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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 Turnabout

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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 centered on wizards, mages, and other learned practitioners of magic as protagonists or masters.
  • 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 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 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 Skinjacker Trilogy
                  Skinjacker Trilogy

                  series · 4 books · 2006

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                  Everlost strands two fourteen-year-olds, Nick and Allie, killed together in a car crash, in the afterlife-adjacent realm of Everlost — a shadow world where lost children (Afterlights) linger among perfect, unbroken echoes of buildings and places the living have destroyed or torn down. Neal Shusterman's Skinjacker trilogy takes its name from Allie's rare and dangerous power to "skinjack," or possess, the bodies of the living, which she and Nick explore across Everwild and Everfound as they try to understand what Everlost actually is.

                • Cover of Apprentice Adept
                  Apprentice Adept

                  series · 7 books · 1980

                  similar by+2 more

                  Apprentice Adept is a heptalogy of fantasy and science fiction novels written by English American author Piers Anthony. The series takes place on Phaze and Proton, two worlds occupying the same space in two different dimensional planes. Phaze is a lush planet of magic, where Proton is a barren mining planet of science. As the series opens, each person born on Phaze and Proton has an alternate self living on the other world. But if a person on either world lacks a duplicate, he can cross to the other through an energy "curtain" that circumscribes each frame.

                • Cover of Andrews Family
                  Andrews Family

                  series · 3 books · 1972

                  completed

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  Mary Rodgers wrote a loose set of comic novels about one suburban family, each built around a different fantastical role-reversal: a mother and daughter swap bodies for a day in Freaky Friday, a boy discovers a television that shows tomorrow's news in A Billion for Boris, and a father and son trade places in Summer Switch. The books share characters and tone rather than a continuing plot.

                • Cover of Every Day
                  Every Day

                  series · 3 books · 2012

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  David Levithan's Every Day follows A, a consciousness with no fixed body who wakes each morning inside a different person's life, and who falls for a girl named Rhiannon despite the impossibility of ever staying in one body to be with her. The story continues from other perspectives in Another Day and, years later, Someday.

                • Cover of East of Midnight
                  East of Midnight

                  Tanith Lee · standalone novel · 1977

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  Having exchanged identities, a ruler's consort and a slave discover they seem doomed to die in their new roles.

                • Cover of The Seventh Sword
                  The Seventh Sword

                  series · 4 books · 1988

                  completed

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                  The Seventh Sword opens with The Reluctant Swordsman, Dave Duncan's 1990 fantasy novel and the first installment in this tetralogy. The Coming of Wisdom and The Destiny of the Sword continue the original three-book arc, with The Death of Nnanji added as a fourth entry more than two decades later.

                • Cover of Elixir
                  Elixir

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar by+2 more

                • Cover of The Switch
                  The Switch

                  Anthony Horowitz · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  For Tad Spencer, only son of a fabulously wealthy businessman, every day is like Christmas. He lives in a mansion, has a maid, servants, every toy imaginable. He has it all—until the day he wishes he was someone else.Suddenly, Tad wakes up as Bob Snarby, trapped in a filthy and corrupt carnival world inhabited by hostile ingrates, hopeless criminals, and mysterious fortune tellers. But Tad discovers he's there for a reason when he begins to untangle a secret that could reveal an enemy no one could have imagined...In this sardonic swap from New York Times bestselling author Anthony Horowitz, readers will not only be entertained, but reminded to be careful what they wish for—and happy for what they have.

                • Cover of Vice Versa; or, a Lesson to Fathers
                  Vice Versa; or, a Lesson to Fathers

                  F. Anstey · standalone novel · 1882

                  similar by+2 more

                • Cover of Like Never and Always
                  Like Never and Always

                  Ann Aguirre · standalone novel · 2018

                  similar bybody swap+1 more

                  On a hot summer night, a screech of brakes and shattering glass changes two lives forever. Liv wakes in the hospital, confused when they call her Morgan. She assumes it s a case of mistaken identity, yet when the bandages come off, it s not her face in the mirror anymore. It s her best friend Morgan s.

                • Cover of The Night Walkers
                  The Night Walkers

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Bone Dance
                  Bone Dance

                  Emma Bull · standalone novel · 1991

                  similar bybody swap+1 more

                  In a dystopian post-nuclear-war American city, a scavenger of pre-apocalyptic video and audio recordings and equipment becomes enmeshed in a struggle between humans who had been created by the military before the war with the ability to transfer between bodies at will, and the spirits summoned by Voodoo practitioners attempting to repair society to the benefit of humanity.

                • Cover of The Dark Passages
                  The Dark Passages

                  series · 2 books · 2014

                  similar by+2 more

                • Cover of Quarters
                  Quarters

                  series · 8 books · 1994

                  similar byfantasy

                  Sing the Four Quarters opens Tanya Huff's Quarters novels, set in a kingdom where certain Bards can channel one of the four elemental Quarters through music and magic. It follows a Bard drawn into a succession crisis and treason plot after using her gift to help a falsely accused prince. The four novels are loosely connected standalone stories sharing the same world and magic system, published across the 1990s and revisited decades later.

                • Cover of Larque on the Wing
                  Larque on the Wing

                  Nancy Springer · standalone novel · 1994

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  Going through a messy mid-life crisis, forty-year-old wife and mother Larque Harootunian gets carried away with her latest doppelganger--herself at age ten--who helps transform her into a young, strong, courageous, and gay man.

                • Cover of Changers
                  Changers

                  series · 4 books · 2014

                  similar by+2 more

                • Cover of Solstice
                  Solstice

                  Diane Woods · standalone novel · 2021

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  ● "Jake Miller was a young man who lived a boring life, but Jake also had a secret life: as Denise. And as Denise, Jake felt as a real person while Jake became something less. Until one summer solstice, it was Denise who awoke in bed, instead place of Jake. And all the world insisted there was no Jake Miller, there had always and only been Denise. It was a dream come true—permanent and complete. Then things started getting truly weird." ― paraphrased from this book's product page on Amazon.com as of 2024-05-28.

                • Cover of Dead Girl
                  Dead Girl

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  similar bybody swap+1 more

                • Cover of The Ghost and the Goth
                  The Ghost and the Goth

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar by+2 more

                • Cover of Otherbound
                  Otherbound

                  Corinne Duyvis · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  A seventeen-year-old boy finds that every time he closes his eyes, he's drawn into the body of a mute servant girl from another world--a world that's growing increasingly more dangerous, and where many things are not as they seem. A 17-year-old boy finds that every time he closes his eyes, he is drawn into the body of a mute servant girl from another world, a world that is growing increasingly more dangerous. The plot contains profanity and sexual situations.

                • Cover of Slambash Wangs of a Compo Gormer
                  Slambash Wangs of a Compo Gormer

                  Robert Leeson · standalone novel · 1987

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  An awkward fourteen-year-old who imagines himself prince of a distant planet suddenly discovers that the planet is real when he and the Prince are switched and must fight to survive in each other's worlds.

                • Cover of Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo
                  Katie Kazoo, Switcheroo

                  series · 47 books · 2002

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Jodi Marshall / Touch of Death
                  Jodi Marshall / Touch of Death

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Freaky Monday
                  Freaky Monday

                  Mary Rodgers & Heather Hach · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar bybody swapfantasy

                  "In a sequel to Freaky Friday, thirteen-year-old Hadley begins to better understand her hippy teacher and herself when she has to spend a day in her teacher's body." -- blurb at Amazon UK 2018-07-24 The summary in Library of Congress record {{LCCN|2008044397}} is the same without the underlined words. Uptight model student Hadley and easy-going Ms. Pitt "find themselves switched into each other's bodies", according to the longer blurb at Amazon US and CA.