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 17 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.
The drought has been going on long enough that life is a list of things people are not allowed to do with water, and then the taps stop running for good. In a California suburb, Alyssa's street turns into something close to a war zone as neighbours and families fight each other for a supply that cannot cover them all.
Dubliners is fifteen stories about the same city, arranged in an order that runs from childhood to public life. A boy watches a priest's house and a market; a young woman stands at a window and decides whether to leave with a sailor; a canvasser spends an evening with friends while his career quietly ends; a Christmas party hears a singer and remembers. The stories avoid the climaxes a reader expects, and the moment that matters is usually an admission or an understanding that arrives late, in private.
An unnamed woman in an Ohio town makes pies and tarts to sell to local restaurants while she looks after her four children, and the novel is made out of what goes on in her mind while she does it. It is written mostly as a single long sentence that runs for a thousand pages. Her thoughts are as ordinary as anybody's, and they go on for a very long time.
Dumb Witness is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in July 1937 and in the United States later that year under the title Poirot Loses a Client. It features Hercule Poirot and is narrated by his friend Captain Hastings, and it is the last of the books in which Hastings appears until the final Poirot novel.
Arrakis is a desert world where water is scarce and the only export worth a war is the spice melange, which extends life, sharpens minds and makes interstellar travel possible. Duke Leto Atreides is handed stewardship of the planet and arrives with his concubine Jessica, their son Paul and a household that knows it is walking into a trap set by the Harkonnens and the Emperor behind them. Paul has been raised for politics and survival, and the desert gives him harder lessons than either. He and Jessica find shelter with the Fremen, the desert people the planet's rulers have never learned to see, whose plans for Arrakis run on a timescale measured in generations.
Twelve years after Paul Atreides took control of the desert planet and the spice trade, his empire is run from the capital city and his name is used to justify a war that has killed billions of people across the galaxy. He is a prophet who does not want the future he can see, and he is married to a princess for political reasons while his concubine remains the person he actually lives with. A conspiracy made up of the guild of navigators, the sisterhood that trained him and a face from the first book's dead arrives in the city to end his rule. Paul lets it come.
Alex Rider is on holiday in the south of France when a bomb destroys the house he is staying in, and the trail leads to Sir Damian Cray, a pop star and peace campaigner who is preparing a global charity concert. Alex is drawn into the investigation and finds that the campaign is not what it appears.
An alien invasion is under way in China, and humanity is divided about how to answer it: the Chinese government is determined to fight on its own despite losses close to catastrophic. Captain Wit O'Toole of the Mobile Operations Police and Mazer Rackham have destroyed one of the three alien landers, but they did it without authorisation and with a nuclear warhead they were not permitted to use, which leaves them in Chinese custody. The third book of the First Formic War follows the attempt to turn isolated victories into the defence of a planet.
Philippa de Beauchamp is as impulsive as she is beautiful, and when she hears that she is to be married to the repellent Baron de Bridgeport she flees her father's castle. Her daring escape in a wool wagon quickly becomes a misadventure, and it leaves her in the arms of Dienwald de Fortenberry, a rogue she has no intention of trusting.
John Tradescant is the greatest gardening pioneer of his day and a man of humble birth who is trusted by politicians, aristocrats and royalty. He collects, raises and nurtures plants and travels the known world looking for new species, and his position gives him a view of the most secret activities at the court of Charles I. His loyalties are tested when he enters the orbit of the Duke of Buckingham, the most powerful man in England.
The novel details the lives of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and their interwoven stories, in the Salinas Valley of California. Its material includes identity, grief and the question of what it means to be human, and the book is tinged with biblical echoes of the fall of Adam and Eve and the rivalry of Cain and Abel across two generations.
A brilliant Egyptologist translating a set of hieroglyphics comes across a message that describes the tomb of an unnamed pharaoh, one that has never been found. He cannot mount an expedition himself without alerting the Egyptian authorities, so he tells a freelance writer, and between them they assemble a crew. The odds are not in their favour.
A tenth-century Arab diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, is sent north and falls in with a company of Vikings, who take him with them to a settlement that is being attacked by something nobody can describe. The account of the journey is presented as his manuscript, and the second half of the book retells the story of Beowulf.
Jack Reacher is hitching through the heat of West Texas when a young woman named Carmen Greer offers him a lift. She wants something in return: her husband is about to leave prison, he has beaten her before, the local police cannot be trusted, and the ranch he is coming home to belongs to his family, which owns everything around it.
Honor Harrington is on Hades, the prison planet the Republic of Haven uses for the prisoners it does not intend to release. The footage of her execution has already been broadcast, and state funerals have been held on two worlds. She is alive, she is not alone, and the question the book is built on is how many people she can take with her when she leaves.
Firestar's three grandchildren now know about the prophecy that describes their future, and each of them wants something different from it. Lionpaw wants to be unbeatable in battle, Hollypaw wants to lead, and Jaypaw believes that only he can see what has happened and what is coming. Their strengths are tested when ThunderClan is attacked without warning.
The ability to manipulate time has come in useful for Caleb Edge in his career as a T-FLAC operative, and his current assignment is to get close to Heather Shaw in order to find her banker father and forty-eight billion dollars of missing terrorist funds. The difficulty is that Heather has been in hiding for a year and does not know where he is.
Edge is the last of a band of immortals who have been hunted and killed one by one by Frank Stiles, a man determined to extract their secrets. Edge intends to make him pay, and to do it he needs to find the young woman said to be the Golden Child, whose existence he has only heard described in rumours.
Effi Briest, written by Theodor Fontane and published as a book in 1895, is a realist novel of Prussian society, and it is usually discussed together with Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary as one of the great nineteenth-century novels about a marriage that ends badly. Its heroine is seventeen when the story opens, and she is married off to a man more than twenty years older than herself.
Nine-year-old David has lost his mother in an accident, and he has moved with his father and grandmother from Minnesota to Pennsylvania. Primrose is thirteen, cynical and bossy, and lives with her fortune-telling mother in a house where she is mostly left alone. The two of them meet at an Easter egg hunt neither of them wants to attend.
Thirteen-year-old Vladimir Tod hates junior high: bullies harass him, the principal is watching him and the girl he likes prefers his best friend. He also has a secret, because his mother was human and his father was a vampire, and with no idea how far his powers go he struggles daily with blood cravings and his enlarged fangs.
El Señor Presidente is a novel by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, first published in Spanish in 1946 after the manuscript had been held up for years by censorship. It is one of the founding works of the dictator novel, and it examines what living under a totalitarian government does to the people who are subject to it.
Elantris was a city of radiant beings who used their powers for the good of Arelon, and each of them had been an ordinary person until the transforming power called the Shaod touched them. Then, ten years ago, the magic failed without warning. The Elantrians became wizened and leper-like, the city turned dark and crumbling, and the Shaod became a curse that no one survives publicly.
Eragon and his dragon Saphira have saved the rebel state from the forces of King Galbatorix, the ruler of the Empire, and Eragon must now travel to Ellesmera, the land of the elves, for further training as a Dragon Rider in magic and swordsmanship. The journey opens his eyes to new places, and chaos and betrayal follow him until he no longer knows whom to trust.
Eleanor Oliphant is twenty-nine, lives in Glasgow and works as a finance clerk for a graphic design company. She is academically able, does the crossword in her lunch hour, and has no friends at all; her weekends run on frozen pizza, vodka and telephone calls with Mummy. Then she and Raymond, the office IT man, help an elderly stranger who has fallen in the street, and the three of them begin the slow work of rescuing one another from isolation. What changes for Eleanor is not her circumstances but her understanding of them.
Winwood High is electing a student president in 1992, and Tracy Flick intends to win. She is the kind of student who runs everything and is resented for it, and her history teacher, Jim McAllister, decides that her victory would be bad for the school, so he recruits the local golden boy to stand against her. What he sets off involves the candidate's sister, an old grudge, an affair the staff would rather forget and a ballot count he decides to manage himself.
Maud finds a note in her own handwriting that reads Elizabeth is missing, and she cannot remember writing it. She is becoming forgetful, but she is certain that something has happened to her friend Elizabeth, and she sets out to find out what, while the people around her are not sure she can. Her memory is not helping.
Elizabeth the Great is a biography of Elizabeth I by Elizabeth Jenkins, published in 1958. It sets out to describe the woman as much as the queen, and it follows her from a childhood in which her position was never safe to a reign that gave its name to an age.
At her birth, Ella of Frell is given a foolish fairy's gift: obedience. She must obey any order she is given, whether it is to hop on one foot for a day and a half or to do something far worse. Ella is strong-willed enough to refuse to accept the gift as her fate, and she sets out to break the curse.
Lynsey Thorpe asks, half as a joke at a friend's wedding party, who will be the prince to her Cinderella, and a stranger answers her seriously. It is only afterwards that she finds out he is Madoc Morgan, the brother of the bride and the man who has just taken over the company she works for.
Two years after Aurora Rising, citizens of the Glitter Band are dying in a manner nobody can explain: the neural implants in their heads overheat and destroy their brains, apparently at random. As the deaths become more frequent, two Prefects have nowhere obvious to start, and several habitats are deciding to leave.
Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home, and she is also spoiled, headstrong and satisfied with herself. She overestimates her own abilities as a matchmaker, is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives, and her imagination frequently leads her astray. The novel is set in the village of Highbury and the estates around it.
Aelin Galathynius has a claim to a throne she does not yet hold, and the people loyal to her have been bought and lost as often as they have been won. Those with magic are now at odds with those without it, and the only route left to Aelin runs through a journey she may not survive. She is not the only person in the story making decisions about what to give up.
Jim Graham is a young English boy living in Shanghai when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and in the chaos that follows the occupation of the international settlement he loses his parents. For a while he lives alone in abandoned houses, eating whatever is left in the cupboards, until he decides that his best chance of surviving is to give himself up to the Japanese army. The camp at Lunghua turns out to be safer than starving, and stranger than anything he expected.
Twenty-seven years ago the sun failed, and since then vampires have taken the world and rebuilt it in their own image. The last living vampire hunter is a prisoner awaiting execution for killing a king, and the empress has not finished with him. She sends her historian to take down the story of his life, and he tells it.
Retired detective Bill Hodges and his partner Holly Gibney run a private investigation agency, and Hodges has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given months to live. He is drawn instead into a spree of suicides, all of them connected to the same source. Brady Hartsfield, the Mercedes killer, has found a new way to reach his victims and drive them to kill themselves.
Orson Scott Card's Ender in Exile, published in 2008, is part of the Ender's Game series. It fits into the gap between the first novel of the series and its first sequel, and it expands the last chapter of the earlier book into a volume of its own while drawing on the Shadow Saga as well.
Earth has survived two wars with an alien species and is preparing for a third. Andrew Wiggin, called Ender, is the third child in a family allowed a third only because the government asked for one, and the tests say he might be the commander the fleet needs. He is taken to Battle School in orbit, where the training is run as a series of games and the adults in charge are willing to break a six-year-old to find out whether he can think under pressure. Ender is good at the games, and he keeps being isolated on purpose so that he has to rely on himself. His sister and brother are still on Earth, and both of them have plans of their own.
Bean is small even for a child living on the streets of a city where gangs of hungry kids fight over scraps, and he survives with his mind rather than his fists. He is recruited to Battle School, where the children are trained in war games for a conflict they are too young to understand. Bean's talent is finding the weakness in whatever is in front of him.
Michael Rogers is a young rolling stone who has never settled to anything, and when he sees the Gipsy's Acre estate he decides that he wants to live there in a house built by the architect Rudolf Santonix. He is poor, the land carries a bad reputation, and the novel is told in his own voice as he explains how he came to be there.
Yeva is a biologist who travels Ukraine in a campervan she has converted into a mobile laboratory, collecting rare snails and failing to breed them while her relatives press her to settle down. Her research is paid for by working for a bridal agency that brings Western men to romance tours, and two of the women she meets there have plans of their own.
On a windy afternoon in the Chilterns, Joe Rose's ordered life is interrupted by a ballooning accident and by a brief encounter with a stranger called Jed Parry. Nothing much passes between them at the time. In Parry it gives rise to an obsession powerful enough to test Joe's rational certainties and the love of his wife.
Herman Broder survived the war in Poland because a servant in his father's household hid him, and he married her afterwards out of the obligation he felt. In New York he also has a mistress he loves and a wife who was reported dead and has now come back, and he spends his days telling each of them what is convenient.
Kylara Vatta is the unconventional member of a shipping family, and she has been building a defensive force out of a converted ship and a crew nobody else would hire. The attacks on civilian trade that she has been answering turn out to be part of something larger, with a political purpose behind it and a personal interest in her family.
Eden Black walks among humans, protecting them from other-worlders who abduct and enslave. She looks human but is an alien of a kind distinguished by golden hair and skin and gifted with the ability to kill without remorse and with total accuracy, until the night she has one shot at a human slaver and misses. Failure is not in her vocabulary, and neither is partner, but she is assigned one.
Everworld is a place that should not exist and does, and the creatures living in it should not exist either; it is a land where dreams and nightmares are real and frequently lethal. April, David, Christopher and Jalil have come to the end of the line, because Senna, the only passage they had back to the real world, is gone and is not coming back.
Two months after Elizabeth Holland comes home to Manhattan, society is waiting to see her take her place again, and she refuses. Her sister Diana is left to face the questions alone, while further uptown the city's most celebrated newly married couple have little but scorn for each other. The papers call Penelope's friend Carolina Broad an heiress, and her fortune is not what it appears to be.
A hollowed-out asteroid appears in near-Earth orbit, an exact copy of the asteroid Juno but carved into seven enormous chambers and rotating to make its own gravity. The United States and the Soviet Union both want it, and the scientists who go inside find cities that have been running themselves for centuries. At the end of the last chamber is a corridor that leads nowhere on Earth.
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.
