Book library

Stories for the midnight shelf

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.

RomanceFantasySci-FiHorrorMystery & ThrillerHistorical FictionLiterary FictionAdventureRomantasy tagContemporary Romance tag3473 booksEdited by Baby Bat

Browse the shelf Back to the first page

Cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

The shelf

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 21 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.

Search all books

Sort

Primary genre

Tag

Showing 48 of 3473 books

Fuzzy Nation

John Scalzi · 2011

Jack Holloway is a rebellious former lawyer working as a contract surveyor for Zaracorp on the colony planet Zara XXIII, and he is fired for causing environmental damage after letting his dog set off explosives again. The explosion uncovers a seam of sunstones worth a fortune, and Holloway talks the Zaracorp manager into a rider that gives him a much larger share of what comes out of it. Then he meets a family of clever, cat-like creatures, and the claim stops being a simple matter of contract law.

First contactSpace opera

G.

John Berger · 1972

G. is set in Europe before the First World War, and its protagonist, who goes by the initial G., is a lover of women in the tradition of Don Juan or Casanova. His affairs take him across the continent, through a series of misadventures and disguises, and as he goes he gradually arrives at a political consciousness.

Experimental fiction

Gadsby

Ernest Vincent Wright · 1939

Gadsby is a novel written without a single word containing the letter E, which is the most common letter in English. Its plot turns on the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalised by the efforts of its protagonist, John Gadsby, and a youth organiser. The constraint applies to the whole book, which runs to over fifty thousand words.

Experimental fictionModern classics

Galactic Pot-Healer

Philip K. Dick · 1969

Joe Fernwright repairs pottery on a future Earth where almost nobody needs pots repaired any more, and where the guild has a form for every kind of idleness. A godlike alien called Glimmung hires him for a job on another planet: to raise a cathedral from the bottom of an ocean. Joe travels there with a team of specialists and finds he does not know what he is for.

Classic science fictionFirst contact

Galápagos

Kurt Vonnegut · 1985

A world economic crisis leaves a small, mismatched group of people shipwrecked on a fictional island in the Galapagos, and then a disease makes every other human on the planet infertile. The survivors are the only fertile people left, and the novel follows their descendants across the next million years from the point of view of a ghost watching it all.

Post-apocalypticClassic science fictionLiterary fiction

Game Changer

Rachel Reid · 2018

Professional hockey player Scott Hunter is in a slump until a smoothie made by juice bar barista Kip Grady precedes a good game, and then he keeps coming back for the drink and for the man who makes it. What starts as a flirtation becomes something intense and frequent, but always on Scott's terms and always behind his closed apartment doors. With the playoffs approaching, Scott cannot afford anything that might derail his career, including telling the world who he is seeing.

Contemporary romanceSports romanceQueer romance

Garden of Shadows

V. C. Andrews · 1987

The novel travels back to meet Malcolm Foxworth as a young and ambitious man. On a trip to Connecticut he meets Olivia Winfield, who is tall, stern and bookish and has resigned herself to remaining unmarried, until he proposes. Soon after she arrives at Foxworth Hall the shadows gather and his darker side appears, and the children born to the house include one beautiful girl who will change everything. The house itself becomes the explanation for everything the series later describes.

Family novelModern horror

Gardens of the Moon

Steven Erikson · 1999

The Malazan Empire has taken Pale's last floating fortress, and the novel begins in the middle of an army that has been fighting this war for years. A young noblewoman is fleeing an arranged marriage, a squad of soldiers has no illusions left, a legendary assassin is carrying a grudge, and the free city of Darujhistan would prefer the empire stayed out of its affairs. Underneath the campaign, older powers are waking up and a deck of cards is telling fortunes nobody wants told. The empress's plans, the gods who take an interest in them and the soldiers who have to carry the orders out all meet in the same city.

Epic fantasyGrimdark

Garment of Shadows

Laurie R. King · 2012

The shadows of war are drawing over the city of Fez, and Holmes badly wants the wisdom and courage of his wife, whom he has learned, to his horror, has gone missing. As Holmes searches for her, and Russell, suffering a temporary loss of memory, searches for herself, each of them tries to solve parallel puzzles before it is too late for them, for Africa and for the peace of Europe.

Historical mysteryEspionage

Gates of Fire

Steven Pressfield · 1998

The battle of Thermopylae is told by Xeones, a free non-citizen of Sparta who is one of only three Greeks to come out of the pass alive. He describes how he came to Sparta, what he was taught there, and what the three hundred did in the narrow pass between the mountains and the sea.

Ancient world fictionWar fiction

Gateway

Frederik Pohl · 1977

An asteroid called Gateway was hollowed out long ago by an alien species that has since vanished, and it is full of small ships nobody knows how to fly. Humans have worked out how to make them go but not where they will go, how long the journey will take, or whether there is enough fuel to come back. Prospectors take the risk for the chance of a fortune.

Classic science fictionSpace opera

Gathering Blue

Lois Lowry · 2000

Kira is orphaned and disabled in a village that has no place for her, and she is taken to live in the Council Edifice, where she is given the work of repairing a ceremonial robe. The task brings her comfort and standing, but the more she learns about the building and the people kept in it, the less comfortable her position becomes.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Generation X

Douglas Coupland · 1991

Dag, Claire and Andy are three friends in their twenties living together in the Coachella Valley in southern California, working at badly paid jobs with no future in them and telling one another stories. The tales they exchange are by turns heartfelt accounts of their own lives and fantastical stories of their own invention, and the novel is arranged so that the tales are told by different characters across three parts.

Modern classicsExperimental fiction

Gerald's Game

Stephen King · 1992

Gerald and Jessie Burlingame have gone to their summer house on a warm weekday in October for a romantic interlude. Handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband's games; when Gerald refuses to stop, she lashes out with deadly consequences. Still cuffed, she is trapped and alone, with painful memories from her childhood for company and her only living visitor a hungry stray dog. The novel stays inside one room for most of its length, and Jessie's company is a stray dog and the voices in her own head.

Psychological horrorDomestic horror

Get a Life, Chloe Brown

Talia Hibbert · 2019

Chloe Brown lives with chronic pain and has written a list of the things she intends to do about it, starting with moving into a flat of her own. The building comes with a caretaker, Redford Morgan, an artist who keeps his distance, and the two of them get off to a bad start. Chloe needs help with parts of her list, Red has reasons of his own for keeping his life small, and the arrangement between them turns into something neither planned.

Contemporary romanceRomantic comedy

Getting Rid of Bradley

Jennifer Crusie · 1994

Lucy Savage's week begins with her husband failing to appear in divorce court and gets worse: a dye job leaves her hair green, somebody takes a shot at her, and she knocks down the policeman who comes to her rescue. Detective Zack Warren believes her husband is tangled up in an embezzlement scheme, and the attempts on her life decide the argument between them, so Zack moves into her house to keep her alive.

Romantic comedyContemporary romance

Ghachar Ghochar

Vivek Shanbhag · 2013

A young man in Bangalore sits in an old coffee shop and thinks about his family: the years of scarcity, the uncle whose spice business made them rich, the large house they moved into and what money did to everyone in it. He also thinks about the woman he let go. The phrase the book is named after was invented by his wife and her brother.

Translated literary fictionFamily novel

Ghost Canoe

Will Hobbs · 1997

When a sailing ship breaks up on the rocks off Cape Flattery, the authorities say there were no survivors, and the fourteen-year-old son of the lighthouse keeper refuses to believe them. Footprints on an empty beach and a wild figure glimpsed in the sea caves convince him that somebody is hiding out there. He is not supposed to go near the caves, and he goes anyway.

Wilderness adventureAmateur sleuth

Ghost Music

An Yu · 2022

Song Yan gave up the career of a concert pianist years ago, and she now fills her Beijing flat with the hesitant playing of her young students. Her husband will not discuss having a child, his mother arrives from the south to campaign for a grandchild, and parcels of mushrooms from her province keep turning up at the door without a note.

Literary fictionMagical realism

Ghost Night

Heather Graham · 2010

Two young actors are murdered on a remote island film set, and their bodies are arranged in an imitation of a massacre that took place there in the nineteenth century. Two years later the survivor of that night, Vanessa Loren, is drawn back to the Bahamas by a documentary about the region's stories, and the man making it has some experience of ghosts.

Paranormal romanceGhost story

Ghost Story

Peter Straub · 1979

After his uncle dies, the writer Don Wanderley comes to Milburn in upstate New York, where the death turns out to be tangled up with a group of older men who meet to tell one another ghost stories. They call themselves the Chowder Society, and their shared past, and what the society has been telling itself about it, is where the trouble comes from.

Ghost storyModern horrorGothic horror

Ghost Wall

Sarah Moss · 2018

In the north of England, far from the cities, Silvie and her family spend two weeks living as though they were ancient Britons, using the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. They have joined an anthropology course that re-enacts life in simpler times, and while the students are there for their coursework, Silvie's father is pursuing a lifelong obsession he has raised her inside. The course puts that obsession within reach of the present.

Literary fictionFamily novel

Gideon the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir · 2019

Gideon Nav has spent her life in indentured servitude on the Ninth House, a death cult guarding a locked tomb, and she wants to join the Emperor's armies and never come back. Her latest escape attempt is stopped by Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the heiress of the Ninth, who needs a cavalier for the trials the Emperor has called at Canaan House. Gideon agrees in exchange for a commission, and the two of them arrive at a decaying mansion full of necromancer heirs and their sword-wielding bodyguards. The trials are puzzles in a ruined house, the other houses are not all honest about their dead, and the prize is a place among the Emperor's Lyctors: immortal necromancers who have served him for ten thousand years.

Science fantasySpace opera

Gilded

Marissa Meyer · 2021

A poor miller's daughter has been cursed by the god of lies and has a talent for spinning stories that are entirely untrue. When one of her tales attracts the sinister Erlking and his undead hunters, she is carried into a world of ghouls and phantoms and told to spin straw into gold or be killed for lying.

Fairytale retellingDark fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 2004

In 1956, the Reverend John Ames of Gilead, Iowa, is seventy-six years old and knows that a heart condition will kill him before long. He begins a letter to his seven-year-old son, who will grow up with almost no memory of him, and the letter becomes the account of his own life and of the three generations of preachers before him.

Family novelEpistolary novelModern classics

Gingerbread

Helen Oyeyemi · 2019

Perdita Lee looks like an ordinary schoolgirl in London and her mother Harriet looks like an ordinary working mother, which is not quite the case for either of them. Their family keeps a recipe for gingerbread that hardly anybody in London appreciates and that is very well known indeed in Harriet's home country, which most accounts say does not exist.

Magical realismFairytale retelling

Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 1956

David is an American living in Paris whose girlfriend has gone to Spain to think about whether to marry him, and while she is away he begins an affair with an Italian bartender named Giovanni. The novel is his account of what happened between the three of them, and Paris is the city the whole of it takes place in.

Modern classics

Girl in Pieces

Kathleen Glasgow · 2016

Charlotte Davis is seventeen and has already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime: her father and the river, her best friend, and any real support from her mother. She has learned how to forget, and she has learned to cut. The novel follows her as she is taken out of the life she has been surviving and begins the slow and uneven work of putting herself back together.

Coming-of-ageSocial realism

Girl Underwater

Claire Kells · 2015

Avery Delacorte is a sophomore on her university's nationally ranked swim team when the flight she takes home for Thanksgiving makes a ditch landing in a mountain lake in the Colorado Rockies. One of five survivors, she is stranded in sub-zero temperatures with three small boys and her teammate Colin Shea, and the two of them have to rely on each other to stay alive.

Survival fictionComing-of-age

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier · 1999

In the 1660s Griet goes into service in Johannes Vermeer's house in Delft, after an accident costs her father his sight and the family its income. She is careful and quiet and watches how the painter works, and in time she is allowed to help him in the studio and then to sit for him. The rest of the household notices, and the debts, the order of the house and the difference in station between them all come into it.

Historical fictionBiographical fiction

Girl, Goddess, Queen

Bea Fitzgerald · 2023

Persephone was not carried off to the underworld: she jumped, refusing to be married to a god more in love with himself than with her. Now she has to talk the Underworld's arrogant ruler, Hades, into going along with a plan that will shake Mount Olympus, and to survive the politics of the gods who told the original lie about her.

Myth retellingYoung adult fantasy

Glasshouse

Charles Stross · 2006

Robin wakes in a rehabilitation centre with no memory of his life and a strong suspicion that somebody is trying to kill him. He signs up for an experiment in which a group of volunteers reconstruct the late twentieth century inside an isolated society, and discovers he has been given a new body and a new name. The experiment has rules that nobody explained to him.

Hard science fictionCyberpunk

Glory Road

Robert A. Heinlein · 1963

Evelyn Cyril Gordon has just been discharged from a war in Southeast Asia and has no idea what to do next. Answering a newspaper advertisement that asks whether he is a coward takes him to a woman called Star, to a quest for the Egg of the Phoenix, and to a road that leaves this universe behind.

Science fantasyAdventure fiction

Glory, Glory

Linda Lael Miller · 1991

Glory Parsons dreads going home for the holidays. Her brother was killed in a war, and Jesse Bainbridge was lost to her through her own weakness: she left him abruptly ten years earlier after promising to love him forever, and she never told him why. Jesse is now the sheriff of Pearl Lake and responsible for his orphaned niece, and he has no intention of getting involved with her again.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romance

Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee · 2015

Jean Louise Finch, twenty-six and living in New York, returns to her home town of Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her father Atticus and finds the place changed less than she has. What she discovers about the people she grew up with forces her to separate the father she loves from the man he actually is.

Literary historical fictionFamily novelComing-of-age

God Emperor of Dune

Frank Herbert · 1981

The fourth book of the Dune series takes place three thousand five hundred years after the events of the original trilogy and tells the story of Leto, the son of Paul Atreides, who has traded his humanity to become an immortal sandworm. Leto has ruled as a tyrant for that entire period, and his control rests on the spice and on the sandworms he has replaced.

Space operaHard science fiction

God knows

Joseph Heller · 1984

King David of Israel is old, close to death and in no mood to make his memoirs tidy. He remembers the sheep, the prophet Samuel, the giant Goliath, Saul and Jonathan, Bathsheba and the arrangements around her, and the children whose quarrels he could never settle, and he argues with God about all of it.

Biographical fictionAncient world fictionLiterary fiction

God of Malice

Rina Kent · 2022

Killian Carson is the student everyone on campus wants to be near and nobody wants to cross, which suits him: the charm is the surface and the rest of him is worse. He notices a girl who has spent her life being overlooked, decides she is the only interesting thing in the building, and starts paying attention in a way she cannot report to anyone. She runs.

New adult romanceEnemies to lovers

God of Pain

Rina Kent · 2022

As a mafia princess, the narrator of this book always understood that her future had been decided for her. She went ahead and wanted the wrong man anyway. Creighton King is trouble with a beautiful exterior, the kind of trouble that a woman with powerful relatives should know better than to approach. She calls the wanting a terrible mistake, and the book follows what the mistake costs her.

Contemporary romanceNew adult romance

God Save the Mark

Donald E. Westlake · 1967

Fred Fitch is a credulous man: wherever there is a scam, he finds it or it finds him, from his rooming house to the people collecting in the street outside. He has a standing file with the Bunco Squad. Then a lawyer tells him an uncle he has never heard of has left him three hundred thousand dollars, and with it come a devoted friend of the deceased and a crowd of claimants.

Amateur sleuthCrime thriller

God's Little Acre

Erskine Caldwell · 1933

Ty Ty Walden owns a farm in rural Georgia during the Depression and spends his days digging it over for gold, with his sons Buck and Shaw working beside him. The family is poor, the fields are going unplanted, and the acre he has promised to the church keeps moving so that he does not have to stop digging there.

Southern gothicFamily novel

Gods of Jade and Shadow

Silvia Moreno-Garcia · 2019

Casiopea Tun is eighteen, lives as an unwanted poor relation in her wealthy grandfather's house in the Yucatán and dreams of escape. In a forbidden chest in his bedroom she finds the bones of the Mayan death god Hun-Kamé, and when a shard of bone pierces her thumb he returns to a semblance of life and binds himself to her.

Historical fantasyMyth retelling

Going Postal

Terry Pratchett · 2004

Moist von Lipwig is a fraudster who is hanged for his crimes and then offered a choice: take charge of the city's derelict post office or be hanged properly. He accepts, and finds a building full of undelivered letters, a staff of two, a rival in the clacks company, and a golem watching his every step.

Cozy fantasyClassic fantasy

Gold Diggers

Sanjena Sathian · 2021

Neil Narayan grows up in the Atlanta suburbs with parents whose expectations of him are as high as the ones they have for his perfect older sister. What he wants is the girl across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal, and Anita has a secret: she and her mother have been brewing an alchemical potion out of stolen gold that carries the ambition of whoever owned it.

Magical realismComing-of-age

Golden Son

Pierce Brown · 2015

Now fully embedded among the Gold ruling class, Darrow continues his work to bring down the Society from within, pursuing the future his murdered wife believed in. The second volume of the trilogy follows his double position as a member of the elite and an agent of a rebellion, and the cost of maintaining both.

DystopianSpace opera

Golden Surrender

Heather Graham · 1987

Prince Olaf of Norway comes to Ireland with a fleet and a plan to build himself a kingdom, and Princess Erin, the daughter of the Irish high king, has every reason to hate him for what his men have done to her country. The alliance that both sides need is sealed by marrying her to him, and neither of them is willing to accept it.

Historical romanceMedieval fiction

Goldfinger

Ian Fleming · 1959

James Bond is put on the trail of Auric Goldfinger, a man whose business is gold and whose methods are as violent as they are clever, and MI6 also suspects him of being connected to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation. What begins as an investigation into a smuggling operation becomes something considerably larger when Bond works out what Goldfinger plans to do to the gold reserves of the United States.

EspionageSpy thriller

Gone

Michael Grant · 2008

In the space of a moment everyone over the age of fourteen disappears from a small town: no adults, no teachers, no police and no parents. The telephones, the internet and the television go with them, which means there is no way to call for help. What is left is young people who are hungry, frightened, and beginning to change.

Young adult science fictionPost-apocalyptic

About the book library

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.

From our books editor

Books editor

Baby Bat

Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.

Goodreads — link coming soon
Social media — link coming soon

Goodreads and social links will be added soon.

Open the editor profile

Browse by genre

Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.

Primary genre

Romance

The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.

676 books Primary genre

Fantasy

Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.

685 books Primary genre

Sci-Fi

Generation ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.

536 books Primary genre

Horror

Haunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.

381 books Primary genre

Mystery & Thriller

Detectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.

599 books Primary genre

Historical Fiction

Cathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.

580 books Primary genre

Literary Fiction

Novels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.

575 books Primary genre

Adventure

Shipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.

324 books

One 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.

Browse by tag

Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.

Tag

Romantasy

Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.

70 books Tag

Contemporary Romance

Modern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.

155 books

Romantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.