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 20 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.
Flint Mahone comes home from the Civil War with one feeling left in him, which is for the children of his dead brother, and when the three of them turn up on his doorstep with a Wyoming winter coming he sets about making them a home. Lauren Hart was raised among outlaws and wants a respectable life, and the two of them are thrown together by the arrangements a frontier town makes.
A Chinese smuggler has built a fortune out of human lives, moving immigrants into countries around the world. Dirk Pitt follows his activities from Washington State to Louisiana, where the man is building an enormous shipping port in the middle of nowhere, and the reason for the location turns out to matter more than the port.
Flora is a young woman of mixed parentage who belongs fully to neither of the worlds she moves between. The story follows her from a remote village in western China to Shanghai and then to England, where her history is as much a problem as an opportunity. She grows up being told what she is by people who have decided in advance.
The stories here are set in Florida and around it, among storms, snakes and sinkholes that sit at the edge of ordinary life. The people in them include two sisters left to manage on their own, a man who grew up lonely, a couple who have not settled, a woman with nowhere to live, and a wife and mother who appears more than once.
Twelve years ago Chester Morton walked out of his home town in upstate New York and was never heard from again. His mother has kept the search alive ever since, paying for a billboard overlooking the local college and hounding every agency that will listen, at real cost to her family. Now Chester's body has been found, hanging from that billboard.
Charlie Gordon is thirty-two and works in a bakery, and he has been chosen for an experimental operation that may raise his intelligence. He writes about it in progress reports, and the spelling and grammar improve as he does. The experiment worked first on Algernon, a laboratory mouse that solves mazes, and Charlie's growing understanding includes the fact that he is the second test. What he gains is an education, a memory of how people treated him when he could not answer back, and a sharp view of the researchers who are using him. The reports also cover what the experiment does to Algernon, and Charlie is well ahead of the doctors in working out what comes next.
The Dollanganger children lose their father in a car crash, and their mother takes them to live in secret in an enormous house, where their grandmother locks them in an upstairs room and their mother promises the arrangement will soon be over. Days turn into years, and the four of them learn what their mother is prepared to sacrifice for the fortune waiting downstairs.
Susan Barton is cast away on the island where Robinson Cruso and his mute servant Friday have been living, and after a year the three of them are rescued. What follows is Susan's attempt to have her account written down, and her discovery that the story belongs to whoever tells it, and that one of them cannot tell it at all.
Laura Vernon overhears Lady Margaret telling Bren Dewar that they do not want Laura falling in love with him, which is awkward, because she already has. Bren is a Border lord with a reputation, and Laura cannot work out why he pays her the attention he does or what Lady Margaret was warning him about.
Harry Dresden is the only wizard in Chicago with an advertisement in the Yellow Pages, and he spends a good deal of his time helping the police with the cases nobody else wants. In this second Dresden Files novel he is asked to consult on a homicide where the body has been savaged and the ground nearby is marked with wolf-shaped paw prints, and his inquiries put him in the way of werewolves of more than one kind.
Prince Dutiful and Elliania are betrothed on the condition that he will kill the dragon Icefyre, and the two of them travel to the island where it lies with their households and their guards. They are met there by the Fool, whom Fitz left behind to keep him out of danger, and he means to save the dragon rather than kill it.
John Merlyn is a writer who spends too much time at the tables in Las Vegas and in the company of people who make their living in Hollywood and in publishing. He and his brother Artie live by a code of their own in a country where, in the circles they move through, the law and organised crime are often the same trade.
Perry Nelson is a navy flier killed in a motor accident in 1938, and he wakes up in the year 2086. The novel that follows is his comparison of the world he left behind with the semi-utopian society that has replaced it, and it sets out the arguments its author would spend the rest of his career developing in his fiction.
Robert Jordan, an American attached to a Republican guerrilla band during the Spanish Civil War, is sent into the mountains to blow up a bridge during an offensive. He lives with the band in a cave, meets Maria, a young woman escaping the Nationalist advance, and waits for an order that will commit them to the attack.
Ian Fleming's For Your Eyes Only, published in 1960, is a book of five short stories and the eighth to feature the British Secret Service agent James Bond. It was a change of approach, because until then Fleming had written Bond at full novel length, and three of the stories began as ideas for a television series that was never made.
Rhine Fontaine has built a life for himself in a Nevada town on the strength of passing for white, and he has kept the arrangement going for years without much trouble. Then he rescues a young woman in the desert, and for the first time he finds himself wanting to step out from behind it.
Fireheart is certain that something is being kept from him about the death of the old ThunderClan deputy Redtail, and the more he asks about it the more he finds that some cats would rather the question were never answered. In the middle of it, his best friend falls in love with a cat he is not allowed to love.
William Mandella fought in the Forever War and now lives on Middle Finger, an ice-covered world where he fishes and teaches physics. Earth's population has become a single group mind, and it keeps the humans of Middle Finger alive because it values the variety in their genes rather than their company. Mandella and his wife want out, and the only way off the planet is to steal a ship.
In 2048 the Alliance fights a long series of wars against poorer nations using soldierboys, nearly indestructible robotic machines piloted by mechanics who are linked to them from a distance. Julian Class is a physicist working on a huge particle accelerator near Jupiter and a mechanic in his other life, and when he learns what the Jupiter Project could do he has to decide what to do about it.
It is 1931 in Shanghai. Four years earlier, Rosalind Lang was brought back from the brink of death by an experiment that also stopped her sleeping or ageing and gave her the ability to heal from any wound. She now works as an assassin for her country, and the Japanese invasion changes her orders. Solving the murders requires her to pose as the wife of a man she does not trust.
The Galactic Empire has ruled for twelve thousand years and is dying. Hari Seldon can prove it, because he invented a branch of mathematics that predicts what huge populations will do while saying nothing useful about any single person in them. His forecast is a dark age of thirty thousand years, and his answer is to gather scientists and scholars on a remote world at the edge of the galaxy and let them build something that can shorten it. The Foundation's history is told as a series of crises, each arriving roughly a generation after the last, and each dealt with by people who have very little time to work out what Seldon intended.
Several centuries after the events of Second Foundation, two citizens of the Foundation search for Earth, the legendary planet where human beings are said to have originated. The novel follows the journey of a councilman, a historian and a visitor from a world called Gaia as they look for humanity's ancestral home, and their search is a matter of evidence as much as of navigation.
The Foundation has survived the collapse of the Galactic Empire by being small, technical and useful to its neighbours, and it has done so for two hundred years on the strength of a plan laid out by the mathematician Hari Seldon. Now the fight changes: a general of the dying Empire decides to restore its glory by crushing the Foundation and turns the Imperial fleet toward it, and the traders who have been the Foundation's real strength are not sure that Seldon's plan accounts for him. Then a second figure appears, a mutant called the Mule, and the plan stops working.
After the defeat of the Mule by the Second Foundation, Terminus enjoys a period of prosperity and stability attributed publicly to the Seldon Plan, though some believe the credit belongs to the Second Foundation. A search begins to establish whether that organisation still exists, while the Second Foundation itself investigates evidence of an independent force acting to protect the plan.
A social worker in Montana tries to help an eleven-year-old boy who is living wild in the woods and barely surviving, and in doing so he meets the boy's father, a paranoid survivalist who is waiting for a final conflict. Meanwhile the social worker's own family is coming apart. Nobody in the story is easy to help.
Violet Sorrengail spent her life expecting a quiet post among the archives. Instead her mother, the commanding general, orders her into the Riders Quadrant, where cadets compete to bond with dragons and the dragons incinerate anyone they reject. Violet is smaller and more breakable than the rest, and she has inherited her mother's enemies, chief among them Xaden Riorson, a wingleader with good reason to want her gone. Getting through the year takes her wits, a handful of allies and a willingness to look at what the college is really training its riders for. Beyond the walls the war keeps worsening and the wards that shield Navarre are failing, and the people in charge are keeping a secret that matters more than any cadet's survival.
Fox and Knox begin with a box and a pair of socks, and the rhymes get harder from there. Chicks, bricks, blocks and clocks are added to the list, Knox complains about the difficulty of the tongue-twisters, and by the end the Fox is inside a bottle with a set of battling beetles.
In 2234 the crew of a survey ship called the Adamura finds something on a planet that appears to have no inhabitants: a circular pit fifty kilometres across, whose curve looks like a design rather than a feature of the landscape. A small team is landed to walk across the surface to the edge of it.
Mark Robarts is a young clergyman with a good living at Framley and ambitions above his income. His father is a physician with no private money but a lucrative practice, and Mark's education has given him a taste for company he cannot afford, which is how he comes to accept the wrong kind of help from the wrong kind of man.
Victor Frankenstein leaves Geneva for university, throws himself at natural philosophy, and works out how to give life to dead matter. He assembles a man, succeeds, and is so horrified by what he has done that he walks away from it. The creature teaches himself language and history by watching a family through a gap in their wall, and works out what he is: strong, hideous and completely alone, with a maker who will not speak to him. What he asks for first is conversation, and what he asks for next is a companion, which his maker refuses. The novel is told in letters and in the creature's own account, so the person who suffers most is also the one who explains himself.
Franny Glass is a college student who has come to the end of her patience with the people around her, and she is trying to get out of it by spiritual means. Her younger brother Zooey, an actor, is the one who tries to talk her through it, and he does most of the talking.
Freckle Juice is a short chapter book for young children by Judy Blume, illustrated by Sonia O. Lisker and published in 1971. Its hero is a second-grade boy who longs for freckles, and the story turns on what a classmate charges him for a recipe that is supposed to produce them, and on what happens once he drinks it.
Something in the Big Woods is frightening the animals of the Bean farm, and the First Animal Bank has been robbed. The neighbours blame a legendary phantom they call the Ignormus, and Freddy the pig, who has solved this kind of problem before, sets out to find out who or what is really behind it.
Mr Free owns a house that the city wants to demolish, and he puts an advertisement in a newspaper offering free living quarters to anyone who will help him find a lost object hidden somewhere inside it. Four strangers answer the advertisement, and they are not the sort of people who usually share a house. None of them can afford to be choosy.
Women, in Adam Wild's view, are playmates rather than partners, and his affairs never last long. He is a talented photographer, exceptionally attractive and cynical to the core; his own summary of his position is that only freedom can give happiness. Katy is determined to resist him when circumstances leave her sharing a holiday in the Canadian Rockies with him, knowing that wanting him will only get her hurt.
Claire Laurent has built French Silk, a successful lingerie company, out of nothing in New Orleans. When a television evangelist denounces her sleepwear as sinful and is then murdered, Claire becomes the prime suspect, and every answer she gives about the night of the killing makes the district attorney more certain of her guilt.
Friday is an artificial person, engineered to be stronger, faster and quicker than the humans she works among, and she is employed as a courier by an organisation that operates across a fractured North America. Her abilities are an asset in her work and would expose her to prejudice if anybody found out about them. On one assignment everything goes wrong at once.
Friday Barnes is a genius girl detective who solves crimes at her exclusive boarding school, and this is the second case she takes on there. The mystery continues from the first book, with the same school setting and the same cast of students and staff around her investigations. The school has money, secrets and a long list of grudges, which is what keeps supplying her with cases.
Rabbi David Small leads a Conservative Jewish congregation in the Massachusetts town of Barnard's Crossing, and he is not a conventional rabbi: his training in the Talmud gives him a habit of seeing the third side of any problem. When the body of a young woman is found on the temple grounds, the congregation and the investigation become tangled together.
Evelyn Couch is a middle-aged housewife in a slump when she meets Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly woman in a nursing home, and begins visiting her every week. Ninny tells her about her youth in Whistle Stop, Alabama, where her sister-in-law Idgie and Idgie's friend Ruth ran a cafe. The novel moves between the present and the past, and the two stories feed each other.
In Pennsylvania in 1979, a stranger drives into a petrol station in a 1954 Buick in perfect condition, goes to the bathroom and never reappears. The state police take charge of the car, which no longer runs, and store it in a shed behind the barracks. The car turns out to have a life of its own, and it begins to intervene: radios and telephones fail, the car moves, and the boot opens to expel things that cannot be described.
Poppy has been the Maiden for as long as she can remember, chosen at birth and kept apart from everyone. She is not to be touched, looked at or spoken to, and the life waiting for her is an Ascension she never got to choose. What she would rather do is train with the guards and fight the things that took her family. Then Hawke, a guard sworn to keep her safe until that day arrives, starts treating her like a person instead of an object, and the rules stop holding. The first Blood and Ash book is about a girl working out how much of her life was arranged for her, in a kingdom where the answers have teeth.
After Hurricane Katrina and an explosion at the vampire summit, everyone in Louisiana, human or otherwise, is under strain, including the cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse, whose boyfriend Quinn has gone missing. The werewolves and vampires of her corner of the state are changing how they do things whether they like it or not.
SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, intends to kill James Bond in a way that will disgrace both him and the British Secret Service, and the lure it has chosen is Tatiana Romanova, a cipher clerk, along with the Spektor, a Soviet decoding machine she offers to bring with her. Much of the book takes place in Istanbul and on the Orient Express, and Bond spends his section of it on a journey he has been allowed to believe is his own operation.
Eleven-year-old Claudia Kincaid runs away from her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, because she believes her parents do not appreciate her, and she takes refuge in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with her younger brother Jamie. Once installed, Claudia sets out to keep their new home in order and to become a changed person, and a heroine to herself. The hiding place has to be financed, cleaned up after and kept secret from everyone working in the building.
Ten-year-old Mia Tang lives with her parents in the motel they run, where her parents clean the rooms and she works the front desk for the owner, Mr. Yao. She also knows something she must not say: her parents let immigrants stay in the empty rooms for nothing, and one word to the owner would end everything.
Riley Jenson is a rare hybrid of vampire and werewolf, and she works for Melbourne's Directorate of Other Races, which polices the supernatural and protects humans from it. Her twin brother Rhoan is a field guardian; she is an office worker, until he goes missing on a mission and she has to look for him herself.
Blake has always been the cautious brother, and Quinn, two years younger, is the one who wants to ride the Kamikaze. At an amusement park one evening Blake wins a game of ball toss and is given a ticket to another park, one that is invitation-only and open through the night. He takes Quinn and two friends with him, and every ride there turns out to be a test that has to be survived before sunrise.
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.
