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 15 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.
Showing 48 of 3473 books
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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Detective Sam Vernelli never solved the murder of his fiancee more than a decade ago, and it is the case that has stayed with him ever since. Now her determined younger sister, Claire Fontaine, is being threatened in ways that are frightening and familiar, and Sam is not prepared to let her face whoever it is on her own.
Cimorene is a princess with an interest in fencing, magic, cooking and Latin, and her family finds all of it unsuitable. When they announce her engagement to a prince she cannot stand, she runs away, and the dragons she meets are happy to take her on. She becomes the princess of a dragon called Kazul, keeps the library and the treasure, and spends her time discouraging the princes who come to rescue her.
Lucanus grows up in the household of his stepfather, the Roman governor of Antioch, studies medicine in Alexandria and becomes one of the greatest physicians of the ancient world, travelling through the Mediterranean healing the sick. In time he learns of the life and death of Christ and recognises in him the God he has been seeking, and he sets out to discover everything he can about a man he never met. The novel is the story of how he came to write the third Gospel.
Jason Lynx is an antiques dealer with a habit of solving puzzles, and one morning on a walk with his dog he finds something that puts him in the middle of a murder. As he looks into it, an unsolved case from the police records turns out to be connected.
Mr and Mrs Darcy have been married six years and are preparing for their annual ball at Pemberley. Jane and Bingley have arrived, the staff have everything in hand, and then the night before the ball Lydia turns up in hysterics, shouting that her husband has been murdered. A body is found in the woods.
Poirot is flying back to England on the midday service from Paris to Croydon and sleeps through most of it, and the eleven other passengers in the rear compartment include a mystery writer, two French archaeologists, a dentist, a doctor, a moneylender, a businessman and three women. Close to landing a wasp is seen in the cabin, and then the moneylender is found dead.
Harry Dresden, Chicago's professional wizard, takes on two problems at once in the fifth Dresden Files novel. A priest asks him to recover the Shroud of Turin, stolen and on its way to a private sale, and a noble of the Red Court vampires challenges him to a duel that would settle a war by single combat. Neither job stays separate for long, and the people who took the Shroud turn out to belong to an older and considerably worse kind of trouble.
Hercule Poirot is holidaying in Egypt when a wealthy young heiress, Linnet Ridgeway Doyle, is shot aboard the Nile steamer Karnak during a cruise south towards Abu Simbel. Almost everyone on the boat has a reason to dislike her, including the friend whose fiance she married, and Poirot has to work out how and when the killing happened.
The apocalypse has already happened, the world has burned, and something new has grown out of the destruction. Bec is back to face the Demonata, and after centuries of imprisonment she is more powerful than she has ever been, which is fortunate, because the demons are not standing alone any more and Lord Loss is no longer the greatest threat to humanity.
Deathwatch is a novel by the American writer Robb White, published in 1972 and awarded the Edgar for best juvenile mystery the following year. A wealthy hunter hires a college student as a guide in the Mojave Desert, and after a shooting the two of them become a hunter and a hunted man.
It begins with the murder of an American woman in the back streets of Tokyo and it ends in war. A group of Japanese industrialists takes control of their country's government and turns it against the United States, and Jack Ryan is in the middle of it. The two countries are at peace when the book opens, and that is the arrangement that breaks.
Rachel Sexton works as an intelligence analyst for the White House, and her father is running for president on a platform that has been attacking NASA for years. When the space agency announces that it has found a meteorite in the Arctic containing fossil evidence of extraterrestrial life, the administration sends Rachel to verify the find before the election. She joins a team of civilian scientists on the ice, and what they are shown is convincing enough to end the argument about whether life exists elsewhere. Rachel begins to notice details that the briefings did not cover.
The gods of the Myriad were enormous sea creatures that fed on human fear, and thirty years ago they turned on each other and tore one another apart. What is left of them is valuable: the remains of their bodies are cut and sold as godware. Hark lives on the island of Lady's Crave with his friend Jelt, and one of the gods is not as dead as everyone believes.
Odd Thomas can see the dead, and during a chance encounter with a truck driver he receives a vision of three children being burned alive by a man in a red suit and a black mask. He understands that the driver had the same vision because he is the man in the mask, and Odd has to stop him.
Sookie Stackhouse has so few living relatives that she really hated to lose one. What she never guessed was that the relative would be her cousin Hadley, who had been a consort of the Vampire Queen of New Orleans and was, technically speaking, already dead. As the unexpected heir, Sookie inherits whatever Hadley left behind, along with the people who want it kept quiet.
Juliette believed she had beaten the Reestablishment and taken charge of her own life, and the fifth book of the series begins with her finding out how much of what she knew was arranged for her. She is left with the same choice as before, between being used as a weapon and fighting back.
In an alternate United States, love has been classified as a dangerous disease and every citizen is required to undergo a procedure called the Cure at eighteen. Lena Haloway is living with her aunt and uncle in Portland, Maine, and looking forward to her treatment. With ninety-five days to go, she meets a boy from the Wilds.
Four friends from a Georgia city drive into the mountains for a last canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River, a wild stretch of water that is about to be dammed. Lewis Medlock, an experienced outdoorsman, has planned the weekend; the narrator, Ed Gentry, is a graphic artist who has come along because Lewis asked him to. The river turns out to be indifferent to their preparations.
Emil Sinclair grows up in a comfortable middle-class German household that he thinks of as one world, and discovers that there is another, darker one at the edge of it. A boast he makes to impress a local boy puts him in the power of a bully, and he is rescued by Max Demian, a classmate who reads the Bible in a way nobody else does. Demian changes how Sinclair sees everything.
Born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Damon Fields has no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-coloured hair, a caustic wit and a talent for survival. The novel follows him through foster care, child labour, failing schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves and crushing losses, in his own voice.
Kay Scarpetta is at a death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts when her phone sounds an emergency alert and a video arrives that appears to be from her niece Lucy. The film is surveillance footage of Lucy taken almost twenty years earlier, and more of it follows. Scarpetta cannot tell her husband, her investigator or even Lucy what she has been sent.
Sophie Bentwood is bitten on the hand by a stray cat she has been feeding, and she refuses to see a doctor about it. She is a translator, her husband Otto is a lawyer in the middle of a bitter split from his business partner, and the two of them are childless and comfortable in a brownstone in Brooklyn. The bite is the start of a long weekend.
Warner is recovering from the bullet Juliette put in his shoulder, and he is still in charge of a sector that is beginning to talk about rebellion. His superiors want the girl found and the two traitors who helped her escape dealt with, and his own obsession with Juliette is not something he can explain to the men he commands.
Jonty Rand was raised in a bawdy house and has posed as a boy all her life to keep the cowboys who use the place from noticing her. The most notorious of them, in her view, is Cord McBain. When her grandmother's dying wish makes Cord her guardian, Jonty is sure she will never be able to tell him who she is.
Evangeline Jenner is the shyest of the group of young women known as the Wallflowers, and she stands to become extremely rich when her inheritance comes due. To get to it she has to escape the relatives who mean to take it from her, so she approaches Viscount St. Vincent, a notorious rake, with a proposal he has no respectable reason to accept.
Evelinde has agreed to marry the most notorious laird in Scotland, known to everyone as the Devil of the Highlands. Her reason is simple: anything is preferable to remaining with her cruel stepmother, and although the stories about her new husband should give her pause, the man himself turns out to be harder to read than the rumours suggest.
Meddelin Chan accidentally kills her blind date, and her mother calls in her even more meddlesome aunties to help dispose of the body. Disposing of a body turns out to be harder than expected, especially once it has been shipped in a cake cooler to a billionaire's wedding at an island resort, where the whole family is working. The wedding is the biggest job their business has ever had.
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days brings together two science fiction novellas by Alastair Reynolds. Both of them are set in the same universe as his Revelation Space novels, though they stand apart from those books' plots and from one another, and the volume was published by Gollancz in 2003. The first of the pair is a story about a maze, a team and a very old alien structure.
Sophie Chesterton knows the right people, goes to the right parties and wears the right clothes, and suspects that her friends are rather nasty and her life amounts to very little. After one shocking evening she falls from grace entirely, and has to work out whether a girl really needs diamonds to be happy.
Bond is sent to investigate a diamond-smuggling operation that runs from the mines of Sierra Leone through London to Las Vegas, and the route is guarded by people who are prepared to kill over it. He meets Tiffany Case, one of the members of the gang, and uses her to get inside the operation. Once he is in America the hunter becomes the hunted, and the help he needs comes from the last person he expected.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys is the private journal he kept between 1660 and 1669, first published in the nineteenth century. It records his work at the navy office, his household and his pleasures day by day, it takes in the plague, a war and the Great Fire, and it is among the fullest eyewitness accounts of the English Restoration that survive.
A young villager in a world built out of blocks has been keeping a diary of his attempts to become a warrior instead of the farmer everyone expects him to be. The sixth book of the journal takes him further into the working life of the village, where the skills he has been practising are needed for something larger than his own training.
In the thirtieth century most people have left their bodies and live as software in the polises, where citizens are born from mind seeds and design their own children. Yatima is one of these, and when a catastrophe destroys the flesh-and-blood humans still living on Earth, the polises have to decide what they owe the rest of the universe. Then an ancient, encoded theory of physics turns out to be true.
Six years after he gave up investigating for the sake of his wife and daughter, Sid Halley is asked by the chairman of the racing authority to look into a run of suspicious races. He turns the request down, and the next day the man who made it is dead, and someone else wants a report written to order.
In Chicago, Jack Reacher stops to help a young woman with an injured leg carry her dry cleaning, and three men with guns take them both. They are driven out of the city and across the country, and on the way Reacher works out that the woman is an FBI agent. Nobody has told him who her family is, and her colleagues have no idea he is there.
Four novellas in one volume, each labelled with a season. One concerns a man serving a long sentence for a crime he did not commit; one a schoolboy who finds out what the old man living near him did during the war; one follows four boys into the woods looking for a body; and one is a story told in a club.
The National Security Agency's code-breaking supercomputer meets a cipher it cannot break, which would be a problem for any bureaucracy in any week. The programme was written by a former employee who objects to the agency reading private messages, and he has arranged for the algorithm to be published if anything happens to him. Then he dies, and the head cryptographer has a day to find out who is holding the key.
Richard MacDuff, a programmer, discovers that his employer plans to sell a system that could rewrite history, and turns to Dirk Gently, a detective whose method is to follow whatever coincidence turns up. The investigation takes in a cat, a professor, a horse in a bathroom and the fate of the human race.
Tom Sanders is the head of advanced products manufacturing at DigiCom, a computer hardware company, and he expects to be promoted to run the advanced products division once DigiCom has completed its merger with a publishing house. The job goes instead to Meredith Johnson, an ex-girlfriend who has just moved to Seattle from the company's headquarters in California. That evening Meredith calls Tom into her office, ostensibly to talk about a CD-ROM drive, and what happens there changes the whole shape of the story.
David Lurie is fifty-two, twice divorced, and a professor of communications at a technical university in Cape Town who teaches a course in romantic literature. An affair with one of his students costs him his job and his standing, and he retreats to the isolated smallholding of his daughter Lucy in the Eastern Cape. What begins as a visit turns into an extended stay, and the book follows what happens there.
Iris Winnow has the job she wanted at the Oath Gazette and nothing else in order. Her brother is missing at the front of a war between two gods, her mother is drinking through the grief, and the only place Iris can put any of it is in letters she writes to her brother's typewriter and leaves under her wardrobe door. The replies come from somebody else entirely, and in person her rival for the columnist post is Roman Kitt, who is cold, good at the job and impossible to like. The first Letters of Enchantment novel is a war story told through newspaper desks, enchanted typewriters and two people who do not know they are already writing to each other.
Dust from a long war has emptied most of Earth, and the people left behind are graded on their empathy. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter paid to retire androids that have escaped off-world service and hidden among humans; his test for telling them apart is whether they can care about the right things. He wants a real animal instead of the electric sheep on his roof. Between assignments he argues with his wife about the empathy box that connects them to a messiah figure the whole world worships, and he keeps running into machines whose behaviour raises the same questions about himself. His assignment is a list of escaped androids, and each one is harder to find than the last.
James Bond is sent to Jamaica to find out what happened to the head of the British intelligence station there, and he arrives expecting something close to a holiday. The centipede left in his hotel room disposes of that idea, and everything he looks into on the island leads him towards a recluse with steel pincers for hands.
Danny Torrance was the boy in the Overlook Hotel, and he has spent the years since living with what happened there. As an adult he takes up his father's drinking and his father's temper, and drifts across the country until he reaches a small town in New Hampshire and decides to stop. There he works at a hospice, where the residents give him a new name.
Mary Thorne is the orphaned niece of the doctor in the village of Greshamsbury, and she has been a favourite at the great house since she was a child. When Lady Arabella discovers that her only son Frank is in love with her, Mary is banished from the house: the family's debts are so bad that Frank has to marry money, and Mary has none.
Dolores Claiborne is a widow of sixty-five living on a small island in Maine, and the police suspect her of killing the wealthy elderly woman she worked for. Her answer is to sit down with the constable and a stenographer and tell the whole story, starting with her marriage, her husband's death thirty years earlier and the years she spent looking after Vera Donovan.
Bento Santiago tells the story of his life in retirement, beginning with his boyhood love for Capitu, the neighbour's daughter he was sent to a seminary to forget. He describes their marriage, his friendship with his school companion Escobar, and the suspicion about his wife that comes to define everything he remembers about his own household. The account belongs to the husband, so the reader has to weigh how much of it is evidence.
Dombey and Son is both a firm and a family, and the ambiguous connection between public and private life is at the heart of the novel. Paul Dombey runs his domestic affairs the way he runs his business, calculatingly and coldly. His relations with his son, his two wives and his neglected daughter Florence are the substance of the book.
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.
