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 Pilgermann

anchored on:historical fictionmedievalliterary & generalquestsfaith and religioneurope+2 more

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 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 that turn on objects of power — enchanted weapons, rings, and relics sought, wielded, or destroyed.
  • 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 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 The Devil in a Forest
                  The Devil in a Forest

                  Gene Wolfe · standalone novel · 1976

                  similar byreflectivemedievalhistorical fictionfaith and religioneurope

                  The Devil in a Forest is a short novel by American writer Gene Wolfe about the conflict between Christianity and an earlier pagan religion in Europe during the Middle Ages.

                • Cover of Brendan
                  Brendan

                  Morgan Llywelyn · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byreflectivemedievalhistorical fictionfaith and religioneurope

                  A historical novel about an early Irish saint, whose SF elements are apparently limited to describing the miracles performed by Brendan.

                • Cover of Ancient Evenings
                  Ancient Evenings

                  Norman Mailer · standalone novel · 1983

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictionfaith and religionliterary & generalmiddle east

                  Ancient Evenings is a 1983 historical novel by American author Norman Mailer. Set in ancient Egypt and dealing with the lives of the characters Menenhetet One and Meni, the novel received mixed reviews. Reviewers noted the historical research that went into writing it and considered Mailer successful at conveying the nature of ancient Egyptian life. However, they also criticized the novel's narration and questioned its literary merit. Ancient Evenings has been compared to the work of the poet James Merrill and the novelist Thomas Pynchon, as well as to Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost (1991). Some have suggested that its opening passage is its strongest part. Ancient Evenings served as an inspiration for the artist Matthew Barney's operatic film River of Fundament (2014).

                • Cover of Grendel
                  Grendel

                  John Gardner · standalone novel · 1971

                  similar byreflectivemedievalliterary & generaleurope

                  Between bouts of his war on the king of the Danish Norsemen, the monster philosophizes about life and fate.

                • Cover of Light of the World
                  Light of the World

                  series · 2 books · 2013

                  similar byreflectivemedievalhistorical fictionfaith and religion

                • Cover of Victory City
                  Victory City

                  Salman Rushdie · standalone novel · 2023

                  similar byreflectivemedievalhistorical fictionliterary & general

                  Victory City is a novel by Salman Rushdie published in February 2023. It is Rushdie's fifteenth novel.

                • Cover of The Pilgrim's Progress
                  The Pilgrim's Progress

                  John Bunyan · standalone novel · 1678

                  similar byreflectivequestsfaith and religionliterary & general

                  The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come is a 1678 Christian allegory written by the English nonconformist preacher John Bunyan. It is commonly regarded as one of the most significant works of Protestant devotional literature and of wider early modern English literature. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and has never been out of print. It appeared in Dutch in 1681, in German in 1703 and in Swedish in 1727. The first North American edition was issued in 1681. It has also been cited as the first novel written in English. According to literary editor Robert McCrum, "there's no book in English, apart from the Bible, to equal Bunyan's masterpiece for the range of its readership, or its influence on writers as diverse as William Hogarth, C. S. Lewis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, George Bernard Shaw, William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Enid Blyton." The lyrics of the hymn "To be a Pilgrim" are based on the novel.

                • Cover of The Years of Rice and Salt
                  The Years of Rice and Salt

                  Kim Stanley Robinson · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar byreflectivemedievalhistorical fiction+1 more

                  What if the Black Death had killed nearly everyone in Europe instead of a third of it? Kim Stanley Robinson opens on that premise with a Mongol scout named Bold, who finds a Hungarian city emptied by plague and only narrowly escapes execution meant to contain the contagion; sold into slavery, he ends up serving aboard a Chinese treasure fleet alongside a young African companion. From there the novel follows a recurring cast of souls, reincarnated across centuries and identifiable book to book by the first letter of their names, through an alternate history in which Islamic and Chinese civilizations, not a devastated Europe, shape the world's future.

                • Cover of The Scarlet Letter
                  The Scarlet Letter

                  Nathaniel Hawthorne · standalone novel · 1850

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictionfaith and religionliterary & general

                  In 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts of 1642-1649, a woman conceives a daughter through an adulterous affair, then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity.

                • Cover of Lavinia
                  Lavinia

                  Ursula K. Le Guin · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictionliterary & generaleurope+1 more

                  Lavinia is a Locus Award-winning novel by American author Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in 2008, it was Le Guin's last novel. It is written in a first-person, self-conscious style that recounts the life of Lavinia, a minor character in Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid.

                • Cover of The Celtic Crusades
                  The Celtic Crusades

                  series · 3 books · 1998

                  similar bymedievalhistorical fictionquestsfaith and religioneurope+1 more

                • Cover of Creation
                  Creation

                  Gore Vidal · standalone novel · 1981

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictionfaith and religionliterary & generalmiddle east

                  Creation is an epic historical fiction novel by Gore Vidal published in 1981. In 2002 he published a restored version, reinstating four chapters that a previous editor had cut and adding a brief foreword explaining what had happened and why he had restored the cut chapters.

                • Cover of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
                  The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

                  Philip Pullman · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar byreflectivefaith and religionliterary & generalmiddle east

                  Philip Pullman retells the gospel story with one change: Mary gives birth to twin sons, not one. Jesus grows into the moral teacher and healer familiar from scripture, while his brother, given the name Christ, watches from the sidelines, recording and reshaping his brother's story with an eye toward the institution he believes should be built on it. As Jesus preaches humility and doubt, Christ is drawn into a bargain with a mysterious stranger who wants his account shaped into something more useful for the church that will one day claim to speak for both of them. Part of Canongate's Myth series, Pullman's short, provocative reworking of the New Testament.

                • Cover of Christ the Lord
                  Christ the Lord

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  completed

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictionfaith and religionmiddle east

                • Cover of Lost Horizon
                  Lost Horizon

                  James Hilton · standalone novel · 1933

                  similar byreflectivefaith and religionliterary & general

                  Lost Horizon is a 1933 novel by the English writer James Hilton. The book was adapted into a film, also called Lost Horizon, in 1937 by director Frank Capra; and a musical film remake in 1973 by producer Ross Hunter with music by Burt Bacharach. It is the origin of Shangri-La, a fictional utopian lamasery located high in the mountains of Tibet.

                • Cover of The Inheritors
                  The Inheritors

                  William Golding · standalone novel · 1955

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictionliterary & generaleurope

                  A small tribe of Neanderthalians suddenly comes in contact with modern Homo sapiens, which leads to mutual incomprehension : the former's awe and fear in front of "the new people" has for counterpart the horror and disgust for these forest-dwelling devils they inspire to the latter. Golding opposes, in his usual, pessimistic way, the doomed, slow-witted but gentle and unselfish Homo neanderthalensis to their "inheritors", more intelligent and inventive, but already affected by inner quarrels, jealousy and violence.

                • Cover of Todd Family
                  Todd Family

                  series · 2 books · 2013

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictionliterary & general+1 more

                  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 Shaman
                  Shaman

                  Kim Stanley Robinson · standalone novel · 2013

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictioneurope+1 more

                  Shaman: A Novel of the Ice Age is a 2013 novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Set during the Ice Age, it tells the story of a trainee shaman, from a tribe of European early modern humans, who must learn the skills needed to survive and to aid his people.

                • Cover of The Wandering Jew
                  The Wandering Jew

                  Stefan Heym · standalone novel · 1981

                  similar byreflectivefaith and religionhistorical fictionliterary & general+2 more

                  Ahasver is a 1981 German-language novel by Stefan Heym. It was published in English as The Wandering Jew in 1984.

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

                  Michael Chabon · standalone novel · 2000

                  similar byreflectivehistorical fictionliterary & generalimmigration and exile

                  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 Karl Glogauer
                  Karl Glogauer

                  series · 2 books · 1969

                  similar byreflective+4 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 Orsinia
                  Orsinia

                  series · 16 books · 1961

                  completed

                  similar byreflectiveliterary & generalhistorical fiction+1 more

                  Orsinia is Ursula K. Le Guin's invented Central European country, used as the setting for character-driven historical fiction rather than her more famous science fiction and fantasy: the linked short stories of Orsinian Tales and the novel Malafrena, set among failed 1820s revolutionaries. There's no ongoing plot connecting the pieces; Orsinia functions more as a shared place and history than a series with continuing characters.

                • Cover of The Spire
                  The Spire

                  William Golding · standalone novel · 1964

                  similar byreflectivemedievalfaith and religionliterary & general

                  The Spire is a 1964 novel by English author William Golding. "A dark and powerful portrait of one man's will", it deals with the construction of a 404-foot-high spire loosely based on Salisbury Cathedral, the vision of the fictional Dean Jocelin. In the novel, Golding utilises stream-of-consciousness writing with an omniscient but increasingly fallible narrator to show Jocelin's demise as he chooses to follow his own will as opposed to the will of God.

                • Cover of Island
                  Island

                  Aldous Huxley · standalone novel · 1962

                  similar byreflectivefaith and religionliterary & general

                  Island is a 1962 utopian manifesto and novel by English writer Aldous Huxley, the author's final work before his death in 1963. Although it has a plot, the plot largely serves to further conceptual explorations rather than setting up and resolving conventional narrative tension.