Book library

Stories for the midnight shelf

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.

RomanceFantasySci-FiHorrorMystery & ThrillerHistorical FictionLiterary FictionAdventureRomantasy tagContemporary Romance tag3473 booksEdited by Baby Bat

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Cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

The shelf

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 13 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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Showing 48 of 3473 books

Crave

Tracy Wolff · 2020

Grace comes to an isolated academy in Alaska after losing both parents, and finds a school that is not the one it advertises. The students belong to factions, none of them human, and every one of them dislikes the new arrival on principle. Then there is Jaxon Vega, a vampire who has kept himself sealed off for a century and has a reason for it, which Grace recognises because it matches the one she is carrying. The first Crave novel is a gothic boarding-school romance where the students are monsters, nobody has written the rules down, and being noticed is the dangerous part.

Vampire romanceParanormal romance

Crazy Rich Asians

Kevin Kwan · 2013

Rachel Chu, who teaches in New York and was raised by a single mother, agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend and meet his family. She is expecting a quiet visit with traditional relatives, and what she finds is an older and far wealthier world than she knew existed, with a grandmother who has strong opinions about who her grandson should marry.

Romantic comedyFamily sagaSocial realism

Creatures of Will and Temper

Molly Tanzer · 2017

Evadne Gray is a fencer with no interest in society and no knowledge of diabolism when she is sent to London to chaperone her younger sister, who wants to be an art critic. Within a short time her sister falls in with the charismatic Lady Henrietta Wotton, and Evadne enrols in a fencing school whose master turns out to be engaged in a war with demons.

Historical fantasyUrban fantasy

Credence

Penelope Douglas · 2020

Tiernan de Haas is the only child of a film producer and an actress, raised in boarding schools with money and no attention, and when her parents die she feels almost nothing. Her father's stepbrother, a man she has never met, becomes her guardian, and she goes to live with him and his two grown sons in a remote cabin in the mountains. Nobody there wanted her.

New adult romanceContemporary romance

Creep from the Deep

Robert Lawrence Stine · 2008

Billy and Sheena spend their summers with their uncle, Dr Deep, on his boat, and they have learned to expect adventure every time. This trip turns into a treasure hunt, and what they find at the end of it is a sea captain who died two hundred years ago and has not stayed dead. Then the trail leads to HorrorLand.

Monster horrorCreature feature

Creepers

David Morrell · 2005

A reporter and four urban explorers break into the Paragon Hotel, an abandoned seaside building where nothing has been touched since its owner killed himself. They are looking for a vault they believe is somewhere inside. They find that the building is not empty, that somebody has been living in it, and that they are not the only people who came for the money.

Crime thrillerPsychological thriller

Crescendo

Becca Fitzpatrick · 2010

Nora Grey has survived an attempt on her life and gained a guardian angel, which she considers a fair exchange. Patch has been evasive ever since, and now he is spending time with Marcie Millar, who is the last person Nora would want near him. An old family friend has moved back to town, and Nora finds herself drawn to him even though she is sure he is hiding something.

Young adult fantasyParanormal romance

Cress

Marissa Meyer · 2014

Cress has spent seven years alone on a satellite, working as a programmer for the Lunar queen and watching the world through screens. When she is finally rescued by the crew she has been helping, the escape goes wrong, and the queen's plans are moving towards a wedding that will decide the fate of two worlds.

Young adult science fictionSpace operaScience fantasy

Crispin at the Edge of the World

Avi · 2006

Crispin and Bear have just won their freedom in the first book of the trilogy, and they set out to find somewhere to live. Bear's old comrades from the Peasants' Revolt find them almost at once, and an arrow leaves him too badly hurt to travel. A healer living in the woods takes them in, along with a girl called Troth, and when the healer is killed, Bear finds himself responsible for two children instead of one.

Historical adventureComing-of-age

Crispin The Cross of Lead

Avi · 2002

In the England of 1377 a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother has just died is accused of theft by the steward of the manor and declared outside the protection of the law. He has nobody to go to and no name of his own beyond the one his mother gave him.

Medieval fictionComing-of-age

Crooked House

Agatha Christie · 1949

Three generations of the Leonides family live together in a large, somewhat crooked-looking house, and then the wealthy patriarch Aristide is murdered. Suspicion falls on the whole household, including his two sons, his widow fifty years his junior and even his three grandchildren. Charles Hayward, engaged to the dead man's granddaughter, tries to help the police find the killer.

Golden age mysteryCosy mystery

Crooked Kingdom

Leigh Bardugo · 2016

Kaz Brekker and his crew have pulled off the heist that was supposed to make them independent, and instead they have been betrayed and one of their number has been taken. The novel follows the gang's attempt to get her back and to take their revenge in a city where every deal has a second purpose.

Young adult fantasyGrimdarkUrban fantasy

Cross

James Patterson · 2006

Years after an unknown gunman killed his wife in front of him, Alex Cross has left the police and the FBI and is practising as a psychologist again. Then his former partner calls in a favour: a serial rapist is working in Georgetown, and the method matches a case the two of them worked together years earlier. Cross says yes.

Police proceduralSerial killer thriller

Crossroads of Twilight

Robert Jordan · 2003

The tenth book of the Wheel of Time opens with the world reacting to a vast display of power, while the three principal figures are each occupied with something else: Mat is fleeing with a kidnapped empress, Perrin is trying to free his captured wife, and Egwene is working to reunite the Aes Sedai before the Last Battle.

Epic fantasySword and sorcery

Crown of Midnight

Sarah J. Maas · 2013

Celaena Sardothien has won the contest to become the king's champion and is now required to carry out his orders while privately working against him. Her position becomes impossible when the next name on the list is someone she knows, and the novel follows her attempts to protect the people she cares about without being discovered.

Epic fantasyYoung adult fantasySword and sorcery

Cruel and Unusual

Patricia Cornwell · 1993

Virginia's chief medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, prepares for the autopsy of the convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell before he has been executed, and watches the clock until he is pronounced dead in the electric chair. His death is not the end of her involvement with him, and the body in her morgue is only the first complication.

Crime thrillerPolice procedural

Cryoburn

Lois McMaster Bujold · 2010

WhiteChrys is a cryocorp on the planet Kibou-daini, a company whose business is freezing the sick and the dying in the hope that they can be revived and cured later, and it is opening a subsidiary inside the Barrayaran Empire. Emperor Gregor sends his troubleshooter Miles Vorkosigan to establish what the arrangement actually means. An attempt to abduct the attendees at a conference puts Miles in the underground Cryocombs, where the frozen are stored.

Space operaDetective fiction

Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson · 1999

In 1942 a young American mathematician named Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is posted to a unit whose existence almost nobody knows about, with the job of keeping the Germans from realising that their codes have been broken. Sixty years later his grandson is helping to build a data haven on a small island in the Pacific, using the same mathematics for a different kind of freedom.

CyberpunkHistorical fiction

Crystal Gardens

Jayne Ann Krentz · 2012

Evangeline Ames takes a country cottage to recover from a fright, and discovers that the garden attached to it is charged with paranormal energy. When an assassin comes for her, she is rescued by the garden's owner, Lucas Sebastian, who needs her professional skills as an investigator to establish what lies buried beneath his estate.

Paranormal romanceHistorical romance

Cuckoo Song

Frances Hardinge · 2014

Triss has not been well since she was rescued from the Grimmer, a pond near her family's holiday cottage, and her memory of what happened there is hazy. Her dolls keep coming alive, she is endlessly hungry and wants to eat her belongings as well as her food, she finds dead leaves in her hair, and her tears come out as spiderweb. Her sister Pen hates her.

Historical fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Cujo

Stephen King · 1981

A large Saint Bernard belonging to a family of mechanics is bitten by a bat in a field and contracts rabies, and the novel follows the disease through the dog over the weeks while the people around him get on with their lives. The family at the centre of the book has its own problems: the marriage is in trouble, the wife has been seeing somebody else, and a decision to have the car serviced is made for reasons that have nothing to do with the animal. By the time the dog is dangerous, the only people who do not know it are the ones closest to him.

Modern horrorCreature feature

Cursed

Marissa Meyer · 2022

Serilda and Gild are trying to break the curses that tie their spirits to a haunted castle before the Endless Moon, when the Erlking intends to capture one of the seven gods and use a wish to bring his lover back from the underworld. As the deadline approaches it becomes clear that he wants all seven gods.

Fairytale retellingDark fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Cursed Daughters

Oyinkan Braithwaite · 2025

Ebun gives birth to her daughter Eniiyi on the same day the family buries her cousin Monife, and the baby's resemblance to the dead woman is impossible to miss. The family takes that resemblance as proof that the child is Monife returned, and the curse that has kept three generations of women in one house begins to close over the new one.

Magical realismFamily novel

Curtain

Agatha Christie · 1975

Hercule Poirot is old and in a wheelchair, and he has taken a room at Styles, the country house where he investigated his first case in England. He sends for Captain Hastings and tells him that a murder is going to be committed there, that he knows this and cannot prevent it, and that no court would accept what he knows.

Golden age mysteryDetective fictionLocked room mystery

Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese · 2009

Marion Stone and his conjoined twin Shiva are born at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa in September 1954. Their mother, an Indian nun, dies in childbirth and their father disappears, leaving the boys to be raised by the doctors and staff around them. The novel follows the twins through a childhood inside medicine and then along separate paths.

Family novelLiterary fiction

Cyclops

Clive Cussler · 1986

A wealthy American financier disappears while hunting treasure in an antique airship, and the blimp drifts out of Cuban waters towards Florida carrying the bodies of Soviet cosmonauts. Dirk Pitt uncovers a covert group of American industrialists who have put a colony on the moon and will defend it at any cost.

Sea adventureConspiracy thriller

Cyrano de Bergerac

Edmond Rostand · 1898

Cyrano de Bergerac is a verse drama in five acts by the French writer Edmond Rostand, first staged in 1897 and brought out as a book a year later. It takes a seventeenth-century nobleman famous for his bold adventures and his enormous nose and turns him into a poet in love with the beautiful Roxane, who does not know it, and who is drawn instead to a handsome young guardsman.

Translated literary fictionModern classics

Cyteen

C. J. Cherryh · 1988

Reseune is a city-sized research centre whose product is people: azi, grown in tanks and trained by tape from birth to fill the roles Union needs. Its director, Ariane Emory, has dominated the politics of Cyteen for fifty years. When she is murdered, her rivals expect to be free of her, and instead her death turns Reseune into an experiment in remaking a human being.

Hard science fictionSpace opera

D Is for Deadbeat

Sue Grafton · 1987

Alvin Limardo hires Kinsey Millhone for a job that looks straightforward, and then his cheque bounces. His real name turns out to be John Dagett, and he is an ex-convict, a liar, a chronic drunk, and dead, drowned in what the police have called an accident. Millhone is not convinced, and the more she looks into the man who hired her, the longer the list of people who had reason to dislike him becomes.

Amateur sleuthDetective fiction

Daddy

Danielle Steel · 1989

Oliver Watson has a wife, three children and a career he is proud of, and he assumes the arrangement will hold. When Sarah leaves the marriage to go back to university, he is left to run a household he has never had to think about. In the same period his mother dies and his father begins to change.

Family novel

Daemon

Daniel Suarez · 2006

Matthew Sobol, a brilliant programmer and the chief technology officer of a games company, dies of brain cancer, and the publication of his obituary activates a daemon: a distributed program that begins to change the real world. Its first task is to kill two programmers who worked for his company and unknowingly helped to create it.

CyberpunkConspiracy thriller

Daisy Jones & The Six

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 2019

A band makes one enormous record and plays one last show, and then it stops. Years afterwards, the people who were in the room are asked to explain how it happened: the singer who joined the group, the songwriter who started it, the players, the producer and the people who loved them. They do not remember the same decade the same way.

Historical fictionLiterary fiction

Daisy Miller

Henry James · 1878

Winterbourne meets Daisy Miller in Switzerland, finds her charming, and cannot decide whether her behaviour is innocence or carelessness. The other Americans he knows have no difficulty deciding, and their verdict travels with her to Rome, where the consequences of being talked about turn out to be serious, and where Winterbourne's own hesitation becomes part of the story as much as her behaviour does.

Modern classicsVictorian fiction

Dance of Death

Douglas Preston · 2005

Agent Pendergast was buried alive behind a wall at the end of the previous book, and the brother who digs him out and nurses him back to health did not do it out of kindness. Pendergast's ward calls in Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta and shows him a letter Pendergast had written about Diogenes, with a single date in it: the twenty-eighth of January.

Crime thrillerSerial killer thriller

Dance with the Devil

Sherrilyn Kenyon · 2003

Zarek has been a Dark-Hunter, one of the soulless guardians who stand between humanity and what would destroy it, for nine hundred years, and long ago he was exiled for something he wants to understand. Astrid, a woman who sees straight to the truth, becomes a point of light in a dark existence he has made for himself, and the two of them are drawn together as he looks into what was done to him.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Dancers in Mourning

Margery Allingham · 1937

Margery Allingham's Dancers in Mourning, a crime novel first published in 1937, is the eighth to feature her detective Albert Campion. Campion is asked to find out who is playing practical jokes on a musical-comedy star, and what looks like a nuisance turns into something considerably darker; the book has also been published in America under the title Who Killed Chloe?.

Classic crimeDetective fiction

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury · 1957

Douglas Spaulding is twelve in the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illinois, and the season is made of small ceremonies: picking dandelions for wine, a first pair of new sneakers, firecrackers and a friend who has just moved in. The novel follows him through the months as he works out, for the first time, that he is alive and will die.

Coming-of-ageClassic fantasyFamily novel

Dangerous Games

Lora Leigh · 2007

Home on leave after destroying a Colombian drug cartel, the Navy SEAL Clint McIntire finds himself in serious trouble with Morganna Chavez, the younger sister of his best friend. She has been working secretly with the Drug Enforcement Administration to uncover a lucrative and deadly conspiracy involving a date-rape drug, and the operation has put her in danger that he is not prepared for.

Contemporary romanceEspionage

Dangerous Games

Keri Arthur · 2007

In the underworld of Melbourne there is a nightclub for every taste, and one of them has become an obsession for Riley Jenson, a rare hybrid of vampire and werewolf who works as a guardian. She is not there for pleasure but for a killer using the club as hunting ground. The club is the only way in.

Urban fantasyParanormal romance

Danny Dunn, Scientific Detective

Jay Williams · 1975

Danny has a problem at school and wants to borrow the equipment his friends' professor is working with in order to solve it. Professor Bullfinch and Doctor Grimes are developing new scientific methods of fighting crime, and Danny ends up using their bloodhound robot and their instruments to investigate the disappearance of the manager of the local department store.

Young adult science fictionAmateur sleuth

Dare To Be Scared Thirteen Stories To Chill And Thrill

Robert D. San Souci · 2003

This collection holds thirteen scary stories for younger readers, illustrated throughout. They include ghost stories, jump tales told for the shock at the end, dark fantasy and science fiction, and several of them draw on legends, folklore and cultural traditions while being set in places the reader will recognise.

Ghost storyFolk horror

Dark Age

Pierce Brown · 2019

Atalantia au Grimmus, the dictator of the Society Remnant, has destroyed the Solar Republic's fleet in orbit and is besieging its Free Legions on Mercury. Three weeks after departing from Venus, Darrow of Lykos arrives on Mercury with his team to break the siege, and Atalantia agrees to an alliance with the Rim on the condition that two of its people take part in her attack on the planet.

Military science fictionDystopian

Dark Angel

V.C. Andrews · 1986

Heaven Leigh Casteel comes to live in her grandmother's house in Boston, where she expects friends, good schools, beautiful clothes and love, and a chance to make the family name respectable and to find her brothers and sisters. What she meets in that world instead is a set of secrets nobody wants remembered.

Domestic horrorFamily novel

Dark Blood

Christine Feehan · 2014

Zev Hunter was an elite warrior, a dealer of death to rogue Lycans who preyed on human beings. He was a loner who never allowed himself personal attachments and was fierce at his work, and then he wakes in the darkness of the sacred cave of warriors to the voice of a woman who has haunted his fantasies for centuries and is soothing him back to consciousness.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Dark Carousel

Christine Feehan · 2016

The moment Charlotte Vintage walks into his club, Tariq Asenguard's blood is set on fire. The ancient Carpathian had given up hope of finding his lifemate, and now he will do anything to make her his own. What Tariq does not know is that Charlotte is using herself and her best friend as bait to draw out the killers who murdered her brother.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Dark Celebration

Christine Feehan · 2006

Mikhail Dubrinsky, who has been Prince of the Carpathians for centuries, fears he cannot protect his people much longer from their greatest threat, which is extinction. Their enemies intend to bring it about by slaughtering Carpathian women, and with his own lifemate Raven and their daughter Savannah vulnerable, Mikhail's remaining hope is to bring his scattered people together.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Dark Challenge

Christine Feehan · 2000

Julian Savage is golden and powerful and tormented, a hunter who walks alone and has always kept himself far from his Carpathian kind, alien even to his twin. Then he hears Desari sing, and the emotions he had lost come back to him along with a hunger to possess her, which blinds him to the danger stalking him.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Dark Curse

Christine Feehan · 2008

Lara Calladine is an expert on ice caves, and the cave she keeps looking for is the one she was kept in as a child, where her father and her great-grandfather used her as a source of blood. Her aunts helped her escape, and the search now is to bring them out too. The trail leads her to the Carpathian mountains, and to a man who has come there to die.

Paranormal romanceVampire horror

About the book library

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.

From our books editor

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Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.

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Browse by genre

Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.

Primary genre

Romance

The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.

676 books Primary genre

Fantasy

Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.

685 books Primary genre

Sci-Fi

Generation ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.

536 books Primary genre

Horror

Haunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.

381 books Primary genre

Mystery & Thriller

Detectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.

599 books Primary genre

Historical Fiction

Cathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.

580 books Primary genre

Literary Fiction

Novels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.

575 books Primary genre

Adventure

Shipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.

324 books

One 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.

Browse by tag

Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.

Tag

Romantasy

Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.

70 books Tag

Contemporary Romance

Modern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.

155 books

Romantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.