anchored on:british isles
series6 books1982
similar bybritish isles
Connie Willis's Oxford Time Travel novels are set at a near-future Oxford University where historians travel into the past as observers, constrained by a version of history that resists any change large enough to alter real events. Doomsday Book sends a medieval historian to what should be 1320 but turns out to be the Black Death year of 1348, intercut with a present-day epidemic at Oxford; To Say Nothing of the Dog returns to the same time-travel program for a lighter, Victorian-set story with different characters. The two novels share their setting and rules rather than a directly continuing plot.
series24 books1898
completed
similar bylighthearted19th centurybritish isles
Six siblings -- Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noel, and H.O. -- set out to restore their widowed father's fortune after a business partner's fraud leaves the family broke, trying everything from digging for buried treasure to playing at highway robbery. E. Nesbit's Bastable novels follow their well-meaning, thoroughly unsuccessful schemes across three books published between 1899 and 1904, mixing believable sibling squabbles with the children's own overactive imaginations. The series is considered an early, influential template for realistic children's adventure fiction.
series10 books1988
similar by+1 more
These Jude Deveraux romances are linked less by one continuing plot than by recurring family surnames — Montgomery and Taggert — that Deveraux threads through much of her historical and contemporary romance writing. A Knight in Shining Armor, her best-known novel, is a standalone time-travel romance whose heroine, Dougless Montgomery, falls for a sixteenth-century English lord pulled forward into her present; The Maiden instead belongs to her more tightly connected medieval Montgomery-brothers sequence. Readers should expect a loose family of stories connected by name and world rather than one continuous saga.
H. G. Wellsstandalone novel1896
similar bylighthearted19th centurybritish isles
The Wheels of Chance is an early comic novel by H. G. Wells about an August 1895 cycling holiday, somewhat in the style of Three Men in a Boat. In 1922 it was adapted into a silent film The Wheels of Chance directed by Harold M. Shaw.
Garth Nixstandalone novel2013
similar by19th centurybritish isles+1 more
After Lady Truthful's magical Newington Emerald is stolen from her she devises a simple plan: go to London to recover the missing jewel. She quickly learns, however, that a woman cannot wander the city streets alone without damaging her reputation, and she disguises herself as a mustache-wearing man. During Truthful's dangerous journey she discovers a crook, an unsuspecting ally, and an evil sorceress but will she find the Emerald?
Monica Burnsstandalone novel2009
similar byparanormal romance19th centurybritish islesghost stories
"His love could be the death of her. When Constance Athelson, Viscountess Westbury, hides her face to attend the Black Widows Ball, she never expected to find erotic passion in a masked stranger's arms. The torrent of lust isn't enough to drown out her dubious "gift" for seeing visions and talking to the dead. Terrified of being found out, she secures a position cataloguing archaeological artifacts for the Earl of Wyndham—where she encounters a ghost begging her to break a curse plaguing his family. Before his mysterious lover disappeared, Lucien Blakemore was tempted to throw caution aside. Yet he knows one taste of love will unleash the curse that drove his father and brother to murder their wives. When he returns home empty handed and empty hearted, he's shocked to discover his new assistant is the goddess who fled into the night. But could her presence be part of a murderous plot to unearth the location of a secret Egyptian tomb? The answer—or his doom—lies behind the desire shining in his seductress's eyes." – from this book's product page on Samhain's website as of 2016-11-06.
series27 books1902
completed
similar bybritish isles
Two separate modern continuations of E. Nesbit's Psammead stories were written decades apart by different authors: Helen Cresswell's The Return of the Psammead (1992) brings the wish-granting sand fairy back for a new set of children, while Kate Saunders's Five Children on the Western Front (2014) follows the now-grown Lamb and his siblings as the First World War arrives, in a more somber sequel to Nesbit's original trilogy. Neither book is by Nesbit herself, and the two have no direct connection to each other beyond both drawing on her creation. Later writers have kept returning to Nesbit's premise long after her own trilogy ended.
series3 books1898
similar by19th centurybritish isles+1 more
Henry James's 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw follows a governess at an isolated English country house who becomes convinced that the two children in her care are being stalked by malevolent ghosts, narrated entirely through her own increasingly uncertain account. Its ambiguity over whether the haunting is real has made it one of the most discussed ghost stories in English literature and prompted later works built around it, including Michael Hastings's The Nightcomers, a 1971 prequel imagining events at the house before the governess's arrival. A stage adaptation of James's original text also exists.