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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 Guy Mannering

anchored on:historical fictionbritish isles19th centuryfamily secretsmysterious

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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 of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of The Prestige
                  The Prestige

                  Christopher Priest · standalone novel · 1995

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                  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 Alias Grace
                  Alias Grace

                  Margaret Atwood · standalone novel · 1996

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                  Alias Grace is a historical fiction novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. First published in 1996 by McClelland & Stewart, it won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

                • Cover of Midnight Is a Place
                  Midnight Is a Place

                  Joan Aiken · standalone novel · 1974

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                  In northern England in 1842, fourteen-year-old Lucas leads a lonely, monotonous existence in the house of his unpleasant guardian until the unexpected arrival of an unusual little girl presages a series of events that completely change his life.

                • Cover of Drood
                  Drood

                  Dan Simmons · standalone novel · 2009

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                  Drood is a novel written by Dan Simmons. The book was initially published on February 1, 2009 by Little, Brown and Company. It is a fictionalized account of the last five years of Charles Dickens' life.

                • Cover of Sebastian St. Cyr
                  Sebastian St. Cyr

                  series · 1 book · 2012

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                • Cover of Todd Family
                  Todd Family

                  series · 2 books · 2013

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                  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 Stone Book
                  Stone Book

                  series · 5 books · 1976

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                • Cover of Sally Lockhart
                  Sally Lockhart

                  series · 4 books · 1985

                  similar byhistorical fiction19th centurybritish isles+2 more

                  Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart quartet follows a resourceful, unconventional heroine navigating Victorian London - a sharpshooting, mathematically gifted young orphan who builds an improbable career as a financial consultant against the era's expectations for women. The Ruby in the Smoke opens with Sally investigating her father's death and a mysterious jewel; the following novels widen out into fraud, opium-trade crime, and international intrigue, tracking Sally's evolving relationships, including with the journalist Daniel Goldberg, across four Victorian-set mysteries.

                • Cover of Hungerstone
                  Hungerstone

                  Kat Dunn · standalone novel · 2025

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                  An orphaned, emotionally isolated heiress with no money marries a cunning steel tycoon for a chance to build back her life. As their relationship progresses, she grows increasingly disturbed by her own desires, which are brought to the forefront by the mysterious woman they rescue upon their arrival to their new, decrepit, countryside estate. Set during the English industrial revolution, inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872).

                • Cover of Strange Objects
                  Strange Objects

                  Gary Crew · standalone novel · 1990

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                  Strange Objects is a 1990 novel by Australian author Gary Crew.

                • Cover of Mary Reilly
                  Mary Reilly

                  Valerie Martin · standalone novel · 1990

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                  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 The Feast of All Saints
                  The Feast of All Saints

                  Anne Rice · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: Rice explores a unique but little-known society, the "gens de couleur libre," free people of color, who flourished in New Orleans in the years prior to the Civil War.

                • Cover of Once Upon a River
                  Once Upon a River

                  Diane Setterfield · standalone novel · 2018

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                  On a dark midwinter's night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, an extraordinary event takes place. The regulars are telling stories to while away the dark hours, when the door bursts open on a grievously wounded stranger. In his arms is the lifeless body of a small child. Hours later, the girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life. Is it a miracle? Is it magic? Or can science provide an explanation? These questions have many answers, some of them quite dark indeed.

                • Cover of The Tragedy of Arthur
                  The Tragedy of Arthur

                  Arthur Phillips · standalone novel · 2011

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                  The Tragedy of Arthur is a 2011 novel by the American author Arthur Phillips. The narrative concerns the publication of a recently discovered Arthurian play attributed to William Shakespeare, which the main narrator, "Arthur Phillips", believes to be a forgery produced by his father. It was published by Random House.

                • Cover of The Lie Tree
                  The Lie Tree

                  Frances Hardinge · standalone novel · 2015

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                  The Lie Tree is the seventh children's historical fantasy novel by Frances Hardinge, published in 2015 by Macmillan Publishers. The book won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year.

                • Cover of This House Is Haunted
                  This House Is Haunted

                  John Boyne · standalone novel · 2013

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                  This House Is Haunted is a novel written by Irish novelist John Boyne. It was first published in 2013 by Doubleday.

                • Cover of The Blind Assassin
                  The Blind Assassin

                  Margaret Atwood · standalone novel · 2000

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                  "Considerable sf content is also concealed in her Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin (2000), a novel whose conventional twentieth-century Canadian frame story of thwarted and secret-ridden family life is folded around a very extensive, and in many ways much more interesting science-fictional Pulp magazine adventure (after which the novel is named)." - {{SFE}}'s author page (2021-10-30)

                • Cover of Armadale
                  Armadale

                  Wilkie Collins · standalone novel · 1866

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                  Armadale is a novel by Wilkie Collins, first serialised between November 1864 and June 1866, and then published in book form in 1866. It is the third of his four 'great novels' of the 1860s: after The Woman in White (1860) and No Name (1862), and before The Moonstone (1868).

                • Cover of The Dead Secret
                  The Dead Secret

                  Wilkie Collins · standalone novel · 1857

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                  The late Mrs. Treverton and her maid Sarah Leeson had a secret between them. When young Rosamond Treverton marries, the secret will trouble her marriage, and Sarah Leeson (who carries a ghost with her everywhere she goes) will not find rest until matters are resolved.

                • Cover of The Time of the Ghost
                  The Time of the Ghost

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1981

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                  The Time of the Ghost is a supernatural English-language children's novel by Diana Wynne Jones, published by Macmillan in 1981. Set in the English countryside, it features a teenage ghost who is one of four sisters, and observes the family, unable to remember which one she is. She is from seven years in the future, in the aftermath of her "accident", so it is a kind of a time slip story, but she has no memories of those seven years.

                • Cover of The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
                  The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

                  Jeffrey Ford · standalone novel · 2002

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                  "The toast of 1893 New York society, the portraitist Piero Piambo has his pick of choice assignments. Acclaimed by his peers and his "betters," he is a fixture in the city's most opulent salons, yet he fears he has sold his soul to arrive there. But then comes a commission unlike any other - one that will test Piambo's talents, his will .. and his sanity.". "The client is a Mrs. Charbuque, and the offer she makes to the artist is as bizarre and intriguing as it is financially rewarding. Piambo must paint the lady's portrait, and for the service he may name any price. However, though he may question her at length on any topic, he must never look upon his subject. And if the painting ends up a true likeness, his payment will be doubled.". "With sketchbook in hand and his "model" hidden behind an elegant screen, the artist begins his haunting descent into her life and mind. Carried by her words through a strange childhood in a world of ice - where she aided an obsessed, perhaps murderous, father in his study of the divine language of snowflakes - and across a history marked by fame and despair, desire and rage, phantasm and myth, Piambo is alternately seduced and repulsed by the story she has to tell. Yet each session leaves him more determined than ever to unwrap the enigma that is Mrs. Charbuque.". "But while he struggles to capture in oils the face of a woman he has never seen, a series of horrific and inexplicable deaths rocks the outside city. On street corners, in the alleys off the bustling shopping areas, and between the crumbling tenements, anonymous women are dying, their lifeblood flowing freely like tears from their eyes. And the deeper Piambo is drawn into Mrs. Charbuque's world, the more he begins to suspect that these terrible events, his impossible task, and his odd "benefactress" are somehow intimately connected."--BOOK JACKET.

                • Cover of The Luminaries
                  The Luminaries

                  Eleanor Catton · standalone novel · 2013

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                  The Luminaries is a 2013 novel by Eleanor Catton. Set in New Zealand's South Island in 1866, the novel follows Walter Moody, a prospector who travels to the West Coast settlement of Hokitika to make his fortune on the goldfields. Instead, he stumbles into a tense meeting between twelve local men, and is drawn into a complex mystery involving a series of unsolved crimes. The novel's complex structure is based on the system of Western astrology, with each of the twelve local men representing one of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and with another set of characters representing planets in the Solar System.

                • Cover of The Waterworks
                  The Waterworks

                  E. L. Doctorow · standalone novel · 1994

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                  The Waterworks (1994) is a book by American writer E. L. Doctorow. It was his eighth published novel.

                • Cover of Red Shift
                  Red Shift

                  Alan Garner · standalone novel · 1973

                  similar byhistorical fictionmysteriousbritish islesidentity

                  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]