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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 Verity

anchored on:our worldcontemporary

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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 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 All Souls
                  All Souls

                  series · 5 books · 2011

                  similar bywitchescontemporaryfantasy+5 more

                  A Discovery of Witches is a 2011 historical-fantasy novel and the debut novel by American scholar Deborah Harkness. It follows Diana Bishop, a history of science professor at Yale University, as she embraces her magical blood after finding a long-thought-lost manuscript and engages in a forbidden romance with a charming vampire, Matthew Clairmont.

                • Cover of Sweep / Wicca (UK)
                  Sweep / Wicca (UK)

                  series · 15 books · 2001

                  similar bywitchesour worldcontemporaryyoung adulturban fantasy+4 more

                • Cover of Wicked (Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié)
                  Wicked (Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié)

                  series · 5 books · 2002

                  similar bywitchesour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adultparanormal+4 more

                  Wicked is a series of young adult novels written by American authors Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié. The first book, Witch was released in 2002 through Simon Pulse.

                • Cover of The Blood Journals
                  The Blood Journals

                  series · 2 books · 2011

                  similar bywitchescontemporaryfantasyyoung adult+6 more

                • HH
                  Hex Hall Universe

                  series · 4 books · 2010

                  similar bywitchescontemporaryour worldyoung adultparanormal+3 more

                • Cover of Reason Cansino
                  Reason Cansino

                  series · 3 books · 2005

                  similar bywitchescontemporaryour worldfantasyyoung adulturban fantasy+1 more

                • Cover of This Poison Heart
                  This Poison Heart

                  series · 2 books · 2021

                  similar bywitchescontemporaryfantasyyoung adult+3 more

                • Cover of Sam Farrell
                  Sam Farrell

                  series · 4 books · 1969

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldfantasyurban fantasy+2 more

                • Cover of Magic Can Be Murder
                  Magic Can Be Murder

                  Vivian Vande Velde · standalone novel · 2000

                  similar bywitchesmysteriousour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adult

                  Set apart from other people because of their unusual abilities, Nola, a teenage witch, and her mother find themselves in great danger when Nola uses her power to call up images and witnesses a murder.

                • Cover of The Dark Elite
                  The Dark Elite

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldyoung adulturban fantasy+4 more

                • Cover of Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)
                  Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)

                  series · 100 books · 1996

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldurban fantasyparanormal+2 more

                  Women of the Otherworld is Kelley Armstrong's long-running urban fantasy series about werewolves, witches, sorcerers, and other supernatural beings trying to pass as ordinary people in the contemporary world, told across thirteen novels plus assorted novellas published between 2001 and 2012. Each book tends to follow a different member of this hidden community while slowly building a shared, continuing world.

                • UU
                  Underlayes Universe

                  series · 10 books · 2016

                  similar bycontemporary+6 more

                • CC
                  Caster Chronicles / Beautiful Creatures Universe

                  series · 8 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyyoung adult+3 more

                • Cover of Life's a Witch
                  Life's a Witch

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar bywitchescontemporaryour worldfantasyyoung adulturban fantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Three Sisters Island Trilogy
                  Three Sisters Island Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2001

                  similar bywitchescontemporaryfantasyparanormal romanceemotional+2 more

                  Dance Upon the Air opens Nora Roberts's Three Sisters Island trilogy with Nell Channing, who arrives on the island believing she's finally found refuge from an abusive marriage and the life she fled months earlier. She instead finds herself entangled in the island's own supernatural history and a curse tied to three founding sisters. Heaven and Earth and Face the Fire complete the trilogy, each centered on a different island woman.

                • Cover of The Kendra Chronicles
                  The Kendra Chronicles

                  series · 5 books · 2007

                  similar bywitchesour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+3 more

                  Alex Flinn's Kendra Chronicles opens with Beastly, a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast in which a wealthy, shallow New York teenager is transformed into a monster by a witch's curse and has two years to break the spell by earning real love. Later books widen the cast to other characters from that story — Lindy, the witch Kendra herself — while staying inside the same fairy-tale-updated-to-Manhattan premise. It's YA fairy-tale retelling built around one curse and its ripple effects rather than a continuing plot across all volumes.

                • Cover of Spellcrackers.com
                  Spellcrackers.com

                  series · 7 books · 2008

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldurban fantasy+3 more

                • Cover of The Beauchamp Family
                  The Beauchamp Family

                  series · 6 books · 2011

                  part of Blue Bloods

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                • Cover of Witch Eyes
                  Witch Eyes

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar bywitchescontemporaryyoung adulturban fantasy+5 more

                • Cover of The Demon Notebook
                  The Demon Notebook

                  series · 3 books · 2012

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                • Cover of Colin McLaren / Claire Moffat
                  Colin McLaren / Claire Moffat

                  series · 7 books · 1972

                  completed

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                • Cover of Katy Jessevar / Legacy
                  Katy Jessevar / Legacy

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                • Cover of Twin Willows Trilogy
                  Twin Willows Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2014

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                • Cover of Sisters of the Craft
                  Sisters of the Craft

                  series · 3 books · 2015

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