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 22 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.
Nick and Amy Dunne have been married five years, and Amy disappears from their rented house in a small Missouri town on the morning of their anniversary. Nick tells the police what he knows, and then behaves in ways a worried husband is not supposed to behave: he is evasive, he is angry, and he is not sorry enough on camera. The book keeps the question of his guilt open throughout.
Scarlett O'Hara is the eldest daughter of a well-off plantation family in Clayton County, Georgia, and the novel opens on her life of parties and suitors before the American Civil War. It follows her through the war and the Reconstruction that follows, including the fall of Atlanta and the march through Georgia, as she works to keep hold of the family land and to rebuild the position she was born into.
The job Patrick Kenzie is given is a missing four-year-old, taken from her mother's apartment on a night when the woman had been out drinking. The search runs through the parts of Boston that nobody reports on, among dealers, kidnappers and people who buy children, and every answer leads to somebody with a reason to keep the girl missing.
Ebby Freeman was ten when she saw her brother Baz shot dead and a centuries-old jar shattered beside him, and the murder was never solved. Years later, when a new relationship brings her back into public attention, the case is reopened and the family has to live through it again in public.
Pip Fitz-Amobi is not a detective any more. With Ravi Singh she made a true-crime podcast about the murder case they solved together, and it went viral, but she insists her investigating days are behind her. Then someone she knows goes missing on the night the town holds a memorial, the police do nothing, and Pip starts looking into it herself.
The Antichrist has been born and delivered to a small country hospital, where a satanic order of nuns swaps him with the son of an American diplomat. The angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who have known each other since the Garden of Eden and have grown fond of the arrangement, agree that the end of the world would be bad for both of them and set out to influence the child. What neither of them knows is that the swap went wrong and the boy they have been watching grow up is not the Antichrist at all. There is also a completely accurate book of prophecies, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the beginning of the end of the world in an Oxfordshire village.
After her husband's death, Kate Long moves with her young daughter to the Australian mountain town of Ferntree Heights and sets out to build a new life for the two of them. She is unsettled by Aaron Frazer, a successful entrepreneur and a man of faith, who takes a romantic interest in her. Kate wants the warmth he offers, and tells herself she does not deserve it.
Terri and Jerry try to solve a mystery about a ghost with their friends, in a story set near a cave where the ghosts are said to live. The question the book keeps returning to is whether their friends will turn against them. The legend is local and the children investigate it themselves, without much adult help.
After a frightening adventure the year before, Gabe is uneasy about returning to Egypt, to the ancient pyramids and to the place where he saw the mummies. Then he learns about an Egyptian superstition and a secret chant said to bring mummies to life. His uncle dismisses it as a hoax, and then something begins to move in the tomb.
Kat is reluctant to visit her uncle Vic Frankenstein because of the rumours about him, but she finds that he is a quiet and gentle man living in a dark, castle-like mansion and working as a scientist who builds robots with artificial intelligence. She also loves his small, fluffy white dog, Poochie. Then an accident in the laboratory sets off a series of strange events.
William Buelow Gould is a convict in Van Diemen's Land, and his life is told here as a fictionalised account of the real convict artist of that name. The novel is built around twelve fish, each of which gives a chapter its heading: the pot-bellied seahorse, the kelpy, the porcupine fish, the stargazer, the leatherjacket, the serpent eel, the sawtooth shark, the striped cowfish, the crested weedfish, the freshwater crayfish, the silver dory and the weedy seadragon.
In the seven kingdoms some people are Graceling, marked by eyes of two different colours and gifted with an extreme skill. Katsa's Grace is killing, and her uncle the king has used her as an enforcer since she was a child, until a rescue she carries out on her own account brings her into the company of a prince from another kingdom.
Cassie Witting thinks there could be nothing better than a prairie wedding, and one is coming: two lovebirds brought together, aunts arriving from as far away as Maine, a long white dress with a veil, zinnias and satin ribbons, dancing under a clear blue sky. As the family gathers, Cassie finds that life brings the turning of seasons, joy and sorrow, and a dance only her grandfather does.
In the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release an unstoppable army. The army consists of hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises with two clear objectives, and nobody in the wider world knows anything about what has happened in the town. Austin is trying to write the whole thing down.
The Sovan Empire has been a republic and is now an empire again, and two hundred years of government by argument left it with a problem: magic has been outlawed, so its enemies have something it does not. Sova is at war with Casimir and Sanque. A young diplomat is sent to look into reports of a cult of necromancers who believe an apocalypse is approaching, and a lieutenant on the frontier is dealing with something worse than soldiers.
Claire is a medium of doubtful authenticity and her best friend Sophie has been dead since they were seventeen. The two of them take what looks like an easy job performing a seance at a crumbling manor house for the family matriarch's eightieth birthday, and a murder follows. Almost everybody in the house has something to hide.
Harry Dresden is Chicago's only professional wizard, and the work is mostly ghosts, vampires and werewolves, in no particular order. This time he is hunting a bewildered and dangerous spirit through a hospital with a Knight of the Cross beside him, and the invitation he has just been handed is to a party held by the vampire court, which is not the kind of invitation a sensible man accepts.
Leda Foley runs a small travel agency in Seattle and has an inconsistent gift for knowing things she should not. When she rebooks a police detective's flight on impulse, she changes both their lives. He watches his original plane blow up from the airport terminal, and he starts to wonder whether her abilities could help him with a case he cannot close.
At the end of the Second World War, Europe is full of soldiers, spies, engineers and profiteers, and the German V-2 rocket programme is being dismantled by whoever can reach the paperwork first. Several of them are looking for a device that seems to connect the rockets to a pattern in the lives of the people around them.
Samantha Kofer is an associate at a New York law firm when the financial crisis hits and she is put on furlough instead of being laid off. She spends the year volunteering at a legal aid clinic in Virginia's coal country, where the clients have real problems and the law behaves differently.
Pip is an orphan, and the novel follows his education from a graveyard in Kent where he is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch to the London life that a mysterious benefactor pays for. It is a coming-of-age story told entirely in the first person. It was Dickens's second novel narrated in that way, after David Copperfield.
The Great Gatsby was published by Scribner's in April 1925, and it is the book on which F. Scott Fitzgerald's reputation now chiefly rests. Nick Carraway tells the story, it is set on Long Island during the Jazz Age, and its subject is Jay Gatsby, a wealthy man of mysterious origins whose parties are famous and who is fixed on the idea of winning back the woman he lost years before.
Richard Hannay is asked to look into rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world, and the enquiry takes him across wartime Europe towards Constantinople. What he finds there is a German plan to use religion as a weapon in the war. It is one of two Hannay novels set during the First World War.
Gregor is eleven and his little sister is not quite two when they fall through a grate in their apartment building's laundry room and end up in an underground world. There the inhabitants are waiting for them, because an old prophecy describes a quest that two people from above the ground are supposed to finish, and the boy from the laundry room is not pleased that anybody has decided that this is his job.
Two children, one date, eighteen years apart, and neither of them knows that the other exists. In New York in September 2001, Brandon is visiting his father's office on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center when an airliner strikes the tower. In Afghanistan in 2019, Reshmina dreams of school and a quiet life, and a battle reaches her village.
Lilly Burkstrom's ex-husband told her that if he died it would not be an accident, and she did not believe him until he was killed in what was reported as a robbery at a convenience store. The police are not interested in her suspicions, and then someone breaks into her house and into the dead man's apartment as well.
The pirate Pagan is despised by the ton, whose riches he plunders, and loved by the poor, whose plight his gifts relieve, and the Marquess of Cainewood has sworn to hunt him down in revenge for the death of his brother. Then a woman with red hair and green eyes arrives at his door, begging for protection from the men who want her dead.
A secret order in Ankh-Morpork means to replace the Patrician with a puppet king, and its method is to summon a dragon to terrify the city and then have the puppet appear to slay it. Standing in the way is the Night Watch, which nobody takes seriously, and its newest recruit: a human orphan raised by dwarves who has read the manuals.
Lemuel Gulliver is a ship's surgeon who takes to the sea and keeps coming back with accounts of impossible countries. He is shipwrecked among people six inches tall, then left behind in a land of giants, then washed up among philosophers who have solved everything except how to live, and finally abandoned in a country ruled by horses where the human-shaped creatures are the animals. Each voyage is described in the flat, practical language of a travel report, and the four accounts together make up a book that has been read to children and argued about by adults for three centuries.
Catherine Tremyne was stolen from her father's Cornish estate as an infant and raised by Gypsies, and she has grown into a beautiful young woman without knowing where she came from. Her life is turned upside down when she is carried off to Paris by Jason Savage, which begins a long passage through danger and captivity at the hands of a man she cannot escape.
Craig Thompson's Habibi, a black-and-white graphic novel of more than six hundred pages, appeared in September 2011. The setting is an invented Islamic country, and the book follows Dodola and Zam, two children who escape slavery together and are then separated, taking on new names and new selves as the years pass before they meet again.
Madhav Jha comes from a village in Bihar and gets into an English-medium college in New Delhi, where his accent and his background are on display every day. There he falls for a rich Delhi girl who will not let the relationship be acknowledged but is willing to be what she calls his half girlfriend, and the novel follows what that costs him.
Nathan Byrn is running again, and the Alliance of Free Witches has been all but destroyed by the Council's Hunters. To save the rebellion the Alliance needs the missing half of an ancient amulet that makes its bearer invincible in battle, and its guardian, the reclusive witch Ledger, has her own reasons for not parting with it.
Ugwu is a village boy who becomes houseboy to Odenigbo, a mathematics professor with revolutionary opinions in a Nigerian university town, and Olanna is the wealthy, educated woman the professor loves. The novel follows the three of them, and Olanna's twin sister, through the ethnic and political tensions of the 1960s and into the Nigerian Civil War, when households that had looked settled are pulled apart and the people in them have to keep moving.
Catherine Crawfield is half vampire and spends her nights hunting the undead, hoping that one of them will turn out to be her father, the man responsible for ruining her mother's life. Then she is captured by Bones, a vampire bounty hunter, and forced into a partnership with him. Her mother's life was ruined by a vampire, and Cat has been trying to settle that account ever since.
Ariadne Oliver, the detective novelist who appears in several Poirot books, is staying with friends and is invited to a children's Hallowe'en party at a house in the village. One of the guests is a thirteen-year-old girl who is known for telling dramatic stories, and during the evening she announces to the room that she once witnessed a murder. Nobody takes it seriously. Later that night she is found drowned in the tub used for the apple-bobbing, and Mrs Oliver asks Poirot to come down because she is certain the two things are connected.
In 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh police is called out to a robbery at a company that has just been floated on the London stock exchange. The crime took place inside a multiplayer online world, the value stolen was in virtual property, and the suspects appear to include the avatars of the players who were in the room at the time.
In Stratford in the 1580s a young Latin tutor meets a woman called Agnes, known for her herbs, her falconry and her habit of knowing things before other people do. They marry, she moves in with his family while he goes to London to work in the theatre, and between them they raise three children largely apart. Eleven years later their son Hamnet falls ill, and the novel stays with the household and with Agnes through the days around his death and what follows it.
Willow O'Keefe is born with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, which means hundreds of broken bones and a lifetime of pain. As the family struggles to cover medical costs, her mother Charlotte considers a wrongful birth lawsuit against the obstetrician who cared for her in pregnancy, a case that would require her to say in court that she would have terminated.
Barnabus Pike is no gunfighter and not much of a street fighter, and Eddie Holt is a black boxer in a white man's world, and both of them have taken their share of hard knocks. They mean to survive a brutal winter in a remote Montana line shack and then settle down, until they meet an Irish immigrant and his sister, who have been burned off their land.
The novel takes place seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs and follows the intended revenge of one of Hannibal Lecter's victims. It is the third book in the series featuring Lecter and the second to feature the FBI agent Clarice Starling, and it centres on a pursuit rather than on a single investigation. It follows The Silence of the Lambs as a direct sequel.
In 1941 the Lecter family's castle in Lithuania is overrun and the boy Hannibal, eight years old, loses the people he loves in the winter that follows. He grows up after the war in France, in the care of his uncle's widow, Lady Murasaki, and decides that he will find the men who took his family and deal with them himself.
A Korean-American family in Virginia is thrown into confusion when the father and his younger son do not come back from a walk in a nearby park. The father's daughter Mia, who is twenty and has an explanation for everything, is not worried at first, and then her brother arrives home alone and covered in blood.
Thomas Gradgrind is a schoolmaster who believes in facts and nothing else, and the novel is Dickens's portrait of a Victorian industrial society built on that philosophy. It is set in Coketown, a northern mill town of red brick and machinery, and it puts Gradgrind's children and the people around them through the consequences of an education that leaves no room for imagination.
Haroun Khalifa lives in a city so miserable that it has forgotten its name, with a father who is a famous storyteller. When his mother leaves and his father loses the gift of the gab, Haroun sets out to find out what has gone wrong with the stories. The journey takes him to a moon called Kahani and to a sea of stories that somebody is poisoning.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus is on a ship with the Emperor and a handful of survivors, and she has been made a Lyctor. She remembers none of the events that led there, and the novel moves between her present and a version of the past that keeps contradicting what she is told about it and that she cannot check.
Harry Potter's second year at Hogwarts begins with a warning rather than a welcome: a house-elf called Dobby turns up in his bedroom to tell him that returning to school will put him in danger. Harry goes back anyway, and the castle starts producing whispers he cannot place and students who are found turned to stone. A message on a wall announces that the Chamber of Secrets has been opened, and the last time that happened a student died and another was expelled. Harry, Ron and Hermione spend the year working out who is behind the attacks, while the school wonders whether Harry is the culprit.
The script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was written by Jack Thorne from a story he developed with J. K. Rowling and John Tiffany, and it was published as a book in 2016. It is set nineteen years after the last of the novels and follows Albus Severus Potter, Harry's second son, as he arrives at Hogwarts and struggles with the weight of the name he was born with.
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.
