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Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

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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 How Does It Feel

anchored on:fantasyromantasy

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 centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • Stories in which gods and deities act as characters — walking the world, meddling in mortal lives, or dying.
  • 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.

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 A Court of Thorns and Roses
                  A Court of Thorns and Roses

                  series · 6 books · 2015

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                  A Court of Thorns and Roses is a fantasy romance series by American author Sarah J. Maas, which follows the journey of 19-year-old Feyre Archeron after she is brought into the faerie lands of Prythian. The first book of the series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, was published in May 2015. The series centers on Feyre's adventures across Prythian and the faerie courts, following the epic love story and fierce struggle that ensues after she enters the fae lands. The series has sold over 13 million copies. There are currently five novels in the series, with the sixth scheduled to release on October 27, 2026, and the seventh on January 12, 2027. An eighth installment is set to conclude the continuous story told across books six, seven and eight.

                • Cover of The Plated Prisoner
                  The Plated Prisoner

                  series · 6 books · 2020

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                • Cover of Fae & Alchemy
                  Fae & Alchemy

                  series · 2 books · 2024

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                • Cover of The War of Lost Hearts
                  The War of Lost Hearts

                  series · 3 books · 2020

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                • Cover of Tairen Soul
                  Tairen Soul

                  series · 6 books · 2007

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                  C. L. Wilson's Tairen Soul opens with Lord of the Fading Lands, a fairy-tale-inflected romantic fantasy in which a woodcarver's daughter is claimed as the truemate of a powerful fey lord and discovers that passion and magic can be dangerous together. The series continues across five novels, including King of Sword and Sky and Queen of Song and Souls.

                • Cover of Saga of the Unfated
                  Saga of the Unfated

                  series · 2 books · 2024

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                  Danielle L. Jensen's Saga of the Unfated opens with A Fate Inked in Blood, in which a woman from a Nordic-flavored fishing village discovers she carries the blood and magic of a legendary shieldmaiden and is drawn into a war between rival warlords who both want her power. The story continues in A Curse Carved in Bone.

                • Cover of Once Upon a Broken Heart
                  Once Upon a Broken Heart

                  series · 4 books · 2021

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                  Stephanie Garber's romantasy series opens with Evangeline Fox striking a desperate bargain with the immortal Prince of Hearts, three kisses in exchange for his help stopping her true love's wedding to another woman, only to learn that bargaining with an immortal always costs more than expected. Once Upon a Broken Heart and its sequels follow the fallout of that bargain across a fairy-tale-inflected world of curses and dangerous magic.

                • Cover of The Powerless Trilogy
                  The Powerless Trilogy

                  series · 5 books · 2023

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                  The Powerless Trilogy is set in a kingdom where people without magical abilities are treated as outcasts, following Paedyn Gray, a powerless girl disguising herself as a magic-wielder, who is drawn into the royal court and a survival competition after crossing paths with the crown prince. Lauren Roberts' trilogy, beginning with Powerless, was later expanded with a further Fearless duology set in the same world.

                • Cover of Letters of Enchantment
                  Letters of Enchantment

                  series · 3 books · 2023

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                  Letters of Enchantment is Rebecca Ross's romantic fantasy duology: Divine Rivals (2023) and Ruthless Vows, with the novella Wild Reverence set in the same world. It follows two rival young journalists who discover they can exchange letters across a supernatural means of communication, while a war between gods and mortals escalates around their city. The two novels form one continuous story.

                • Cover of Celestial Kingdom
                  Celestial Kingdom

                  series · 4 books · 2022

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                  Sue Lynn Tan's Celestial Kingdom duology reimagines the Chinese legend of the moon goddess Chang'e, following her daughter Xingyin as she seeks to free her mother from an enchantment binding her to the moon. It opens with Daughter of the Moon Goddess (2022) and concludes with Heart of the Sun Warrior, with the companion collection Tales of the Celestial Kingdom and the further novel Immortal extending the same mythic world.

                • Cover of The Bridge Kingdom
                  The Bridge Kingdom

                  series · 7 books · 2018

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                • Cover of The Fair Isle
                  The Fair Isle

                  series · 4 books · 2020

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                • Cover of Folktales
                  Folktales

                  series · 3 books · 1978

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                • Cover of The Cursebreaker
                  The Cursebreaker

                  series · 3 books · 2019

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                • Cover of This Woven Kingdom
                  This Woven Kingdom

                  series · 4 books · 2022

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                  Tahereh Mafi's This Woven Kingdom follows Alizeh, a servant girl who is secretly the long-lost heir to an ancient Jinn kingdom, and Kamran, the human crown prince drawn to her despite prophecies foretelling his own king's downfall. The series continues across These Infinite Threads, All This Twisted Glory, and Every Spiral of Fate.

                • Cover of Fae Isles
                  Fae Isles

                  series · 7 books · 2022

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                • Cover of The Sacred Stones
                  The Sacred Stones

                  series · 3 books · 2023

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                • Cover of Fairy Tale Retelling
                  Fairy Tale Retelling

                  series · 2 books · 2023

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                • Cover of Married to Magic
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                • Cover of Bloodwing Academy
                  Bloodwing Academy

                  series · 4 books · 2025

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                • Cover of Serpent & Dove
                  Serpent & Dove

                  series · 5 books · 2019

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                  Shelby Mahurin's Serpent & Dove trilogy is set in the city of Cesarine, where witches live in hiding from a Church that hunts and burns them. It follows Louise Le Blanc, a witch concealing her identity, and Reid Diggory, a Church huntsman sworn to destroy witches, after the two are forced into marriage and must navigate duty against their growing feelings for each other. The story continues across Blood & Honey and Gods & Monsters.

                • Cover of The Bargainer
                  The Bargainer

                  series · 4 books · 2016

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                • Cover of Iskari
                  Iskari

                  series · 3 books · 2017

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                • Cover of Stolen Brides of the Fae
                  Stolen Brides of the Fae

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