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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 The Bear Flag

anchored on:historical fictionnorth america19th century

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

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

                Practical

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

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

                • Cover of Ghost Dance
                  Ghost Dance

                  John Norman · standalone novel · 1970

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                  Ghost Dance is a 1970 historical fiction novel by John Norman. A Sioux man and his tradition comes into conflict with a white woman and her civilization as the Wounded Knee Massacre approaches. As with his Gor series, his main body of work, Norman displays both philosophical reaction and an affinity with incorporating historical events into the plotlines of fictional characters.

                • Cover of Black Hills
                  Black Hills

                  Dan Simmons · standalone novel · 2010

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                  Haunted by Custer's ghost, and also by his ability to see into the memories and futures of legendary men like Sioux war-chief Crazy Horse, Paha Sapa plans to silence his ghost forever and reclaim his people's legacy--on the very day FDR comes to Mount Rushmore to dedicate the Jefferson face.

                • Cover of Buckskin Brigades
                  Buckskin Brigades

                  L. Ron Hubbard · standalone novel · 1937

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                  Buckskin Brigades is a Western novel written by L. Ron Hubbard, first published July 30, 1937. The work was Hubbard's first hard-covered book, and his first published novel. The next year he became a contributor to Astounding Science Fiction. Winfred Blevins wrote the introduction to the book. Some sources state that as a young man, Hubbard became a blood brother to the Piegan Blackfeet Native American tribe while living in Montana, though this claim is disputed. Hubbard incorporates historical background from the Blackfeet tribe into the book.

                • Cover of Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Robert W. Chambers
                  Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Robert W. Chambers

                  series · 6 books · 1914

                  completed

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                • 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.

                • J
                  Jess

                  H. Rider Haggard · standalone novel · 1887

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                  Jess is a novel by British writer H. Rider Haggard, set in South Africa.

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

                  Kim Stanley Robinson · standalone novel · 2002

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                  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 Traveller
                  Traveller

                  Richard Adams · standalone novel · 1988

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                  Traveller is a historical novel written by Richard Adams in 1988. It recounts the American Civil War through the viewpoint of Traveller, the favorite horse of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

                • 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 Bring the Jubilee
                  Bring the Jubilee

                  Ward Moore · standalone novel · 1953

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                  From the flaps of the Farrar, Straus and Young first edition: ""Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921." So Hodge Backmaker begins his story of the harsh and curious world he lived in, a world in which the South won the Civil War and the all-powerful Confederacy dominated the poor and backward North; a North that had neither a transcontinental railroad, and where television was undreamed of. Like most Northerners, Hodge was poor - but he had ambition. A printer's handyman in 1938, he had since become an eminent historian. Hodge's special interest was the American past, when the States had been united and had seemed to be on the brink of prosperity and technical progress. And then he was offered an opportunity no historian could resist - he could go back in time. Hodge chsoe to return to a certain field near Gettysburg on a day in July, 1863... Bring the Jubilee is a novel of curious events, of adventures and reflection, of passions and comment. It at time Hodge's world, its horse-carriages and gas-lights, minibles and tinugraphs and the Great Emperors' War of 1914 faintly resembles our own, it is perhaps, because that world might well become a reality: on the battlefield of Gettysburg there is a small hill called Little Round Top. One July morning in 1863 the Confederate Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a mistake that cost them victory in a battle which - in the view of many historians - was the turning point of the Civil War."

                • 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 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
                  Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

                  Steven Millhauser · standalone novel · 1996

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                  Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer is a 1996 novel by Steven Millhauser. It won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. It follows the exploits of Martin Dressler, a young, optimistic entrepreneur, in late nineteenth-century New York City. It vividly evokes its time and place through elaborate description.

                • Cover of Samuel Clemens Fowler
                  Samuel Clemens Fowler

                  series · 2 books · 1989

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                • Cover of Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West
                  Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West

                  Cormac McCarthy · standalone novel · 1985

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                  "Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen." (cited from the OCLC entry for the first edition)

                • Cover of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
                  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

                  David Mitchell · standalone novel · 2010

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                  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an historical fiction novel by English author David Mitchell published by Sceptre in 2010. It is set during the Dutch trading concession with Japan in the late 18th century, during the period of Japanese history known as Sakoku.

                • Cover of All Those Vanished Engines
                  All Those Vanished Engines

                  Paul Park · standalone novel · 2014

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                  Follows the Park family in three different areas of the nation after the Queen of the North agreed to a two-nation settlement in the Civil War, in this new alternate-history novel from the author of A Princess of Roumania.

                • Cover of Lost Continent of Atlantis
                  Lost Continent of Atlantis

                  series · 5 books · 2005

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                  Atlantis is an alternate history series written by Harry Turtledove. The point of divergence occurs around 85 million years ago when the eastern portion of the North American continent splits off from the rest of the continent and forms Atlantis, a separate continent farther east in the Atlantic Ocean.

                • Cover of Contact: The Battle for America
                  Contact: The Battle for America

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Time and Again
                  Time and Again

                  series · 2 books · 1970

                  completed

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                  Time and Again (1970) follows Si Morley, a commercial artist recruited into a secret government project that sends him back to Manhattan in 1882, where he falls for a woman named Julia while weighing whether he can, or should, alter the past; Jack Finney illustrates the story with period photographs and engravings. The sequel, From Time to Time (1995), continues Si's story with a further trip into the past.

                • Cover of The Lovelock Version
                  The Lovelock Version

                  Maurice Shadbolt · standalone novel · 1980

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                  The Lovelock Version is a long historical novel by New Zealand writer Maurice Shadbolt that calls into question the interpretation of the past through the narrative process. Published in Auckland and London in 1980 and in New York in 1981, it won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the James Wattie Award.

                • Cover of Galore
                  Galore

                  Michael Crummey · standalone novel · 2009

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                  Galore is a 2009 novel by Michael Crummey first published by Doubleday Canada. It is about the discovery of an 18th-century Jonah in a remote coastal town of Paradise Deep, Newfoundland.

                • Cover of Herland
                  Herland

                  series · 2 books · 1915

                  completed

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

                  Michael Chabon · standalone novel · 2000

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                  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.