3473 books across eight primary genres: romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery and thrillers, historical fiction, literary fiction and adventure. Romantasy and contemporary romance are tags on top of those shelves rather than genres of their own. Every page gives you the author, the publication year, the series it belongs to and a short synopsis that stops before the plot turns.
Search by title or author, narrow the list by primary genre or by tag, or sort it. Every title here is a different book: no duplicate editions and no omnibus volumes. A book that genuinely belongs to two genres appears once and is listed on both.
This is page 11 of the list. The search box and the filter chips read the whole catalogue, not just this page, and the page links below walk the shelf in order.
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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
A young woman becomes the target of a vampire who calls herself Carmilla, and whose interest in her is romantic as much as it is predatory. The name turns out to be an anagram of the visitor's real one, Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. The story was first published as a serial in 1871 and 1872.
In the small Mississippi town of Innocence, days are long, nights are fragrant and secrets do not stay kept. When a killer begins taking the lives of the town's most attractive women, neighbours have to ask whether the culprit is a stranger hiding in the bayou or someone living next door. Into that summer comes Caroline Waverly, a concert violinist who wants only a quiet stay in her late grandmother's house.
A family of vampires from Uberwald is invited to the naming of a royal baby, and the witches of Lancre find that the vampires have trained themselves out of their weaknesses. They wear bright clothes, drink wine and stay up until noon. The witches of Lancre are the ones who have to answer them.
Carrie White is a friendless high school girl from an abusive religious household in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, and she has telekinetic powers she is only beginning to understand. Repressed at home and tormented at school, she tries to fit in, and the attempt leads to a confrontation on prom night after a cruel prank pushed by one of her bullies.
Simon Snow is in his final year at a magical school and is supposed to be the Chosen One who will defeat a creature called the Humdrum. His roommate and rival Baz has not returned for the year, and Simon spends the term looking for him while his magic fails and the war outside the school comes closer.
On a planet where violence and vengeance are the ordinary business of government, every person develops a currentgift when they come of age, and most of the gifts are useful. Akos and Cyra are not so lucky: his gift makes him unable to bear the pain of others, and hers gives pain to everyone who touches her, including herself.
Jackson Brodie is a former police inspector making a living as a private investigator in Cambridge, and three old family tragedies come to him at once: a little girl who vanished from a garden thirty years ago, a woman who killed her husband with an axe, and a solicitor's daughter murdered for no reason anybody can find.
British agent James Bond is sent to a casino in northern France with one job: to ruin a Soviet paymaster called Le Chiffre at the baccarat table. The man has lost money that belongs to his employers, and the service has decided that taking the rest of it is cheaper than killing him. Bond arrives with a colleague from the CIA and a French contact, plays the game over several nights, and finds that winning makes him a target rather than a winner. The first Bond novel is short, cold and much darker than the films.
Gary Soneji, the killer Alex Cross put away, is out of prison, dying and determined to take his revenge before he goes. At the same time a second man is at work: Thomas Augustine Pierce has been hunting a killer he calls Mr Smith since his fiancee was murdered, and when Cross is attacked in his own home the two hunts begin to meet.
A writer working on a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped goes looking for the family of one of the scientists who made it, and finds a research laboratory, a Caribbean island and a religion invented by a calypso singer. The island is called San Lorenzo, its people are poor, its ruler is a tyrant, and the scientist's legacy includes a form of ice that freezes at room temperature. The novel is short, made of very short chapters, and it treats the end of the world as an administrative matter.
Justine Campbell would gladly rewind her life a few months, to the time before it crumbled around her. Billy Tucker would take the same option, going back to the day before his vehicle was blown up in Iraq, injuring him and killing two of his friends. His bitterness and her humiliation make them a prickly pair when they first meet, and both have to let go of the past.
Yossarian is an American bombardier stationed on a Mediterranean island in the closing months of the Second World War, and he has decided he does not want to fly any more missions. The rule that governs his problem is the one that gives the novel its title: a man who asks to be grounded for insanity is demonstrating that he is sane, because caring about his own survival proves it. His commanding officers keep raising the number of missions that count as a tour of duty. The novel moves backwards and forwards through the squadron's history rather than in order.
Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark came out of the Hunger Games alive, which was not supposed to happen, and the Capitol is treating their survival as a political problem. Katniss is back in District 12 with a house, a stipend and a set of people who will not quite look at her, and the districts are beginning to move in ways the government notices. President Snow arrives in her mother's house to explain what she owes him. The second part of the trilogy turns on the Victory Tour, and on the decision the Capitol makes about how to deal with the girl who became a symbol it did not want.
Ben Cowan and Bijah Catlow have been bound as friends since childhood, but they grew into different men: Catlow became a top cowhand with a wild streak, and one disastrous confrontation with a band of greedy ranchers turned him into an outlaw. That left it to Cowan, now a United States marshal, to bring him in alive, if Catlow will let him.
Birdie Lee and her sister Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother who met in the civil rights movement in Boston. Cole is taken for black and Birdie for white, and that difference decides what the family is allowed to be. When the marriage breaks apart and the parents believe federal agents are after them, Birdie and her mother take new names and disappear to a small town in New Hampshire.
Laila wants a child and has lost every pregnancy she has carried, so she goes to the Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family whose healing power comes from a caul that they keep and do not share. The deal she hopes for falls through, and the events that follow bring a baby into the family by another route.
A mysterious signal broadcast over the global mobile phone network turns the majority of the people who hear it into mindless and vicious animals. The novel follows a New England artist who is in Boston when it happens and who has to make his way north to find his young son, through a country that is coming apart around him.
Yadriel is queer, trans and Latino, and in his family the boys become brujos who summon and release the spirits of the dead while the girls become brujas who heal. His relatives have not accepted him as a man and expect the healing powers they think he should have, so he sets out to prove otherwise by summoning a ghost on his own.
Tayo comes home to the Laguna Pueblo reservation after surviving the Pacific war and a Japanese prison camp and finds that sleep, drink and his own family cannot hold him together. His cousin Rocky died on the Bataan Death March, the reservation is caught in a drought, and the medicine men Tayo visits tell him his cure lies in stories older than the war.
Mexico City is an oasis in a sea of vampires, policed to keep the creatures out. Domingo, a teenage trash-picker, attaches himself to Atl, the last descendant of a line of Aztec blood drinkers, who is hiding in the city from other vampires and from the authorities hunting her, drawing police, crime bosses and the vampire community into the search.
Seven friends did something terrible one night in the California desert, and somebody knows what it was. A chain letter signed by a figure calling themselves Your Caretaker reaches Alison first and then each of the others in turn, and what it asks for is not a favour: do as you are told, or pay for what you did.
Cordelia Carstairs is a Shadowhunter, a warrior with the blood of the angel Raziel, and when her father is accused of a crime she travels to London with her mother and brother to clear his name. There she finds her childhood friends James and Lucie Herondale and is drawn into their world of parties and obligations, while hiding what she feels for James, who is sworn to marry somebody else. Then Shadowhunters begin to be killed in the city.
A heart transplant gives television presenter Cat Delaney a second chance, and she leaves Hollywood for San Antonio, where she hosts a show for children with special needs and meets Alex Pierce, an ex-cop turned crime writer. Then other recipients of donor hearts begin dying in accidents, and a stalker starts following her.
Charley Skedaddle is a children's historical novel by Patricia Beatty, first published in 1987 and based on records from the American Civil War. Its hero is a twelve-year-old New Yorker who runs errands for a street gang, runs away to join the army after his brother is killed, and then keeps running after he shoots a man.
Charlie Bucket shares a small house with his parents and four grandparents, close enough to the largest chocolate factory in the world that he walks past it every day and smells what the family cannot afford. The owner, Willy Wonka, has hidden five golden tickets inside his chocolate bars and promised a tour of the factory to whoever finds them. Four of the tickets go to children with very determined parents, and Charlie finds the fifth almost by accident. The tour turns out to be something more than a tour, and the other children do not manage it well.
Taking up where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory leaves off, Charlie, his family and Mr Wonka find themselves launched into space in the great glass elevator. Their journey takes them out of the factory and into orbit, where they encounter situations that require the same kind of improvisation the earlier book had confined to the building, and the sequel's scale is deliberately larger.
John Arable decides that the runt of a litter of eleven piglets is not worth raising and takes it outside to kill it. His daughter Fern argues with him until he gives her the pig, and she names him Wilbur and takes care of him herself until he grows too big for the house. Wilbur moves to the Zuckerman farm, where he is lonely until a barn spider called Charlotte decides to be his friend. When the farm starts planning for winter, Charlotte answers the problem the only way a spider can, by writing words in her web.
A Johannes Vermeer painting, A Lady Writing, is stolen while it is on its way to the Art Institute of Chicago, and two eleven-year-olds in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of the city, Calder Pillay and Petra Andalee, set out to find it. The thief places advertisements in the newspaper explaining that the painting will be returned if the public can work out which of the pictures attributed to Vermeer were really painted by him. The whole neighbourhood begins looking at paintings much more closely.
Chasm City was a utopia built under a dome on a planet human beings should not have been able to settle, and its wealth came from somewhere else entirely. A virus that infects machinery as readily as flesh has left the city half ruined, its buildings and its people altered, and its survivors living inside what remains.
Sebastian, Lord Somerton, runs a secret organisation called the Nexus and has been responsible for many deaths without ever being a traitor. Accused of treason after the mistreatment of his former ward, he is ordered to hand over the names of all his agents. The widow of one of his men has her own reasons to want him exposed.
Seth Quinn is finally home. His boyhood with a drug-addicted mother ended when the Quinn family took him in, and he grew up with three older brothers who watched over him. Now he returns from Europe as a successful painter to settle on Maryland's Eastern Shore among Cam, Ethan and Phillip, their wives and children. Much has changed in St. Christopher, and the most intriguing change is Dru Whitcomb Banks, a city woman with a new florist shop.
Hatshepsut is the daughter of a pharaoh, and she grows up expecting to rule Egypt in her own right, which no woman has done. The novel follows her from a childhood spent in temples and on the river to her marriage to her half-brother, the years in which she governs, and the opposition of priests and courtiers who cannot accept a woman on the throne.
Huge ships appear over the cities of Earth, and the Overlords who command them begin a period of peaceful rule, ending war, poverty and cruelty within a generation. Humanity prospers under a system it did not choose, and the cost of the arrangement becomes clear only as the next generation grows up.
Zelie Adebola's mother was a Reaper who could summon souls, until the king's soldiers took magic away from Orisha and killed the maji. Years later Zelie is given a chance to bring the magic back, and she has to make the journey with a princess and a young man who both have their own reasons for going.
The children of Dune are the twin siblings Leto and Ghanima Atreides, whose father, the Emperor Paul Muad'Dib, disappeared into the deserts of Arrakis. Like their father they possess unusual abilities, which makes them valuable to their aunt Alia, who rules the Empire as regent. If Alia can obtain the secrets of the twins' prophetic visions, her rule becomes absolute.
A terraformed world was supposed to receive monkeys and a virus designed to speed their minds along, and instead receives spiders. The world was prepared long ago by an artificial intelligence built from the personality of one of the human terraformers, and it has been left alone with its own instructions ever since. Thousands of years later the planet holds a civilisation built by arachnids, whose science, religion and politics are followed across generations as they work out what they are and what they might become. Meanwhile the last humans are on the starship Gilgamesh, carrying the survivors of Earth in cold storage and looking for the world their ancestors' probes prepared. When the two civilisations finally notice each other, the novel follows the encounter from both sides.
Victor Mancini dropped out of medical school to look after his mother, who is in a nursing home and does not always remember who he is. To pay for her care he pretends to choke on food in restaurants and lets strangers save his life. He keeps a list of everyone who has ever rescued him, and writes to them about the debts he says he cannot pay.
On a frigid autumn morning in 2006, an attack on a British scientific outpost in Antarctica announces the invasion of the seventh continent. Argentina, resurgent after the Falklands war, has launched an armed takeover of the Antarctic Peninsula to seize the last untapped pool of natural resources, and one United States Navy vessel is the only answer.
Back at the House of Night for another term, Zoey Redbird is trying to lead her circle of student priestesses while keeping a secret that would destroy her friends. Neferet, the school's High Priestess, has been bringing back the students who died during their change and making them into something obedient. One of them was Zoey's best friend.
A baby is born to a humble Jewish family in first-century Israel with a great destiny ahead of him, and the novel follows him as a boy of seven or eight beginning to understand his own powers and the whispered mysteries surrounding his birth. The tyrannical rule of King Herod has driven the family out of the Holy Land to the relative safety of Alexandria, and the story begins with their return.
In 1978, in a suburb outside Pittsburgh, a seventeen-year-old called Arnie Cunningham stops on his way home to look at a dilapidated 1958 Plymouth Fury sitting on a neglected lawn. The car is for sale, and the old man selling it has a bad back, a sour temper and a name for it: Christine. Arnie's best friend tells him not to buy it.
Christy Huddleson is nineteen and the daughter of a comfortable family in North Carolina when she hears a mission founder describe a mountain community that has no school. She volunteers to teach there, and in 1912 she arrives in the village of Cutter Gap in Tennessee, where the people she has come to help have their own ways of doing things.
The gates left behind by the civilisation that made the protomolecule have opened the way to a thousand worlds, and the rush to settle them has started. On the first of those colonies a small group of Belters who arrived first and a corporate survey party sent by the charter are arguing about who owns the ground, and the ship that made the gates available has been asked to keep the peace.
Humans and androids crowd the streets of New Beijing while a deadly plague ravages the population and a ruthless lunar people watch from space waiting to make their move. Cinder is a gifted mechanic and a cyborg, a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister's illness. Then her life becomes entangled with the crown prince's.
Two hundred years after Cinderella found her prince, the fairy tale has become a state ritual. Every year teenage girls must attend the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom choose wives; girls who are not chosen are never heard from again. Sophia would rather marry her childhood friend Erin. At the ball she runs.
Circe is a daughter of Helios, the sun titan, and by the standards of the gods she is nothing much: no particular power, a voice that sounds like a mortal's, and no interest in divine politics. When she uses the magic she has discovered to punish a rival, Zeus exiles her to a deserted island, which she turns into a home over centuries of practising herbs and spells. The men who arrive there are mostly trouble, and turning some of them into pigs is the part of her story everyone already knows. She crosses paths with Daedalus, Medea and Odysseus, and is still on the island when the mortal she has come to love needs her to choose between the gods she is born from and the life she could have.
Nemo's parents left their bodies behind to join the Bin, the virtual afterlife that holds twelve billion uploaded personalities in crime-free, disease-free societies. He has grown up on a nearly deserted Earth among the stragglers who refused it, and on a rare visit to his parents he meets Justine, a new arrival who dreams other people's dreams in the virtual night and has no body to go back to.
Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, published in 1957 after four issues of Astounding Science Fiction, follows a boy sold at a slave auction on a distant planet. It is about the old beggar who buys him and raises him as a son, and about the question of who the boy really is and where he came from.
The library is split into eight primary genres so you can find the kind of book you actually want: romance, where the relationship carries the story; fantasy, from epic quests to cosy shops; science fiction, from the classics to this year's awards; horror, from gothic novels to haunted houses; mystery and thrillers, from detectives and spies to domestic suspense; historical fiction, for stories built inside a past period; literary fiction, for books whose interest is in the writing and the people rather than in a plot engine; and adventure, for journeys, survival and treasure hunts. Each shelf page says what belongs on it.
Tags are a second, separate layer. Romantasy marks the books where romance and a fantasy world carry the story together, and contemporary romance marks the love stories set in the modern real world. Neither is a genre: a tagged book still lives on one or two of the eight shelves, and the tag is a way to narrow a shelf rather than a shelf of its own. Tags have landing pages too.
The title, the author and the publication year are checked against the publisher or a library record before a page goes up, and the cover is the one that record carries. Where no source states the first-publication date, the page says the year is the earliest edition we could confirm instead of claiming a date.
The synopsis on each page is written for this library. It tells you who the characters are and what they are up against, then stops. It is not a review, there are no scores anywhere on these shelves, and nothing here claims that we have read a book we have not written about yet.
Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.
Goodreads and social links will be added soon.
Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 booksOne page per book, shared between genres: 858 titles sit on more than one genre right now. Romance 676, Fantasy 685, Sci-Fi 536, Horror 381, Mystery & Thriller 599, Historical Fiction 580, Literary Fiction 575, Adventure 324.
Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.
Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.
70 booksTagModern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.
155 booksRomantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.
