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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 This Witch

anchored on:adventuremiddle eastcontemporaryadventurousfantasymagical artifacts

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 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 Copernicus Legacy
                  The Copernicus Legacy

                  series · 6 books · 2014

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                  The Copernicus Legacy is a book series written by Tony Abbott. It is about the adventures of Wade Kaplan, Darrell Kaplan, Lily, Becca Moore, Roald Kaplan, and Sara Kaplan, as they try to destroy a time machine made by Ptolemy but discovered and used by Nicolaus Copernicus, from the dangerous Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia. It currently has four books in the main series, but two are in a series diverted from The Copernicus Legacy called Copernicus Archives. While a work of fiction, it does incorporate some facts about Copernicus's history.

                • Cover of Jonk & Bill
                  Jonk & Bill

                  series · 2 books · 1968

                  completed

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                • Cover of Alfred Kropp
                  Alfred Kropp

                  series · 3 books · 2005

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                  Rick Yancey's Alfred Kropp trilogy follows the teenage title character through three young-adult fantasy-adventure novels. The debut, The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, was a Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book and a Carnegie Medal finalist, and the story continues in The Seal of Solomon and The Thirteenth Skull.

                • Cover of The Hobbit
                  The Hobbit

                  series · 2 books · 1937

                  completed

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

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                  The Hobbit (1937) is J. R. R. Tolkien's children's fantasy novel following the reluctant burglar Bilbo Baggins, who joins a company of dwarves and the wizard Gandalf on a journey to reclaim treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug. It stands as a complete adventure on its own, but shares its setting with the rest of Tolkien's legendarium and leads into the events of The Lord of the Rings.

                • Cover of The Lost Ark
                  The Lost Ark

                  J. R. Rain · standalone novel · 2010

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                  In a lonely bar in eastern Turkey, ex-National Geographic photojournalist Sam Ward is hired to find an eccentric professor who disappeared high atop Mount Ararat, fabled resting spot of Noah's Ark. Accompanied by the professor's beautiful daughter, archaeologist Faye Roberts, Sam soon stumbles upon a secret stronghold—a base of operation for unleashing hell on earth. Now running for their lives, Sam and company are about to come face-to-face with the greatest archaeological discovery of all tiime...

                • Cover of Seven Wonders
                  Seven Wonders

                  series · 10 books · 2013

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                  Seven Wonders is a pentalogy of children's fantasy, adventure and mythological fiction books written by American author Peter Lerangis. It is based on Greek mythology and set around the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Jack McKinley discovers a secret organization on a hidden island, and becomes the leader of a mission to retrieve seven lost magical orbs. As Jack and his three friends realize their lives are at stake, they have no choice but to accept the quest and embark on the challenge.

                • Cover of Moving Target
                  Moving Target

                  series · 2 books · 2015

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                • Cover of Vampire a Go-Go
                  Vampire a Go-Go

                  Victor Gischler · standalone novel · 2009

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                  On the brink of failing out of school, graduate student Allen Cabbot agrees to participate in a research project to save his academic career. He is swept into an adventure with witches, vampires, ghosts, and a hunt for the famed philosopher's stone and its transforming powers.

                • Cover of House of Secrets
                  House of Secrets

                  series · 3 books · 2013

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                  Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini's House of Secrets follows the three Walker children after they move into an unusual new home and their parents are taken from them; the children set out to find a secret book that holds the key to getting them back. The series continues across two more books, Battle of the Beasts and Clash of the Worlds, the latter co-written with Chris Rylander.

                • Cover of Immortal Vegas
                  Immortal Vegas

                  series · 3 books · 2015

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                • Cover of The Fellowship of the Talisman
                  The Fellowship of the Talisman

                  Clifford D. Simak · standalone novel · 1978

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                  From the flaps of the Del Rey first edition: "Through a wilderness blighted by horror rode Duncan, son of the noble House of Standish. Astride his mighty war horse, he was pursuing a quest vital to the future of civilization. With him went a strange fellowship: a brawny man-at-arms, a banshee, a hermit, a ghost, a turncoat demon, a goblin and a witch. Opposing them came forces of supernatural malignancy. Aiding them was a girl with the blood of enchanters in her veins who was mounted on an ancient griffin. And all this takes place in England in the 1970s... But in the world of The Fellowship of the Talisman, the Dark Ages never ended. There had been no renaissance, no exploration of the lands across the sea; and men lived much as they did a thousand or more years ago. Some historians believed this situation was the result of the terror and devastation called the Evil, which broke out every five centuries, laying waste first to Macedonia, then to Iberia, and finally to a large part of England. Duncan Standish had been sent on a dangerous mission which could give humanity an instrument against this Evil and rekindle the spirit of mankind. It was through a land where the monstrous servants of the Evil held sway that Duncan and his oddly assorted followers had to pass. The ghost, though erratic, was an excellent spy; and Snoopy, the goblin, knew many of the enemy's weak points. And with the aid of an ancient sorcerer's talisman which seemed to guard Duncan and his band from peril, they were safe... for the moment."

                • Cover of Alif the Unseen
                  Alif the Unseen

                  G. Willow Wilson · standalone novel · 2012

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                  Alif the Unseen is a 2012 cyberpunk fantasy novel by American writer G. Willow Wilson. In the novel, a Middle Eastern hacker named Alif discovers a book of djinn tales which may lead to a new age of quantum computing. The novel won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

                • Cover of Jack Howard
                  Jack Howard

                  series · 8 books · 2005

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                • Cover of Sphinx
                  Sphinx

                  Robin Cook · standalone novel · 1979

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                  Sphinx is a 1979 novel by Robin Cook. It follows a young American Egyptologist named Erica Baron, on a working vacation in Egypt, who stumbles into a dangerous vortex of intrigue after seeing an ancient Egyptian statue of Seti I in a Cairo market. Cook's third novel, it is one of the few not centered on medicine.

                • Cover of The Red Stone of Jubbah
                  The Red Stone of Jubbah

                  Donald Tyson · standalone novel · 2020

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                  "H. P. Lovecraft's fabled character, Alhazred, the mad Arab who wrote the infamous Necronomicon is back in a new and startling tale of sword and sorcery, horror, and adventure. The infamous author of the Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred, is sent by the Caliph, Muawiya II, from Damascus to the distant Oasis of Jubbah, which lies in the midst of the Nefud Desert, to search of a fabled red stone that fell from the heavens many ages ago. The stone is mystically linked to the black stone in the Ka'bah at Mecca, and has the power to transform the man who holds it into a conqueror of nations, making him invulnerable in battle. It was once possessed by Alexander the Great, but was lost in Persia after Alexander's death. Rumor has it that the stone was carried westward into Arabia by the mysterious cliff-dwelling clan of wanderers known as the Thamud. The last mention of the stone in ancient written records intimates that it was hidden by the Thamud at Jubbah. Alhazred must locate the stone before it can be found by the agents of the Caliph's arch rival, Marwan ibn al-Hakam, who seeks to overthrow Muawiya and create a new ruling dynasty. Marwan's agents in Jubbah are deceitful and dangerous, leaving Alhazred to wonder who he can trust. Does the stone lie forgotten in a cave on the mountain Jebel Umm Sanman, which looms over the oasis like a thundercloud, or is this only a rumor to mislead fools? The witch of the mountain, Salamagoogah, is ancient beyond the memory of men. She knows the secrets of the red stone, but will she share them with Alhazred or lead him to his death? Who will find the red stone of Jubbah first? The Caliph, Muawiya, in Damascus? His rival Marwan? The witch Salamagoogah? Or will it be another? The fate of the entire Caliphate hangs in the balance, for the man who holds the red stone holds the world on the palm of his hand." Weird House Press Aug 10, 2022

                • Cover of TombQuest
                  TombQuest

                  series · 5 books · 2015

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                • Cover of Thomas Lourds
                  Thomas Lourds

                  series · 3 books · 2009

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                • Cover of The Lost Trumpet
                  The Lost Trumpet

                  J. Leslie Mitchell · standalone novel · 1932

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                  In modern day (1932) Cairo two American archeologists mount an expedition to find the great horn, which blown by Joshua, crumbled the walls of Jericho.

                • Cover of Kid vs. Squid
                  Kid vs. Squid

                  Greg van Eekhout · standalone novel · 2010

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                  Spending the summer after sixth grade at his great-uncle's oceanside museum, Thatcher and local girl Trudy team up to help Shoal, one of the people of Atlantis cursed by a witch whose head still survives, and who has an army of monstrous creatures helping her.

                • Cover of Maddy West and the Tongue Taker
                  Maddy West and the Tongue Taker

                  Brian Falkner · standalone novel · 2014

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                  At nine-and-a-half Maddy West can speak every language in the world, a skill her mother finds weird--but when Maddy is asked to translate some ancient scrolls in Bulgaria, she and her ten-year-old friend Kazuki find themselves on a wild adventure with a mysterious monkey, a Bulgarian wrestler, evil magic, and a fiendish witch.

                • Cover of The Indian in the Cupboard
                  The Indian in the Cupboard

                  series · 5 books · 1980

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                  Lynne Reid Banks' Indian in the Cupboard series begins with the 1980 children's novel in which a boy discovers that an old cupboard can bring his plastic toy figures to life. The low-fantasy series, which inspired a 1995 film adaptation, continues across Return of the Indian, The Secret of the Indian, The Mystery of the Cupboard, and The Key to the Indian.

                • Cover of The Librarians
                  The Librarians

                  series · 3 books · 2016

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                • Cover of The Secret Keepers
                  The Secret Keepers

                  Trenton Lee Stewart · standalone novel · 2016

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                  "When twelve-year-old Reuben finds a peculiar, magical watch that has the power to turn its wearer invisible, he's propelled on the adventure of a lifetime"-- When Reuben discovers an antique watch that was mortared into the wall, he soon learns it has a secret power. As one secret leads to another, Reuben finds himself torn between his innately honest nature and the lure to be a hero. Now he is on a dangerous adventure, and with fearless Penny, mighty Jack, and the wise Mrs. Genevieve on his side, Reuben must outwit and outmaneuver the sly villain called The Smoke and his devious defenders the Directions, in order to save the city from a terrible fate.

                • Cover of His Dark Materials
                  His Dark Materials

                  series · 8 books · 1995

                  part of His Dark Materials Universe

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                  His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The novels have won a number of awards, including the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights and the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass. In 2003, the trilogy was ranked third on the BBC's The Big Read poll.