Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

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 Zanoni

anchored on:fantasyeurope19th centurygothicimmortalitywizards+3 more

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 centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • 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 Earthsea Cycle
                  Earthsea Cycle

                  series · 18 books · 1964

                  completed

                  part of Earthsea

                  similar byreflectivefantasywizards

                  The Earthsea Cycle, also known as Earthsea, is a series of high fantasy books written by American author Ursula K. Le Guin. Beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972), the series was continued in Tehanu (1990), and Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. In 2018, all the novels and short stories were published in a single volume, The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, with artwork by Charles Vess.

                • Cover of Grendel
                  Grendel

                  John Gardner · standalone novel · 1971

                  similar byreflectiveeuropefantasy

                  Between bouts of his war on the king of the Danish Norsemen, the monster philosophizes about life and fate.

                • Cover of Miranda and Caliban
                  Miranda and Caliban

                  Jacqueline Carey · standalone novel · 2017

                  similar byreflectivefantasywizardsforbidden love

                  "A lovely girl grows up in isolation where her father, a powerful magus, has spirited them to in order to keep them safe. We all know the tale of Prospero's quest for revenge, but what of Miranda? Or Caliban, the so--called savage Prospero chained to his will? In this incredible retelling of the fantastical tale, Jacqueline Carey shows readers the other side of the coin--the dutiful and tenderhearted Miranda, who loves her father but is terribly lonely. And Caliban, the strange and feral boy Prospero has bewitched to serve him. The two find solace and companionship in each other as Prospero weaves his magic and dreams of revenge. Always under Prospero-s jealous eye, Miranda and Caliban battle the dark, unknowable forces that bind them to the island even as the pangs of adolescence create a new awareness of each other and their doomed relationship. Miranda and Caliban is bestselling fantasy author Jacqueline Carey's gorgeous retelling of The Tempest. With hypnotic prose and a wild imagination, Carey explores the themes of twisted love and unchecked power that lie at the heart of Shakespeare's masterpiece, while serving up a fresh take on the play's iconic characters."--

                • Cover of Green Mansions
                  Green Mansions

                  W. H. Hudson · standalone novel · 1904

                  similar byreflective19th centuryfantasy

                  "WHH's most famous bird novel is Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904). Structured as the confession-in-tranquillity of an old man named Abel, it takes place in the middle of the 19th century somewhere between Venezuela and Guyana, where young Abel has fled after a political debacle. Here he finds a tribe of Indians which lives in fear of the "demons" who inhabit a nearby region; but what Abel discovers there is a tiny woman called Rima, who seems and sounds half-bird, who can talk with animals, and who longs to return to her home, which is a kind of lost world (see Lost Races) in the mountains. When they get there, it has been destroyed. She returns to her home woods and is burnt alive in a great Tree by the Indians, who are then massacred at Abel's instigation. Quite extraordinarily attenuated in comparison with earlier figures – like {{A|H Rider Haggard}}'s Ayesha – Rima nevertheless very fairly represents WHH's notion of the impossibility of harmony between humans and the natural world." (underscore represents linked cross-reference) --SFE: Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), biographical entry by John Clute

                • Cover of A Romance of Two Worlds
                  A Romance of Two Worlds

                  Marie Corelli · standalone novel · 1886

                  similar byreflective19th centuryfantasy

                  A Romance of Two Worlds was Marie Corelli's first novel, published in 1886. It referenced the contemporary debate between creationism and evolution, as well as supernatural themes, overlaid with elements of science fiction. The book was an immediate commercial success, establishing Corelli as one of the most popular writers of the time, though like much of her subsequent work, it was negatively received by critics.

                • Cover of Tuck Everlasting
                  Tuck Everlasting

                  Natalie Babbitt · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar byreflectivefantasyimmortality

                  Publisher's description: "The Tuck family is confronted with an agonizing situation when they discover that a ten-year-old girl and a malicious stranger now share their secret about a spring whose water prevents one from ever growing any older."

                • Cover of The Night Circus
                  The Night Circus

                  Erin Morgenstern · standalone novel · 2011

                  similar byfantasyeuropeforbidden love+2 more

                  The Night Circus is a 2011 speculative fiction novel by Erin Morgenstern. It was originally written for the annual writing competition National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) over the span of three competitions. The novel has a nonlinear narrative written from multiple viewpoints.

                • Cover of Hiddensee
                  Hiddensee

                  Gregory Maguire · standalone novel · 2017

                  similar byreflectiveeurope19th century

                  Presents an imaginative tale rooted in early nineteenth-century German Romanticism that explores parallels between the origin legend of the famous Nutcracker with the life of Drosselmeier, the toymaker who carves him.

                • Cover of The Martian
                  The Martian

                  George du Maurier · standalone novel · 1897

                  similar byreflectiveeurope19th century

                  The Martian, by George du Maurier, is a largely autobiographical novel published in 1898 and the author's third. It describes the life of Barty Josselin as told by his close friend Robert Maurice, starting from their school days in Paris in the 1850s. Written in long descriptive passages with very little dialogue and many digressions, the book had considerably less success in its time than its predecessor, the popular Trilby.

                • Cover of Melmoth
                  Melmoth

                  series · 9 books · 1820

                  completed

                  similar byeurope19th centurygothicimmortalityframe story

                • Cover of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
                  The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

                  Patricia A. McKillip · standalone novel · 1974

                  similar byreflectivefantasywizards

                  The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is a fantasy novel by American writer Patricia A. McKillip, and illustrators Peter Schaumann in 1974, and Alicia Austin in 1981, first published by Atheneum Publishers in 1974, and by Magic Carpet Books in 1996. It is the winner of the 1975 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. The book centers on Sybel, a woman previously cut off from the rest of the world of Eldwold, as she learns to live and love in the world outside of the one she once knew.

                • Cover of Midnight Is a Place
                  Midnight Is a Place

                  Joan Aiken · standalone novel · 1974

                  similar byreflective19th centurygothic

                  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 Gilda Stories
                  The Gilda Stories

                  series · 8 books · 1991

                  similar byreflectivefantasyimmortality+1 more

                • Cover of Nation
                  Nation

                  Terry Pratchett · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar byreflectivefantasy19th century

                  From copyright page: "After a devastating tsunami destroys all that they have ever known, Mau, an island boy, and Daphne, an aristocratic English girl, together with a small band of refugees, set about rebuilding their community and all the things that are important in their lives."

                • Cover of Grimus
                  Grimus

                  Salman Rushdie · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar byreflectivefantasyimmortality

                  After drinking a mysterious fluid that grants him immortality, the young Axona man Flapping Eagle sets out on a centuries-long search for his vanished sister, drifting through identities and eras as the decades pass without aging him. The trail eventually leads him to a hidden dimension reachable through the Mediterranean, and to Calf Island, a refuge for immortals who have grown weary of endless life but cannot bring themselves to give it up, ruled by a strange and rigid order all its own. Salman Rushdie's first novel, an early, genre-inflected departure from the realism of his later, more famous work.

                • Cover of Immortal Muse
                  Immortal Muse

                  Stephen Leigh · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar byreflectiveeuropeimmortality+2 more

                  Immortal Muse is a tale that takes the reader on a fascinating journey from Paris of the late 1300s with the alchemists Perenelle and Nicolas Flamel, to contemporary New York City. Along the way, there are interludes with Bernini in Rome in 1635; with Vivaldi in Venice of 1737; with Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier and Robespierre in the Paris of the French Revolution; with William Blake and John Polidori in 1814; with Gustav Klimt in fin de siècle Vienna; with Charlotte Salomon in WWII France. And in modern-day New York, a complicated dance of love and violence finally brings a resolution to the centuries-old deadly feud.

                • Cover of Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
                  Hitty, Her First Hundred Years

                  Rachel Field · standalone novel · 1929

                  similar byreflective19th centuryfantasyimmortality

                  "the memoirs of a sentient (though immobile) Doll ... Hitty is a singular example of a doll who does not want to be human and her story provides interesting commentary on the joys and liabilities of Immortality." (underscore represents linked cross-reference) --Encyclopedia of Fantasy Hitty's immobility is crucial to the plot recurrently but it is not strict. Initially she takes up the pen to write her memoirs on paper. When dropped under a church pew, she raises and lowers her legs to "thump" for attention.

                • Cover of Villette
                  Villette

                  Charlotte Brontë · standalone novel · 1853

                  similar byreflective19th centuryeurope+1 more

                  Villette is an 1853 novel written by English author Charlotte Brontë. After an unspecified family disaster, the protagonist Lucy Snowe travels from her native England to the fictional Continental city of Villette to teach at a girls' school, where she is drawn into adventure and romance.

                • Cover of Vergil Magus
                  Vergil Magus

                  series · 9 books · 1969

                  similar byfantasyeuropewizards+1 more

                  Avram Davidson's trilogy, completed after his death with Michael Swanwick's help, reimagines the historical Roman poet Virgil as a wizard-engineer, Vergil Magus, working real magic and craft in an alternate ancient Mediterranean where his legendary reputation as a sorcerer is literally true. The Phoenix and the Mirror opens with Vergil undertaking to forge a magical mirror of true seeing; Vergil in Averno and The Scarlet Fig carry him through further commissions and intrigue told in Davidson's dense, digressive prose. It is a heavily researched, idiosyncratic take on late-antique myth rather than conventional epic fantasy.

                • Cover of The Salt Roads
                  The Salt Roads

                  Nalo Hopkinson · standalone novel · 2003

                  similar byreflective19th centuryeuropefantasy

                  Jeanne Duval, the ginger-haired entertainer, is descended from African slaves and white sailors. It is twilight, and she argues with her lover Charles Baudelaire in his Paris apartment. Mer, plantation slave and doctor, has healing hands though her spirit is sickened. She both hungers for and dreads liberation, and longs for the gods to take her home. Thais, a beauty from Alexandria, was sold into slavery and prostitution as a girl. Impelled to seek a glorious revelation, she will travel the long hot roads to Jerusalem. (adapted from information stated with the first edition)

                • Cover of The Vampire Chronicles
                  The Vampire Chronicles

                  series · 15 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar bygothicimmortality+3 more

                  The Vampire Chronicles is a series of Gothic vampire novels and a media franchise, created by American author Anne Rice, that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.

                • Cover of Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr
                  Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

                  John Crowley · standalone novel · 2017

                  similar byreflectivefantasyimmortalityframe story

                  Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr is a fantasy novel by American author John Crowley, published on October 24, 2017, by Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The novel follows Dar Oakley, who is described as the first crow in all of crow history to possess a name of his own, born approximately two thousand years ago, as he recounts his lives and deaths across human history to a contemporary narrator. In the crow language depicted in the novel, "Ka" refers to the spiritual realm of crows, while "Ymr" is the crow word for the human world (Earth).

                • Cover of The Alvin Maker Saga
                  The Alvin Maker Saga

                  series · 15 books · 1986

                  similar by19th centuryfantasy+2 more

                  The Tales of Alvin Maker is a series of seven alternate history fantasy novels written by American novelist Orson Scott Card, published from 1987 to 2026. They explore the experiences of a young man, Alvin Miller, who realizes he has incredible powers for creating and shaping things around him.

                • Cover of The Time Keeper
                  The Time Keeper

                  Mitch Albom · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar byreflectivefantasyimmortality

                  The Time Keeper--a compelling fable about the first man on earth to count the hours. The man who became Father Time. In Mitch Albom's newest work of fiction, the inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time. He returns to our world--now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began--and commences a journey with two unlikely partners: one a teenage girl who is about to give up on life, the other a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever. To save himself, he must save them both. And stop the world to do so.