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 18 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.
A dying wizard tries to pass on his powers to the eighth son of an eighth son who is being born at that very moment. The fact that the child is a daughter is discovered a little too late, and the consequence is a girl who has inherited a wizard's staff and a wizard's business in a world where that is not permitted.
Eragon is a farm boy in a mountain valley who finds a polished blue stone while hunting and discovers, when it hatches, that he has a dragon. His village is destroyed by the king's servants looking for it, and he leaves with an old storyteller, the dragon growing on his shoulder, and a plan to find the people who killed his uncle. The Empire has been ruled for a century by a dragon rider who turned on his own order, and a new rider is a threat that has to be removed. Eragon and Saphira travel across Alagaësia towards the Varden, and every city they pass through has someone in it who would sell them to the king.
Eric Thursley is thirteen, a would-be demonologist, and certain that his three wishes deserve a proper demon. What his summoning produces is Rincewind, the least competent wizard on the Discworld, at that moment stranded in the Dungeon Dimensions and entirely unable to grant anything at all. Since the spells that bind demons work on him regardless, Rincewind has to make the wishes happen, which is how a boy, a wizard, a parrot and a very large walking luggage end up touring the Disc.
Six children are sent on a month-long voyage across the Pacific for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to be there. Their differences stop mattering when a storm wrecks the boat and leaves them stranded in the middle of the ocean with no food, no water and almost no hope of being found.
It is 1968, and Rick Desmond has been sent to Brookline Asylum because his parents have decided that his temper is a disease. The staff talk about a Patient Zero, the first person to be tested on, and as Rick learns his way around the building he begins to understand that nobody is being cured here.
Peril was raised to serve Queen Scarlet, who used her lethal firescales to kill dragons in the SkyWing arena. She has since changed sides and is loyal to Clay, the only friend she has, and when Scarlet threatens the academy the dragonets attend, Peril sets out to find her old queen and stop her.
Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave a life of wealth and privilege in Mexico for the labour camps of southern California, where Mexican farm workers are living through the years before the Great Depression. Esperanza has never had to work, and the novel follows her as she learns how, alongside people who have been doing it for years and in a place where her family's old standing is worth nothing.
After a human uprising was put down by the Elders, the few cities still under human control are far apart and the land beyond them is feared. Lakeside Courtyard came through the fighting more or less intact, and its leaders have to work with the humans who remain. The peace is fragile, and the people keeping it are few.
Miranda has just become the life of the party, and all she had to do was die. Elevated by the King of the Mantle of Dracul, she goes from high-school theatre hopeful to glamorous fiend in a single night. Her guardian angel, Zachary, has been demoted to human form as her personal assistant, and there is a gala to arrange.
Carrie Montgomery grew up with seven older brothers and is used to getting what she wants, and what she wants is the man in the photograph: a farmer who has advertised for a practical mail-order bride to keep house and help raise his children. She arranges to marry him by proxy and then presents herself as a fait accompli.
An engineer spending the winter in the New England town of Starkfield notices a limping man named Ethan Frome and asks the neighbours about him. What he learns opens the story of how Frome was injured, and of the years he spent on a failing farm with a wife who was constantly ill and a cousin who came to help in the house.
Sophronia would rather take clocks apart and climb trees than learn how to behave in company, and her mother is desperate for her to become a proper lady. So she is sent to a finishing academy for young ladies of quality, which turns out to be something else. The lessons are not the ones her mother had in mind.
Holland lives on a property in western New South Wales with his daughter Ellen, and over the years he plants hundreds of eucalyptus trees on the land until it becomes a kind of outdoor museum. When Ellen is nineteen he announces that she may marry only a man who can correctly name every gum tree on the property.
Shane Galanter is ready to settle somewhere after years of moving, and the woman he has never forgotten is on his mind. Lauren Gibbs has spent her working life as a war correspondent and has given up on the future she once wanted. Emily Anderson is a college student raised by her grandparents who discovers, in her first year, a love story with a tragic ending that turns out to be her own beginning.
In Dublin, a school opens an evening class in Italian, and a group of people who have nothing else in common sign up for it. Their teacher is an Irishwoman who lived in Italy for years and came home after the death of the man she went there with. Over the course of a year the class changes what several of the students do with their lives.
Sophie Foster has decided to fight back. Her abilities are growing stronger, the group that was supposed to help her is not answering, and she wants to find the people who took her before they try again, but a single miscalculation leaves her world on the edge of a war. The book is the third of the series and the longest of the first three.
Bianca is taken from her home town and enrolled at Evernight Academy, a Gothic boarding school where the other students are sleek, clever and somehow too perfect for her to feel at home among them. Then she meets Lucas, who does not fit in either and who warns her to keep her distance.
Kate Donovan is a television producer whose career has stalled, and she is given an interview with the only survivor of a massacre that has shocked the world. The interview is the chance of a lifetime and it puts her in the middle of an investigation that the authorities would rather she did not pursue. She is also brought face to face with a man from her past.
Children disappear under the right conditions: through the shadows under a bed, out of the back of a wardrobe, down a rabbit hole or into an old well, and they come out somewhere else. Magical lands have little use for used-up miracle children, though, and Nancy has come back. The children under Miss West's care understand what that is like, and each of them is looking for a way home.
The novel begins at the funeral of its unnamed protagonist and then works backwards through his life: his first encounter with death as a child on a summer beach, his career as a commercial artist, three marriages, two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, and finally the physical decline of old age.
In 1618, plague and the beginning of the Thirty Years' War have left the Holy Roman Empire frightened and suspicious. In the small town of Leonberg, an illiterate widow called Katharina Kepler, known for her herbal remedies, is accused of witchcraft by a neighbour, and the accusation grows until the whole community has an opinion about her. Her son Johannes, the imperial mathematician, has to leave his work and defend her.
Everything I Know About Love is a memoir by the British journalist Dolly Alderton, published in 2018. It follows a young woman through her twenties, from school to shared houses and on through friendships, bad relationships, work and grief, and it mixes straight narrative with other material, among it lists, conversations in text messages and recipes.
Lydia Lee is dead, and the novel's first line says so before anybody else in the family knows. She was the middle child of a Chinese-American family in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, and she was the one her parents had decided would have the life they did not get. Her father teaches at the college because the college would not hire him for anything else. Her mother gave up medical school in a way that everybody has agreed not to discuss. The investigation into what happened to Lydia is also an examination of what the family asked of her.
A young man arrives in Ukraine with a tattered photograph in his hand, looking for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis fifty years earlier. His guides are Alex, a translator whose English has become a language of its own, a blind old man haunted by memories of the war, and an undersexed guide dog called Sammy Davis, Jr, Jr. The book tells the story of that search and the history of the town it is trying to find.
Gretel grew up on a canal boat with her mother, and the two of them made a language that belonged to nobody else. She has not seen her mother since she was sixteen, and she works now as a lexicographer, which suits a woman who lives alone. A telephone call from a hospital sends her back to the vocabulary and the river she left behind.
Poirot is taking a quiet holiday at a secluded hotel in Devon, where he notices a former actress called Arlena Marshall flirting with a married man. She is attractive and she is not well liked by the other guests. One morning she goes out to a cove for a private meeting, and later she is found there, strangled.
The novel begins sixty-five million years ago, with a small mammal in a world that is about to be struck by an asteroid, and ends half a billion years in the future, when the descendants of humanity have changed past recognition. Between those points it follows a single line of descent, and its characters change as the line does. The result is a family history rather than a hero's story, running from the age of the dinosaurs to the far end of time.
Evvie Drake has been widowed for a year and rarely leaves her house in a small Maine town, and everyone, including her best friend, assumes it is grief. She does not correct them. Dean Tenney is a former major-league pitcher whose arm has stopped doing what he asks of it, and an invitation to spend a few months in Maine looks like a way to reset. He rents the flat attached to her house, and they strike a bargain: no questions about her husband, and none about his career.
After a terrorist attack kills almost everybody in the American government, the man who had recently been confirmed as Vice President is sworn in as President. Jack Ryan has to rebuild the government and deal with the crises coming at him at the same time. He is left to represent the United States more or less on his own.
Mitch Rapp's cover has been blown, and the man who killed terrorists quietly for years is now a public figure and a target. He is moved onto the CIA director's staff as an adviser, and then a rescue operation in the Philippines goes wrong because somebody in Washington passed on its details. Rapp is asked to deal with both the leak and the hostages.
Sophie has settled into her new life among the lost cities and into living at Havenfield, where she spends time with rare creatures, including the first female Alicorn, which trusts her and nobody else. Her job is to help train it so that it can be shown to the people as a sign of hope.
For twenty thousand years, humanity has been at war with the alien Xeelee, using weapons so advanced that time itself has become a battlefield. The war has cost billions of lives and has been fought with a ruthlessness the population has never been allowed to question. A young pilot is about to find out what the conflict is really for.
Buried under the water, somewhere inside the Bermuda Triangle, there is a treasure worth killing for. Samantha Carlyle runs a dive resort on a small island and wants nothing to do with it, but unexplained events keep happening, her former lover arrives without warning, and somebody tries to take her. Two men she was close to are already gone.
Tom Keely is alone, living at the top of the Mirador apartments, a highrise in Fremantle in Western Australia. He was once a high-powered environmental activist, and he is now divorced and destitute, which is where the novel finds him. Fremantle is the setting, and the apartment block he lives in gives the book its title.
Two children go to stay with a grandfather they hardly know, and find that his house and the grounds around it are not what they appear to be. The estate is a refuge for magical creatures, and there are rules about what the children may do there. The rules are there for a reason.
Guy Montag is a fireman, which in this America means he burns books rather than fights fires. The temperature in the title is the one at which paper catches and a house goes up. He comes home to a wife who lives inside wall-sized screens and a machine that pumps her stomach clean, and he meets a teenager next door who asks him whether he is happy. That question, and the woman who stays in a burning house with her books, starts him reading and then hiding what he reads. The society around him gave up on difficult things voluntarily, and the firemen exist to make sure nobody changes their mind.
Aza is the adopted daughter of innkeepers in Ayortha, a kingdom with a narrow idea of beauty that she does not fit: she is large, milk-white in colouring, and her hair looks frying-pan black to humans although gnomes see it as the dark purple they call htun. What Ayortha admires in her is her voice, which can mimic anyone and throw itself without her moving her mouth, and the new queen hears it at the royal wedding.
In December 1985, nineteen-year-old Frank Mackey planned to escape his family's cramped flat on Faithful Place and start again in London with his girlfriend Rosie Daly, and the two of them were to meet at midnight at the top of the cul-de-sac. Rosie never appeared. Frank took it that she had dumped him, and he left Ireland without going home again. Twenty-two years later, Rosie's suitcase turns up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place.
Lauren Moore is left penniless when her mother dies, and her aunt's invitation to Falconridge seems too fortunate to be true. She is drawn to her arrogant cousin by marriage, and the house by the sea is full of locked rooms, strange happenings and a housekeeper who tells her plainly that she does not belong.
Beginning with a Welsh boy's first day in the coal mine in 1911, Fall of Giants follows five families, Welsh, English, German, American and Russian, through the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the campaign for votes for women. Coal owners, miners, embassy staff and orphans meet across the years as the old order breaks apart.
Richard Forthrast, known as Dodge, is a billionaire who made his fortune from games and who is declared brain-dead after a routine medical procedure. His will asks for his body to be preserved so that his brain can be scanned later, and the scan is carried out. What follows is a world that has to decide what a copied mind is.
Heaven Casteel returns to the West Virginia hills and begins to live out her childhood dreams: she becomes a respected schoolteacher at the local school and marries her sweetheart, Logan Stonewall. After their wedding trip to Farthinggale Manor, Tony Tatterton persuades the two of them to stay in Boston, but old ghosts rise up around her fragile happiness and threaten her marriage with scandal and jealousy.
Tanner Bohlman works for the Forest Service and knows the dangers of Idaho's land and rivers, and he does not think it is any place for a woman like Zoe Lawton, even if she is a capable marine biologist. Zoe is new in town and could use a guide. When Tanner finds that her young son has never been fishing, he steps into the role of a father figure, and finds himself rethinking a vow never to love again.
Martie Rhodes drives her friend Susan to appointments with a psychologist, because Susan's agoraphobia makes it impossible for her to go alone. Martie's husband Dusty is trying to keep his brother Skeet, just out of rehabilitation, out of trouble. Then Martie develops a terror of her own reflection, and the fear starts to spread to the rest of her life.
Nariman Vakeel is seventy-nine, has Parkinson's disease, and lives in a decaying Bombay flat with his two middle-aged stepchildren. When he breaks an ankle, the burden of his care moves to his daughter Roxana and her husband Yezad, who are already short of money. The arrangement strains everyone it touches, and it turns a family held together by habit into one that has to decide what it owes.
Jillian Whitney is well born, penniless and living under the roof of a wealthy nobleman old enough to be her father, which is scandal enough for the London ton. When her guardian is murdered and she becomes the only suspect, she flees and is taken in by Adam Hawthorne, the Earl of Blackwood, who offers shelter from the law.
A widow runs an elegant boutique and has arranged her life so that nothing in it can surprise her. Then a man steps into the shop who is exactly what she has been imagining in private, and she has to decide whether to keep hold of her past or take a risk on loving somebody again.
Mr Fox is clever and anthropomorphic, and he lives with his wife and four children. Every night he steals food from three cruel and brutish farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean, until the farmers decide they have had enough of being outwitted and set out to capture and kill him. The foxes escape by digging deep, and the farmers settle in to wait outside the hole for them to come out.
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.
