lloyd-Jones · standalone novel · 2019

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                  The Bone Houses is a 2019 young adult horror fantasy novel by Emily Lloyd-Jones, following Ryn, a female gravedigger, and Ellis, an apprentice mapmaker, as they try to stop "bone houses" from roaming their world and affecting Ryn's family business. The book received mixed reviews from critics, and was also praised for its disability representation, owing to the character Ellis having chronic pain in the story. The audiobook was read by Moira Quirk.

                • Cover of Black Jewels
                  Black Jewels

                  series · 23 books · 1998

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                  Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series is set in a matriarchal fantasy world ruled by hierarchies of magical 'Jewels,' beginning with the trilogy Daughter of the Blood, Heir to the Shadows, and Queen of the Darkness, for which Bishop won the 2000 Crawford Award. She continued expanding the world across more than a dozen further novels and story collections, including The Invisible Ring, Dreams Made Flesh, and The Shadow Queen.

                • Cover of The Nikolai Duology
                  The Nikolai Duology

                  series · 2 books · 2019

                  part of Grishaverse

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                  Leigh Bardugo's Nikolai Duology picks up Nikolai Lantsov and Zoya Nazyalensky from her earlier Grishaverse trilogy set in Ravka, now dealing with the kingdom's fallout as king and general, and adds Nina Zenik from the Six of Crows spin-off working a mission out of Ketterdam. King of Scars and its sequel Rule of Wolves tie together threads from across the wider Grishaverse rather than starting fresh, raising the stakes to a hidden threat inside Nikolai himself. It functions as the convergence point for Bardugo's separate Grishaverse story lines.