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 Bourne

anchored on:young adulteurope

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 about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • 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 Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
                  Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

                  series · 26 books · 1991

                  similar byhistorical fantasy+4 more

                  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 The Outlaw of Torn
                  The Outlaw of Torn

                  Edgar Rice Burroughs · standalone novel · 1927

                  similar byadventurouseuropemedieval+1 more

                  Raised from childhood by a vengeful royal fencing master who wants him turned into a weapon against the English crown, Norman of Torn grows up in 13th-century England knowing only combat and contempt for the nobility. By nineteen he leads the kingdom's largest band of outlaws and carries a king's ransom on his head, yet a priest's influence has left him with a streak of chivalry. Amid rebellion against King Henry III, Norman joins Simon de Montfort's rebels, and finds himself drawn to de Montfort's daughter despite a startling resemblance to the crown prince. An early adventure novel from Edgar Rice Burroughs.

                • Cover of Legends of the Wolves
                  Legends of the Wolves

                  series · 3 books · 1998

                  completed

                  similar byeuropemedievalhistorical fantasy+2 more

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

                  series · 8 books · 1999

                  similar bytime travel+2 more

                • Cover of Viking (Series I)
                  Viking (Series I)

                  series · 4 books · 1994

                  similar bymedieval+5 more

                • Cover of Wings of the Storm
                  Wings of the Storm

                  Susan Sizemore · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar byforbidden loveadventurouseuropemedievalhistorical fantasytime travel

                  Wings of the Storm (Time Search #1) by Susan Sizemore (Goodreads Author) 3.63 · Rating details · 320 Ratings · 37 Reviews What was a woman to do? When an experiment gone wrong landed Dr. Jane Florian in the Middle Ages, she vowed to make the best of things. And if that meant posing as Lady Jehane from the Holy Land, cleaning the castle from tower to dungeon, ousting the hounds from the banquet hall, and giving the mistress of the hall a makeover, then she would... Unfortunately, she hadn't counted on her reaction to her new neighbor - the magnetic Sir Daffy. The Middle Ages might lack modern conveniences, but Jane had no complaints about the men. Sir Daffy's arrogant masculine sensuality fired her senses as no man from her own time had ever done....And yet, Jane's secrets weren't the only ones, for Sir Daffy was a man of mystery himself...

                • Cover of The Red Necklace
                  The Red Necklace

                  series · 2 books · 2007

                  similar byadventurouseuropehistorical fantasyyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of MacLeod / de Piaget Universe
                  MacLeod / de Piaget Universe

                  series · 29 books · 1996

                  similar bymedieval+2 more

                • Cover of Order of Darkness
                  Order of Darkness

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar byeuropehistorical fantasy+2 more

                • Cover of Until Forever
                  Until Forever

                  Johanna Lindsey · standalone novel · 1995

                  similar byadventurouseuropemedievaltime travel+1 more

                  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 Girl from Everywhere
                  The Girl from Everywhere

                  series · 2 books · 2016

                  similar byforbidden loveadventuroustime travelyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of Passenger
                  Passenger

                  series · 2 books · 2016

                  similar byforbidden loveadventuroustime travelyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of The Horse Goddess
                  The Horse Goddess

                  Morgan Llywelyn · standalone novel · 1982

                  similar byforbidden loveeuropehistorical fantasy+1 more

                  Epona, a golden Celtic beauty, commanded wind, fire, all the bests of the earth. But she could not resist Kazhak, the sensual Nomad Prince whose stallion swept her away to the farthest reaches of the strange Black Sea. Even as their passion forged a white-hot bond mightier than Celtic bronze, the Druid Priest of Epona's tribe pursued them. No mortal man, no earthly love, had yet withstood his awesome force. Published: Nov. 1983 469 pages Inside book jacket: With her national best-selling novel, Lion of Ireland: The Legend of Brian Boru, Morgan Llywelyn was hailed for her combination of brilliance and authenticity in bringing Celtic history to life. ... And now with The Horse Goddess she brings us a stormy love story that sweeps across the ancient world of the 8th century before Christ. Its heroine is Epona, whose legends finally made her a goddess; its hero, Kazhak, a Scythian warrior, a prince of the wild horsemen of the eastern plains. A woman of the west meets a man of the east in a world still swirling with elemental spirits. As their story opens, Troy is a crumbling ruin and Athens is rising far to the south. Mortal men and women are being turned into gods as tales are told and retold of their extraordinary adventures, and above all looms the awesome figure of Kernunnos, the Druid priest - the Shapechanger - who will become the prototype of the first werewolf as he pursues Epona and Kazhak from the Alps to the Ukraine. If this is not actual history, it has the ring of truth. Based on Morgan Llywelyn's painstaking research, it leads readers to say, "Yes, this is how it must have been." Epona and her people are destined to become part of the permanent landscape of memory.

                • Cover of Perfect Fire Trilogy
                  Perfect Fire Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  similar byeuropemedieval+3 more

                • Cover of The Infernal Devices
                  The Infernal Devices

                  series · 5 books · 2010

                  part of The Mortal Instruments

                  similar byhistorical fantasyyoung adult+2 more

                  The Infernal Devices is a trilogy by author Cassandra Clare, centring on a race called the Shadowhunters introduced in her The Mortal Instruments series. The trilogy is a prequel series to The Mortal Instruments series. Cassandra Clare has stated that the two series are able to be read in any order, but it is best to read them in publication order.

                • Cover of Wode
                  Wode

                  series · 5 books · 2013

                  similar by+3 more

                • Cover of All Souls
                  All Souls

                  series · 5 books · 2011

                  similar byforbidden loveeuropehistorical fantasy

                  A Discovery of Witches is a 2011 historical-fantasy novel and the debut novel by American scholar Deborah Harkness. It follows Diana Bishop, a history of science professor at Yale University, as she embraces her magical blood after finding a long-thought-lost manuscript and engages in a forbidden romance with a charming vampire, Matthew Clairmont.

                • HD
                  Highland Dragon Universe

                  series · 6 books · 2013

                  similar by+4 more

                • Cover of Daughters of the Glen
                  Daughters of the Glen

                  series · 8 books · 2007

                  similar bymedieval+3 more

                • Cover of The Last Hours
                  The Last Hours

                  series · 4 books · 2019

                  part of The Mortal Instruments

                  similar byyoung adult+2 more

                  Cassandra Clare's The Last Hours opens with Chain of Gold, set in 1903 London among the Shadowhunters of the London Institute, part of the wider Shadowhunter Chronicles that includes The Mortal Instruments. Continuing the saga's tradition of chapter epigraphs drawn from Victorian and Edwardian poetry, the trilogy concludes across Chain of Iron and Chain of Thorns.

                • Cover of River of Time
                  River of Time

                  series · 9 books · 2011

                  similar bymedievalyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of The Guardian (Mary Jo Putney)
                  The Guardian (Mary Jo Putney)

                  series · 10 books · 2004

                  similar byhistorical fantasy+2 more

                • Cover of Immortal Brotherhood
                  Immortal Brotherhood

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  similar byeuropemedievalhistorical fantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Montgomery / Taggert
                  Montgomery / Taggert

                  series · 10 books · 1988

                  similar by+2 more

                  These Jude Deveraux romances are linked less by one continuing plot than by recurring family surnames — Montgomery and Taggert — that Deveraux threads through much of her historical and contemporary romance writing. A Knight in Shining Armor, her best-known novel, is a standalone time-travel romance whose heroine, Dougless Montgomery, falls for a sixteenth-century English lord pulled forward into her present; The Maiden instead belongs to her more tightly connected medieval Montgomery-brothers sequence. Readers should expect a loose family of stories connected by name and world rather than one continuous saga.