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 16 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.
Jack Harmon is already being picked on at school when he finds a mobile phone on the bus home. There is a voice on the other end of the line, and the voice wants Jack to do things for it. Jack does as he is told, and the people around him begin to think that he has lost his mind.
Georgina is sacked from a restaurant and comes home early to find her boyfriend in bed with somebody else, both on the same day. She takes the first job she is offered, behind the bar of a newly opened pub, and then discovers that the man who owns it is the boy she fell in love with at school. He does not remember her.
Born without magic, Joram was one of the Dead and was denied the throne of Merilon, and for years he lived among outlaws and survived by his wits. Now he carries the Darksword, a weapon that absorbs magic, and he returns to the enchanted kingdom that was once his home to take revenge and claim his birthright. There he will test Bishop Vanya and the army of Duuk-tsarith.
At Oxford in the twenty-first century, history students do their fieldwork by travelling into the past as observers, and Kivrin Engle has prepared for years to visit the fourteenth century. Her tutors finally agree to send her, and then the drop does not go as planned and the team at home has problems of its own to deal with.
An earthquake in California opens a crack in the ground, and Dorothy, her cousin Zeb and a horse fall through it into a country beneath the earth. They are joined by the Wizard, who arrived the same way, and by a piglet, and together they travel through lands of vegetable people and glass cities looking for a way back to the surface.
Double or Nothing is told by a writer who plans to shut himself in a room for a year with nothing but food and supplies, on the theory that the isolation will force a book out of him, and by the book he keeps failing to produce. The second narrative follows a Jewish man arriving in America and keeps changing as the first narrative reshapes it.
Lorenzo Smythe is a bankrupt actor and a superb mimic, drinking away the last of his money when a spaceman buys him a drink and puts him on a ship to Mars. The job turns out to be impersonating a kidnapped politician whose treaty with the Martians depends on him, and the part becomes harder to leave the longer he plays it.
Julia Ransom is the widow of August Ransom, a well-known psychic whose murder six months ago left her with a media circus to survive. She is only beginning to be all right again when she spends an evening with friends and walks along the San Francisco waterfront, where her ordinary happiness is interrupted by the case that the novel is built around.
The Starship Titanic is sabotaged before its maiden voyage is properly under way, and the damage brings on a catastrophe the story calls a Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure, leaving the liner crashed on Earth. Three humans from the planet it has landed on are recruited to help repair it, which means dealing with the ship's central computer as well as the bomb on board. Two of the people behind the sabotage had arranged it for the insurance.
Frances O'Roark Dowell's Dovey Coe, published in 2000, is set in the mountains of North Carolina in the 1920s. It is narrated by a twelve-year-old girl who wants to set the record straight about a death in her family, and it won the Edgar Award in 2001 for the best children's mystery of that year.
Wren Southerland's reckless use of magic has cost her the place she had in the Queen's Guard and the company of the friend she loves. So when a letter arrives from a reclusive lord asking her to come to his estate to cure a patient, she takes the commission, and finds that the house and the man she is meant to heal are not what the letter described.
Pell's World is the transit point between Earth's sector of space and the breakaway colonies of Union, and whoever holds it controls the road between them. The stationers of Downbelow have kept to their neutrality while ships, refugees and politics arrive, and the war fought far away finally reaches their docks. Earth's corporation still governs what it can from a distance, and the fleets it sends out to hold the colonies together come to Pell.
Fifteen-year-old Jessie and six companions from an outdoor education program take the company's rafting gear without permission and set off down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. There are no adults, no permit and no river map, and the first days on the water are the best time any of the seven of them have ever had.
Robby Schwartz writes comic strips on his computer, and his favourite creation is Dr. Maniac, a wicked supervillain with a taste for drama and destruction. Then Dr. Maniac escapes the screen and starts walking around in the real world, while seven ordinary children are trapped inside the HorrorLand theme park and nobody knows how to reach them.
In 1868 a twenty-one-year-old Bram Stoker waits in a deserted tower with crucifixes, holy water and a rifle, and prays to survive the night. He has already decided that if he lives, he will write down everything that led him there, and the novel is the record he produces, assembled from his own diaries and the letters of the people who were caught up in the same events.
Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, travels to a castle in Transylvania to settle a client's affairs and finds that his host is not alive. Count Dracula soon leaves for England, where he begins feeding on the people of a seaside town. Told through letters, diaries and newspaper reports rather than by a single narrator, the book follows Harker and the group led by Professor Van Helsing who set out to destroy him.
Jack Morgan is fourteen, recently orphaned and wanted over a robbery he had nothing to do with, so he is hiding in the starship his uncle left him when another vessel crashes nearby. The only survivor is Draycos, a warrior of a dragon-like species who cannot stay alive for long without a living host to ride on. Draycos needs a body and a pilot, Jack needs someone who can clear his name, and the arrangement they make is meant to be temporary.
Kindan has taken a place as an apprentice at the Harper Hall, where he has to deal with a bully, a relationship the people around him consider forbidden, and the responsibility that comes with being a protector of the hall's new female apprentices after the Masterharper ends the old prohibition on women becoming harpers. Then an illness arrives that spreads like influenza, and it threatens to do what centuries of Threadfall never managed: kill every human being on Pern. The book sits shortly before the third return of Thread.
The Good Magician Humfrey is accidentally doused with water from the Fountain of Youth and regresses to babyhood, and so does the dragon he was dealing with. At the same time, three-year-old Princess Ivy has wandered off into Xanth, and her mother Queen Irene has to find her. Ivy's talent, which nobody has recognised yet, is enhancement.
Firestone is the mineral that lets the dragons of Pern breathe flame, and the mine that produces it has exploded, killing the men inside. A young man called Cristov volunteers to go back for the rock the dragons need, and the work is as dangerous as the accident that started it. His story is told alongside those of Pellar and Halla, who are the same age.
Young Kindan expects little from his life until the people of Pern discover what the watch-whers, distant relatives of the dragons, can actually do. The beasts can warn miners about gas in the seams they are digging and find men trapped after a cave-in, and the work of putting them to use begins in the camp where Kindan is growing up.
Pern is a colony world that has lost the memory of what it is, and every few generations a silver rain of spores falls from the sky and eats everything organic it touches. The only defence is the dragons: bred from a native species, bonded to a rider at hatching, and able to burn the spores out of the air. Lessa is the last surviving heir of Ruatha Hold, living as a kitchen drudge while she waits for a chance to take her home back. When the dragonriders of Benden come looking for candidates, she gets that chance, and the bond she forms changes what the Weyrs are able to do.
Claire Randall has kept her secrets for twenty years, and she is returning to Scotland with her grown daughter to tell the truth about them. What she has to explain involves the Jacobite rising, the Battle of Culloden and the husband she left behind in the eighteenth century, and her daughter has never been told any of it.
Pern has not recovered from the plague that killed holders and craftsmen less than fifteen years earlier, and now the dragons themselves are falling ill. Fiona of Fort Weyr, the only surviving child of Lord Holder Bemin, is caught up in it when she impresses a gold dragon she was not expecting. The story takes place in the winter of 508 After Landing, weeks into a new Pass of Thread.
Seven years after the events of Dragonflight, the riders who came forward in time to help protect Pern are at odds with the riders who were already there. An argument between them ends with F'nor stabbed, and he is sent south to recover, where he falls in love and finds out what some of the Oldtimers have been doing.
The gods have left Krynn and the dragons rule the continent, dividing the nations between them under a weak treaty about magic. Caramon Majere, on his deathbed, sends a Solamnic knight and a kender who has come back through the Device of Time Traveling to find the mage Dalamar, while a seventeen-year-old girl takes control of the Knights of Neraka.
Five friends meet again after years apart and find that the world they left has changed: dragons have come back, the gods have withdrawn and the armies of a Highlord are taking the continent apart. The companions are carrying something that the soldiers want, and they do not yet know what it is for or who they can take it to.
The war has moved to the sea. Tanis Half-Elven comes back to his friends after time spent in the company of the enemy and does not tell them everything that happened, and the companions take ship out of the port of Flotsam. Aboard is a helmsman with a history of his own, and behind them the Dragonarmies are recovering from their defeat at the High Clerist's Tower.
The Chaos War begins because the Irda, an island people who hide themselves under an illusion, break open a magical object in the hope that it will protect them from invasion. Inside it is an entity called Chaos, long considered too dangerous to touch. Meanwhile a Nightlord returns a dead man's body to his parents.
The companions who freed the refugees of Pax Tharkas are sent to find them a permanent home, and the city they travel to is destroyed by dragons while they are standing in it. The party is split between two escapes, and each half has to work out what it is fighting for. The war for Krynn is going badly, and winter is closing in.
Pern looks like a paradise to the colonists who choose it, and they come hoping for a simpler, agrarian way of life away from the wars they have left behind. Not long after they land, a lethal spore called Thread begins falling from the sky, and the colony has very little time to work out how to live through it.
Menolly, a young musician who keeps nine fire lizards of her own, arrives at the Harper Hall on Pern to begin training as a harper. She is the first girl ever apprenticed there, the Masters disagree about whether she should be taught at all, and the students she has to live with resent her for being different.
Menolly is the daughter of a fishing family on Pern, and she has a talent for music that her hold has no use for. When her father forbids her the training she wants, she leaves home, and the timing could not be worse: the deadly rain that falls from the sky, called Thread, has begun again.
The dragons kept in the dragon sanctuaries no longer regard them as safe places to live, and they have started to see them as prisons instead and want their freedom back. In the hidden sanctuary of Wyrmroost, Celebrant the Just, King of the Dragons, is plotting his revenge: he means to overthrow the people who confined his kind and to bring back the Age of Dragons, when he and his kind ruled the world without any borders at all.
The dead rose on the battlefields of Gettysburg and the American Civil War stopped before it could be won. In the country that emerged, safety depends on a few people doing dangerous work, and the laws require Black and Native American children to attend combat schools to learn how to put the dead back down.
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America, alone during the pandemic and thinking about the men she has loved and the choices she has made. Her closest friend Zikora is a lawyer whose competence has never protected her from being hurt, and a third woman in their circle has her own account of the same years.
Gwen Frazier is a psychic counsellor, and the death of her friend and mentor, Evelyn Ballinger, brings her back to the small town of Wilby, Oregon, and to memories she would rather not revisit. Two years earlier a killer stalked the members of one of Ballinger's research studies, and Gwen survived it when two others did not. She is certain the two deaths are connected.
Laurel has not heard from her father since he left her mother when she was small, and she has kept the wound open by reading his novels and following his career. When a stranger comes into her bookshop on Long Island and picks up a copy of the latest one, she has a premonition, and what follows takes her into the family she has never met.
Dream Park is an amusement park where visitors act out adventures that the park's technology makes solid, and in March 2051 a game is running that has drawn a large audience. Somewhere in the middle of the illusion a man is murdered, with a weapon that should not exist inside the game. Alex Griffin, the park's head of security, has to work out which of the players did it.
Dr Fridolin is a physician in Vienna, comfortably married, and one evening his wife tells him about a fantasy she had about another man. The confession unsettles him more than he admits. Over the next two days and nights he moves through the city, meeting people who give him pieces of a world he did not know was there, and it ends with a masked ball.
Four lifelong friends reunite for their annual hunting trip at an isolated lodge in the Jefferson Tract, and there they find themselves caught between an alien invasion and an insane retired Air Force colonel. The four men share something they have kept since childhood, when they saved an older boy from a group of bullies: telepathy, shared dreaming and the ability to see a trace left behind by human movement.
Sara Fielding is a prim and proper gentlewoman who writes novels, and curiosity takes her out of her country cottage and into the London gambling world of Derek Craven, a man who rose from poverty to become the owner of the most exclusive gaming house in the city. He finds that the innocent woman he had dismissed as a mouse can be something quite different, and she finds that a cynical gambler can be shaken by what he feels.
Returning home to Sussex one afternoon, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes find a stone in their garden that once belonged to the Imperial gardens in Kyoto. It brings back the spring of 1924, when on their way back from India they agreed to do a small but dangerous job for the emperor of Japan, and when Russell met a young Japanese woman who guided them into a secret meeting with the Prince Regent.
Michael Terny has been at seven schools in four years and knows what to expect at each of them, because he is the fat kid and there is always somebody willing to make his life difficult. He is also a lucid dreamer, able to recognise that he is asleep and arrange what happens next, and the dream world is the one place where he is safe and in charge.
A Celtic warlord was murdered before he could marry the woman he loved, and he has been reborn again and again since, each time without any memory of the lives before. She has been waiting for him through all of it, and when they meet again he does not know her.
Lady is left for dead when the company is broken at the end of Shadow Games, and she begins the novel by digging herself out of a heap of the dead. Separated from Croaker and the rest of the unit, she attaches herself to two strange men and starts to rebuild an army in a country that has very little appetite for another war.
Generations after a nuclear war, healing is done by travelling practitioners who carry trained serpents with them, and the rarest of those animals is the dreamsnake, whose venom eases the dying. Snake, a young healer, loses her dreamsnake and has to cross a thinly populated continent to find another, through settlements that treat strangers in their own ways.
Charles Dickens is at the height of his fame in 1865 when a train he is travelling in runs off the rails at Staplehurst, and the disaster lays the ground for the last five years of his life. The man telling the story is his friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, whose account of Dickens cannot be trusted.
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.
