Reading Guides
Reading Guides
Each guide answers the question first and recommends this series second — including plenty of books that aren’t ours.
Books like Piranesi
Seven novels about vast, impossible places and the patient people who map them.
Read-alike guideBooks like The Midnight Library
Two different shelves hide inside this question. Find out which one you actually want.
Read-alike guideBooks like Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Gentle, rule-bound, quietly devastating — the shelf that Kawaguchi's café belongs to.
Theme guideThe best liminal space books
Corridors, waiting rooms and transit that never arrives — fiction about places built for passing through.
Setting guideThe best books set on a train
Locked-room mysteries, railway travel writing, and the rare novels where the train is the whole world.
Theme guideFiction books about dementia
Novels that render the illness from the inside, from the caregiver's side, or as something else entirely.
Theme guideBooks about losing a child
Novels and one memoir about the aftermath — handled honestly, and marked for what each one contains.
Theme guideBooks about memory loss
Amnesia thrillers, collective forgetting, and novels about memory you can't trust.
FAQ
Questions readers ask
Do you have to read The Train Between Worlds books in order?
No. All three novels share a world, a currency and a train, but not a plot. Each one is written to work as a complete first book, and none of them spoils the others. Reading in publication order gives you the world in the order it was invented; starting anywhere else costs you nothing.
What is The Train Between Worlds actually about?
A train nobody remembers boarding, with more carriages than anyone has counted. Passengers stay because leaving is expensive: every door aboard costs one true memory of the person you would go back for. Not a fact or a date — the kind of memory you can walk around inside. The series follows three people paying that fare for very different reasons.
Is The Train Between Worlds free on Kindle Unlimited?
Yes. All three novels are free to borrow with a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and each can also be bought outright on Kindle. The Memory Fare and The Forty-Year Passenger are available in paperback too.
What should I read after The Midnight Library?
It depends which part of it you loved. If it was the premise — a place outside life where you get to examine your choices — you want speculative fiction with a clean central rule. If it was the feeling, you want quiet, consoling novels about second chances. Those are two different shelves, and the read-alike lists usually confuse them.
What are liminal space books?
Fiction set in places built for passing through and then never left — corridors, waiting rooms, stairwells, transit that never arrives. The defining feature is not horror but suspension: the architecture is doing something the characters cannot explain, and the rules of the place matter more than the plot.
Are there novels set entirely on a train?
A few. Most “train books” are murder mysteries that use a carriage as a locked room for a few hundred pages, or travel memoirs about real railways. Novels where the train is the whole world — no destination, no getting off — are much rarer, and they behave very differently.
What is the best novel about dementia?
There is no single answer, because readers come to these books for opposite reasons — some want the illness rendered accurately from the inside, some want the caregiver's side, and some want a story that is about forgetting without being a medical narrative at all. The right book depends on which of those you need.
Which book is about a mother searching for her missing daughter?
The Memory Fare, Book Two. Cora Marsh has spent six years at a railway lost property office looking for anything of her daughter's. When she finally boards the train on purpose, she learns that every door she opens to search for June costs her one real memory of her — and she will never know which one she paid.