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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 Gomers

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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 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 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 belief, doubt, and religious life are the central subject, from crises of faith to life inside a religious community.
  • 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 about rising against rulers — uprisings, resistance movements, and revolutions and their aftermaths.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.

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 Lord of the Flies
                  Lord of the Flies

                  William Golding · standalone novel · 1954

                  similar byliterary & general+1 more

                  Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of prepubescent British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves that lead to a descent into savagery. The novel's themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.

                • Cover of Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
                  Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

                  Kurt Vonnegut & Jr. · standalone novel · 1969

                  similar bywarliterary & general

                  Vonnegut opens in his own voice, describing the twenty years it took him to face writing about surviving the firebombing of Dresden as a POW. He then hands the story to Billy Pilgrim, an awkward, fatalistic American chaplain's assistant swept into the Battle of the Bulge and captured by German forces alongside a soldier who dies blaming him for it. Imprisoned in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden, Billy survives the firebombing that follows, and, we're told upfront, has also come 'unstuck in time,' living his life out of order, including a stretch on the alien world of Tralfamadore. Vonnegut's best-known novel folds war memoir into science fiction and black comedy.

                • Cover of Herland
                  Herland

                  series · 2 books · 1915

                  completed

                  similar byliterary & general

                • Cover of Mother Night
                  Mother Night

                  Kurt Vonnegut & Jr. · standalone novel · 1962

                  similar bywarliterary & general

                  Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American playwright who grew up in Germany, writes his memoirs from an Israeli prison cell awaiting trial for war crimes. As the Nazis rose to power, Campbell stayed on, married a German actress, and was recruited by an American agent to serve as a double agent, broadcasting Nazi propaganda over the radio while secretly passing coded intelligence to the Allies. The catch, as Campbell tells it, is that he became one of the war's most effective propagandists in the process, whatever his loyalties. Kurt Vonnegut's darkest novel asks what a person becomes when the mask he wears for a cause is indistinguishable from his face.

                • Cover of The Mouse That Roared
                  The Mouse That Roared

                  series · 6 books · 1955

                  completed

                  similar by+1 more

                  The Mouse That Roared launches Leonard Wibberley's satirical series about the tiny fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a European microstate whose leaders declare war on the United States purely to lose quickly and collect the postwar reconstruction aid given to defeated nations. The 1955 novel uses Fenwick's mismatched ambitions to poke fun at Cold War politics and the nuclear arms race, and Wibberley kept the joke going across four more novels into the 1970s. Later entries send the duchy into further absurd confrontations with the wider world, including a race to the Moon and a scheme on Wall Street.

                • Cover of Gravity's Rainbow
                  Gravity's Rainbow

                  Thomas Pynchon · standalone novel · 1973

                  similar bywarliterary & general

                  Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 postmodern novel by Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät, which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000".

                • Cover of Empire of the Sun
                  Empire of the Sun

                  series · 2 books · 1984

                  completed

                  similar by+2 more

                  J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun draws on his own childhood to follow Jim, a British boy separated from his parents in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II and interned in a civilian camp for the rest of the war. Ballard revisited the same period and a version of the same character years later in The Kindness of Women, a more explicitly fictionalized continuation into Jim's adult life. Empire of the Sun is the more directly autobiographical and better-known of the two.

                • Cover of Karl Glogauer
                  Karl Glogauer

                  series · 2 books · 1969

                  similar by+1 more

                  Michael Moorcock's two Karl Glogauer novels share a character rather than a plot. In Behold the Man (1969), Glogauer travels back in time seeking the historical Jesus, discovers the real man is severely disabled, and takes on the role of Christ himself, engineering his own crucifixion to fulfill the story he grew up reading. Breakfast in the Ruins (1972) recasts him across seventeen variant lives spanning 1871 to 1990, each one crueler than the last, framed around a present-day encounter in London -- using the same protagonist for a different formal experiment rather than continuing a single narrative.

                • Cover of Red Shift
                  Red Shift

                  Alan Garner · standalone novel · 1973

                  similar bywarliterary & general

                  Quoting that 1978 review article by Brian Lee: Red Shift [after The Owl Service] was again about the relationship between two adolescents, but interwoven in their love story were two other strands: one about a group of Roman legionaires 'going tribal' among warring factions of the British (the parallel and the brutal language are obviously those of the Americans among the Viet Cong and the Viet Minh); the other strand is about the massacre of a village on the Welsh border during the Civil War.{{BREAK}} Undoubtedly, Red Shift is a brilliantly written and gripping book. The difficulty about it is that Garner makes no concessions to his readers (and on the book jacket he makes it clear that it is for children). It is told almost entirely in cryptic conversation with minimal clues to the identity of the speakers. He switches from strand to strand of the story without warning. The book cannot be understood and appreciated at one hasty reading. It is worth serious study, but will children persevere? In her introduction to the 1973 edition of Children's Books of the Year, critic and reviewer Elaine Moss says: Spurred on by the publication of Alan Garner's literary crossword puzzle Red Shift ... many of us asked ourselves where children's publishing should end and adult begin? For Children's Books of the Year I have drawn the line below Red Shift and excluded it ... Alan Garner, in deliberately choosing an avant-garde form, is also choosing an advanced, sophisticated audience for his book. Alan Garner himself seems to have come around to this view. This year a television adaptation of Red Shift was screened at peak viewing time with no mention of the fact that it was originally published as a children's novel. [end quotation from the review article; ellipses by Lee]

                • Cover of Ilium
                  Ilium

                  series · 2 books · 2003

                  completed

                  similar bywar+1 more

                  Ilium/Olympos is a series of two science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. The events are set in motion by beings who appear to be ancient Greek gods. Like Simmons' earlier series, the Hyperion Cantos, it is a form of "literary science fiction"; it relies heavily on intertextuality, in this case with Homer and Shakespeare as well as references to Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.

                • Cover of Todd Family
                  Todd Family

                  series · 2 books · 2013

                  similar bywarliterary & general

                  Kate Atkinson's Life After Life gives Ursula Todd, born on a snowy night in 1910, a strange gift: whenever she dies, she's born again into a slightly altered version of the same life, gradually piecing together enough intuition across her many deaths to try to change the course of the twentieth century's worst events. The companion novel A God in Ruins turns to Ursula's brother Teddy, a bomber pilot, following his one, single life forward from the war through old age. The two books share a family and a set of preoccupations -- memory, war, chance -- without forming a conventional sequential series.

                • Cover of Von Bek
                  Von Bek

                  series · 4 books · 1965

                  similar by+2 more

                  Michael Moorcock's Von Bek novels follow the Von Bek family across different historical periods, part of his wider Eternal Champion multiverse. The sequence opens with The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981) and continues through The Brothel in Rosenstrasse and The City in the Autumn Stars.

                • Cover of Hearts in Atlantis
                  Hearts in Atlantis

                  series · 6 books · 1994

                  similar byliterary & general

                  Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis (1999) is a single book of five linked, chronologically ordered stories rather than a multi-volume series, connected by recurring characters and centered on the Vietnam-era 1960s. The opening novella, Low Men in Yellow Coats, follows young Bobby Garfield's friendship with Ted Brautigan, an old man with psychic powers being hunted by sinister figures called the low men, and sets up the themes of lost innocence and quiet betrayal that run through the rest of the book.

                • Cover of The Iliad and The Odyssey universe
                  The Iliad and The Odyssey universe

                  series · 36 books · 1840

                • Cover of Time's Arrow
                  Time's Arrow

                  Martin Amis · standalone novel · 1991

                  similar bywarliterary & general

                  From Amazon description: In this icy, knife's-edge story of a life that progresses backward through time, unfolding into one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century, Amis ("at his intriguing, heedful, and powerful best" —Time Out), finds a chillingly original approach to the Holocaust in fiction • From the acclaimed author of Zone of Interest "The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art." —Newsday Tod. T. Friendly is living his life in reverse. Doctor Friendly has just died, but he moves "out of blackest sleep" to find himself surrounded by doctors and on the deathbed of a man in whose body he is imprisoned. After weeks of improving in the hospital, he is sent home to his affable, melting-pot, primary-colors existence in suburban America. As Friendly breaks up with his lovers in a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home, his life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense. From the fresh-cut lawns of his retirement to the hustle of New York, and then back to the boat which reverses his course to the war-torn Europe Friendly came from, Amis brings the steeliest nerve to the job of realizing the novel's inevitable logic. Trapped in his body from grave to cradle, Friendly's consciousness can only watch as he struggles to make sense of the good doctor's most ambitious project yet—the final solution.

                • Cover of Man in the Dark
                  Man in the Dark

                  Paul Auster · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar bywarliterary & general

                  An insomniac makes up a story about a man transported to an alternate reality in which a US civil war erupted after the 2000 election.

                • Cover of Dream Archipelago
                  Dream Archipelago

                  series · 16 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar byliterary & general

                  Christopher Priest's Dream Archipelago stories return again and again to a vast chain of islands stretched across a world locked in permanent, distant war between two continental powers, without ever quite settling whether the archipelago is a real place or something closer to collective dream or fiction within the fiction. Novels like The Affirmation and The Islanders, along with numerous short stories, revisit the setting from different, often contradictory angles rather than building one continuous narrative. The ambiguity between what's real and what's invented is treated as the point, not a gap to be resolved.

                • Cover of The Women of Troy
                  The Women of Troy

                  series · 3 books · 2018

                  similar by+2 more

                  The Women of Troy continues Pat Barker's retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of Briseis, the captive queen whose voice frames The Silence of the Girls, as the victorious Greeks wait out bad weather in the ruins of Troy and the enslaved Trojan women confront what's left of their lives. The Voyage Home closes out the trilogy, following Cassandra's fate as Agamemnon's captive in the aftermath of Troy's fall.

                • Cover of The Anti-Death League
                  The Anti-Death League

                  Kingsley Amis · standalone novel · 1966

                  similar byliterary & general+1 more

                  The Anti-Death League is a 1966 novel by English author Kingsley Amis. Set in England, it follows the lives of characters working in and around a fictional British Army camp where a secret weapon is being tested.

                • Cover of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
                  Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

                  Lydia Millet · standalone novel · 2005

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                  Oh Pure and Radiant Heart imagines a world in which the three geniuses who were key to the invention of the atom bomb--physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard--are displaced to contemporary America at the moment history's first mushroom cloud rises over the New Mexico desert in July 1945. When the scientists appear in Santa Fe in 2003, Ann, a reference librarian, and her doting husband Ben take them in, and with the long-dead physicists for houseguests are swept up in a quixotic and calamitous quest.

                • Cover of The Midnight Zoo
                  The Midnight Zoo

                  Sonya Hartnett · standalone novel · 2010

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                  The Midnight Zoo is a 2010 novel by Sonya Hartnett. It was first published on 1 November 2010 in Australia and was then released in the United States a year later. It follows the story of two gypsy boys that find an abandoned zoo after fleeing a traditional celebration. The novella has gained critical praise for its "lyrical" prose and for the illustrations in the United States version, done by artist Andrea Offermann.

                • Cover of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
                  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

                  Michael Chabon · standalone novel · 2000

                  similar byliterary & general+1 more

                  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon. A historical fiction novel, it follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Josef "Joe" Kavalier, a Czech artist and magician who escapes Nazi-occupied Prague, and Sammy Clay, a Brooklyn-born writer. Together, they create The Escapist, a fictional superhero inspired by Joe’s desire to fight fascism and his struggle to rescue his family from Europe. In the story, Kavalier and Clay become major figures in the comics industry during its Golden Age.

                • Cover of The Buckmaster Trilogy
                  The Buckmaster Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2014

                  similar byliterary & general+1 more

                • Cover of Ballad
                  Ballad

                  series · 11 books · 1991