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 12 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.
Clary Fray would like her life to go back to normal, which is difficult now that she can see werewolves, vampires and faeries and knows she is one of the Shadowhunters who police them. Her mother is in a magically induced coma, and the man who put her there is still collecting the objects he needs.
Clary Fray is fifteen and has just started seeing things she cannot explain, beginning with a group of teenagers in a club that nobody else notices. Within days her mother has disappeared, her apartment has been wrecked and a stranger with strange markings has saved her life and told her that the world she grew up in is only part of the picture. The people who can see what she sees call themselves Shadowhunters, they hunt the things that come from elsewhere, and they tell Clary that she is one of them.
The Mortal War is over, and Clary Fray is back in New York, training to be a Shadowhunter and looking forward to a period with nothing worse in it than her mother's wedding. Then Shadowhunters begin to be murdered, and the killings are arranged to make the Downworlders and the Shadowhunters blame each other. Her friend Simon, newly a vampire, cannot help her.
Leningrad, winter 1942. Lev, a seventeen-year-old arrested for taking a parachute from a German body, and Kolya, a cheerful deserter, are offered a way to avoid execution: find a dozen eggs for a Soviet colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their search takes them out of the starving city, through the wreckage of the front and towards the German lines.
The volume holds six short stories and a novella called Bounty, and the people in them are all trying to get by in a world that has gone haywire around them. Their jobs, their families and the language of improvement they have been taught no longer match the reality they are living in.
The Duke of Kylemore decides to marry London's most celebrated courtesan, and then she disappears. He tracks her down under the name she has taken for herself and carries her off to a lodge in Scotland, where he means to have her on his own terms and she means to get away.
From an abusive and alcoholic father, to townspeople who treat him as though he were cut from the same cloth, to his own insecurities, nothing Alec does is ever good enough. He cannot see how he could let himself love the boss's daughter, or why she would have declared her love for him. Then Clara's life is threatened by cattle rustlers and he has to answer for both.
Davie and his friend Geordie are altar boys in a Catholic parish, full of mischief and not much else, until a boy named Stephen Rose arrives in town. Stephen can model figures out of clay, and he and Davie discover that what they make between them can be brought to life, which is exciting until they understand what they have made.
Most people in this near future live inside gated communities or travel in armed groups, and nobody who can avoid the desert goes into it. A physician named Blake Maslin is driving across the Mojave with his sixteen-year-old twin daughters when the three of them are taken by a man who has been out there for years. His name is Eli Doyle, and what he carries is not a weapon.
When three American officials are killed in Colombia, the President's advisers see a chance to strike at the drug cartels behind the attack without admitting that they are at war. The operation runs through the Caribbean and the Andes, its details hidden even from some of the people carrying it out, until a man at the CIA notices that the reports crossing his desk do not add up.
Tessa Gray crosses the Atlantic in 1878 to join her brother in London and is taken from the docks by two women who want her for what she can do. Held in a house in the Downworld, she discovers she is not entirely human, and is rescued by the Shadowhunters who are hunting the same people.
Herald Mags, the King of Valdemar's Herald Spy, has built a network of young informants in the streets of Haven and in the kitchens of the great houses. His wife Amily is King's Own Herald, and finds it useful to be underestimated. Somebody has collected the secrets of the women of the Court.
A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer in Belgium between the wars; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing the family of his star author; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation. The narrators hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history.
At a shooting lodge in Yorkshire, the fiance of Lord Peter Wimsey's sister is found shot dead outside the conservatory at three in the morning, and the family's elder brother, the Duke of Denver, is found kneeling beside the body. The bullet came from the Duke's revolver and he had quarrelled with the dead man that evening, and he refuses to explain himself.
Sookie Stackhouse's boyfriend has been distant, and then he disappears while working on a task for the queen of the Louisiana vampires. His friends tell her he had been in Mississippi, summoned by the vampire who made him. Sookie drives to Jackson to find him, with a werewolf for a bodyguard and instructions she does not entirely trust.
George Poole is in his forties when his father dies, and one of the things he finds among the paperwork is that he has a sister he never knew about. Following her trail takes him to Rome and to an old religious order. Half a continent and sixteen centuries away, a girl called Regina is growing up in Britain as Roman rule comes to an end.
In 1943 a British aircraft comes down in occupied France, and the woman who survives is taken prisoner by the Germans. The account of how she came to be there, and of the pilot who was flying her, is written by a captive who tells the story she has to tell in order to stay alive.
Ned Begay is sent to a boarding school where he is taught that his own language is useless, and punished for using it. Then the Marine Corps comes looking for Navajo men, and the language he was told to forget becomes the basis of a code the American military uses through the islands of the Pacific.
A man wakes in the lavatory of a railway station in 1958 with no memory of who he is, and his clothes and surroundings suggest to him that he is an alcoholic derelict. He is in fact a rocket scientist, and the launch he helped to design is due in a matter of days. Working out his own identity means working out who took it from him.
Paul Edgecombe has been suffering from a bladder infection that will not clear, and in this instalment he discovers that John Coffey can heal with his touch. Meanwhile Eduard Delacroix has been teaching a mouse called Mr Jingles tricks and has become attached to it, almost as much as the guard Percy Wetmore despises it.
The attorney Barbara Holloway has no strong evidence to work with, only her legal instincts, and if those instincts cannot lead her to the truth then her client will die. Meanwhile, in Eugene, Oregon, a state senator is doing everything he can to keep buried a story that goes back twenty-two years to the death of a young woman at the university.
Inman is a wounded Confederate soldier who walks away from an army hospital as the American Civil War closes and sets out for Cold Mountain in North Carolina, where Ada, the woman he barely knew before he left, is trying to keep her father's farm from slipping away. Ada was raised to be ornamental and has no idea how to work land, until a young drifter called Ruby arrives and teaches her. The novel moves between his walk home and her farm, through a South being remade behind them.
Leonidas Witherall has inherited money from an uncle and had a house built while he was travelling the world, and he is on the train to Dalton in Massachusetts to see it for the first time. On the way he meets a nervous woman and a young woman carrying a brown paper package, and the house he arrives at contains a pickaxe and a corpse in the garage.
Ashton Wingate's bride Lierin is lost to the river only days after their wedding, leaving the Mississippi planter to mourn a marriage that had barely begun. Three years later his carriage collides with a cloaked rider on horseback, and the woman carried into his house, wearing Lierin's face, wakes up with no memory of who she is.
In the twelfth century, with Scotland under siege, King David looks for warriors willing to fight for him with their blood and their hearts. Waryk de Graham, the greatest of them, is knighted Lord Lion, and the honoured position of Scottish chieftain comes with a price attached: a Viking bride who has sworn to resist him. Mellyora MacAdin rules her ancestral lands like a Valkyrie, and now she is an unwilling captive of his power.
Kathy Hunt travels to Castlemoor after her brother dies suddenly, intending to finish the book he was writing about the old rites once performed on the moors nearby. His manuscript has disappeared, and the people around her seem to be afraid of something. The man who says he loves her warns her that the danger is real.
Sophie Grant's parents have died and left her a trust fund she cannot touch, her home has been condemned and she has just lost her job, all at once. With nowhere else to go she accepts a place in Matthew Trevelyan's isolated house in Cornwall. It is there, with the ground finally steady under her, that her real troubles begin, because Sophie falls in love.
Eric Bennett has spent his career in goal and is now working out what to do with the rest of his life, beginning with the fact that he has never dated men. Kyle Swift has moved to New York with a broken heart and a rule about not getting attached, and then meets a hockey player fifteen years older than he is.
Maverick Carter is seventeen and selling drugs for the King Lords, because that is how he helps his mother, who works two jobs while his father is in prison. Then he learns that he has a son of his own, and the life he has been running starts to pull against the life he now has to support.
Auburn Reed is twenty-one and has already lost everything important to her, and she has decided that there is no room in her life for mistakes. Then she walks into an art studio in Dallas looking for work, meets Owen Gentry, the artist who works there, and for once lets her heart make the decision. What she does not know is that he is keeping something from her.
Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater describes his own addiction to laudanum and what it did to his life. It appeared anonymously in a magazine in 1821, was the first of his works to make his name, and was published as a book the following year, in a text he revised and reissued much later.
An expedition sent by a company hunting diamonds in the Congo finds its previous team dead, apparently killed by something in the forest. A primatologist and her gorilla join the second party, which has to cross a country in the middle of a war to reach a lost city and the source of the danger there.
Norman Saylor, a professor at a small American college, considers magic to be superstition. Then he discovers that his wife is a practising sorceress, and he still refuses to accept what he has learned: that among women magic is an open secret, that it is being used against him, and that the occult warfare behind ordinary academic life is a matter of life and death.
Sir Arryn Graham has come to take revenge on Kinsey Darrow for his bloody deeds against the Highland rebels, and he intends to do it by claiming Darrow's bride, Kyra, as his own. In the tangle of her hair and the green of her eyes he finds a woman who is much more than a pawn.
Mitch Rapp has spent fifteen years hunting terrorists for the CIA, and the people he has killed have families with money. A Saudi businessman whose son died in one of Rapp's operations buys the services of a professional assassin, and the intention is not a quick death but an example. Rapp's private life is the part of him that is unprotected.
The novel introduces the Culture, a ubiquitous utopia whose Minds control events, and sets it against its mortal sentient enemies. The plot follows an enemy of the Culture through the Idiran-Culture War, presenting various small versions of that conflict rather than one decisive campaign, and its title is taken from a line in a T. S. Eliot poem.
Ellie Arroway loses her father young and grows up into an astronomer who spends her career listening for a signal that may never come. When the telescope she is running finally picks something up, the message is a prime number sequence repeated from a star twenty-six light years away, and confirming it has to survive politics, committees and a government that would rather the news belonged to it. The signal turns out to hold instructions, and building what they describe becomes an international project with five seats aboard and no agreement about who fills them. Arroway's argument with the officials and the religious advisers around her runs through the whole book.
Coonardoo is an Aboriginal woman who has been prepared since childhood to be the housekeeper of Wytaliba station in north-west Australia, in an age when white settlers were taking control of more and more of the bare plains. She falls in love with the station's owner, Hugh Watt, a white man, and the novel describes the difficult relationship between them.
Coraline Jones moves into a large old house that has been divided into flats, with parents who are busy and neighbours who keep to themselves. There is a door in the drawing room that opens onto a bricked-up wall, and one day it does not. Behind it is a flat that looks like her own and is better in every way, with a mother and father who have buttons for eyes and who want Coraline to stay. They have been waiting for her, and the parents she left behind are still in the real house.
Erika Fane, known to everyone as Rika, grew up in the orbit of the Crist family as the girlfriend of the younger son, while the older brother, Michael, was the person in that house she could never stop watching. Years later she arrives at the same university as Michael and his three closest friends, a group who hold parties nobody forgets. Michael has decided that Rika owes them something for a night years ago, and he is patient about collecting.
Cade Armanelli is an infamous hacker with billionaire status who operates better alone, and the narrator has earned the right to work alongside him whether he likes it or not. That is why she is on the first plane out to an undisclosed location for the company's cybersecurity team retreat.
When the United States secretary of state's plane goes down on her way to a summit meeting in Libya, the CIA does not trust the Libyans to look for her and hires Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon instead. The aircraft is found, but the secretary of state has vanished, and Libya's foreign minister has plans for the conference that Cabrillo cannot allow.
In one strand of the story a computer programmer in a newly independent Scotland takes a job on a remote asteroid and finds that the owners of the place have plans he was not told about. In the other, the crew of a starship far in the future trade with an alien world and learn something about where human beings came from. The two stories are the same story.
Eric Packer is twenty-eight and very rich. One morning he gets into a white stretch limousine that has been fitted out as an office and gives his driver an instruction: he wants a haircut, and the barber he uses is on the other side of Manhattan. Between his apartment and the barber's chair there is a presidential motorcade, a protest and a funeral.
Matthew Penicuik has raised his ward Kitty Charing in the country, and his fortune will become her dowry only if she marries one of his three great-nephews. Kitty finds the condition intolerable. She has already lost her heart to Jack Westruther, a rake who knows it and has done nothing about it.
Turner is a corporate mercenary who wakes in a rebuilt body and is sent out on a job more dangerous than the one that nearly finished him. Elsewhere a woman in the art trade is offered a piece that comes with a strange history, and a teenager in the projects finds that something in the matrix has noticed him. The three stories are heading for the same place.
Kate Logan proposed to Luke Rivers at somebody else's wedding, in the middle of being miserable about the man she thought she loved. Luke said yes, and now he refuses to take it back, even though Kate is certain he only agreed out of pity and that what she feels for him is friendship.
Crash Coogan is a seventh-grade football player who has been a legend in his own school since he used his first helmet to knock his cousin flat, and who has spent the years since running over other people. The person he runs over most is Penn Webb, a vegetarian Quaker kid who refuses to take it personally, and the story is told from inside Crash's own head.
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.
