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 23 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.
Harry Potter leaves Privet Drive for the last time, and the protective charm that has kept him safe is broken. The Dark Lord is spreading fear through everything he loves, and hiding is no longer possible. To stop Voldemort he must find the remaining Horcruxes and destroy them, which means facing his enemy in a final battle. The story is a hunt rather than a school year, and the friends are separated from almost every protection they have relied on.
Harry returns for a fourth year at Hogwarts with Ron and Hermione, and the school is host to a tournament between three schools of magic in which one champion is chosen from each by the Goblet of Fire. Harry is not eligible and is not a fourth competitor, but his name comes out of the goblet, and he has to take part in a contest that is dangerous even for a wizard who entered willingly.
One summer night Dumbledore arrives at Privet Drive to collect Harry Potter, and his wand hand is blackened and shrivelled, though he will not say why. Rumour and suspicion spread through the wizarding world until it feels as if Hogwarts itself is under threat. Harry is convinced that Malfoy bears the Dark Mark, and he will need powerful magic and true friends as he investigates Voldemort's darkest secrets.
After Dementors attack his cousin Dudley, Harry understands that he has become Voldemort's next target. Many in the wizarding world deny that the Dark Lord has returned, but Harry is not alone, and a secret order gathers at Grimmauld Place to organise against him. Meanwhile Voldemort's assaults on Harry's mind grow stronger, and he must let Professor Snape teach him to defend himself before his time runs out.
Harry Potter lives under the stairs at his aunt and uncle's house and has been told his parents died in a car crash, which is untrue in every particular. On his eleventh birthday a letter arrives by owl, a giant takes him shopping for a wand, and he finds out that he is famous in a world he did not know existed, for something he does not remember doing. He goes to Hogwarts, makes a friend and an enemy on the train, and finds that the school is keeping something valuable hidden behind a locked door that at least one teacher wants opened. There is a mirror that shows what you want most, a game of wizard chess that has to be won, and a package that a great many people want for reasons of their own.
Sirius Black has escaped from the wizarding prison of Azkaban, and the Daily Prophet reports that he is coming for Harry Potter. Harry spends the summer at the Dursleys listening to the news, loses his temper badly enough to blow up his aunt, and takes the Knight Bus to London. Back at Hogwarts the school is guarded by Dementors, creatures who drain the warmth out of everything near them and who make Harry faint. Harry learns that Black was a friend of his parents, and what he was supposed to have done to them becomes the question that drives the year.
Brian Robeson is thirteen and his parents are divorced. He is flying north in a bush plane to spend the summer with his father when the pilot has a heart attack and the plane goes down, leaving Brian alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but the clothes he is wearing and a hatchet his mother gave him. He has to work out how to stay alive.
Dirk Pitt is investigating a toxic outbreak in the Caribbean Sea that may eventually reach the United States, and in the course of it he becomes involved in something more dangerous still: a struggle for control of Cuba after Castro. His children are in the region too, following an Aztec stone that may show where a vast treasure is hidden.
Rue has thought Hawke Masters the most insufferable man she has ever met from the moment she saw him: proud, arrogant and overbearing, and insultingly clear that although her grandfather's shotgun forced him to marry her, nothing would make him share a bed with a scrawny backwoods girl like her. Then he takes her home to his ranch to look after his orphaned niece and nephew.
Adelaide Proctor longs for a storybook hero of her own, and when a husband-hunting episode leaves her humiliated she vows to abandon her romantic notions. She interviews for a governess position on a remote Texas sheep ranch, where Gideon Wescott is raising a daughter who has not spoken since her mother died. When the child's uncle comes to claim her and her inheritance, the two of them have to work together.
Haden's Syndrome left a proportion of the people who caught it alive and conscious but unable to move their own bodies, and most of them meet the world through robot bodies instead. That has produced its own culture, including a violent sport in which one player is chosen at random to be decapitated. A death in the game cannot be explained.
Charles Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames: an assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior, and a voyage up a river into the Congo Free State in search of a man. The man he is sent to find, an ivory trader named Kurtz, has gone native, and the pursuit becomes the whole of the book.
Katriane writes romance novels for a living and has never been in love herself. She spends a Christmas with Egan Winthrop, her roommate's brother, who ranches in Wyoming and has no interest in cities, and finds that the man she has been avoiding is harder to keep at a distance than she expected.
Judas Coyne is a retired heavy metal singer with a ranch, a bad back and a long-running habit of collecting objects associated with death. When his assistant shows him an online auction for a dead man's suit, advertised as haunted, he buys it for a thousand dollars because he cannot resist the gesture. The suit arrives in a heart-shaped box, and so does its owner: an old man who is now living in Jude's house, who has a reason to be there, and who is not going to be bought off, reburied or reasoned with. Jude takes his girlfriend and his dogs and runs.
Rachel Samstat is a food writer, seven months pregnant and married to a man whose politics she has been following in print, and she finds out during a dinner party that he is in love with somebody else. What follows is the dismantling of the marriage, told by somebody who knows exactly how absurd it is.
Catherine is one of the most admired young women in Wonderland and the favourite of the unmarried King of Hearts, and neither of those is what she wants. She bakes, and her plan is to open a shop with her closest friend, though her mother has other ideas. Then she meets Jest, the court joker.
After a revolution that took witches from rulers to hunted, Rune spends her days playing the empty-headed socialite and her nights as the Crimson Moth, smuggling other witches out of the republic. When a rescue goes bad, she decides the safest place to hide is right under the nose of Gideon Sharpe, the revolution's most implacable witch hunter, by courting him in public. Gideon despises everything Rune pretends to be, then discovers the cargo hidden in her family's merchant ships, and decides the best way to catch the Moth is to court her back and watch. The first Crimson Moth novel pairs two people running the same con from opposite ends, each increasingly sure the other is the villain they are looking for.
In Wessex in 873, Kristen Haardrad is nineteen and defiant, and she has been made a prisoner by Royce, Thane of Wyndhurst. He intends to keep her as a slave, and she has no intention of being one, and the two of them recognise in each other a pride and a strength neither had expected. He also carries a hatred for a crime committed by her people, and it was not her crime.
A woman travels to India to find out about Olivia, the first wife of her grandfather, and she reads Olivia's letters as she goes. Through them, and through her own experience of the country, she learns what happened to Olivia in the 1920s, when a bored English colonial wife was drawn into the orbit of a minor Indian prince.
Virgil Flowers, an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, is summoned by Lucas Davenport to look into a pair of murders in which the victims were found with lemons in their mouths. He has to work out what connects them, because without that connection more killings will follow and there will be no way to anticipate them.
Of all the families in the mountain shacks, the Casteels were the lowest, and Heaven Leigh Casteel was the prettiest and cleverest girl in the backwoods despite ragged clothes and a father meaner than ten vipers. Then her stepmother ran off, and her father devised a scheme that threatened to destroy everything Heaven had been holding on to for her brothers and sisters.
Ripley Todd is a deputy on Three Sisters Island, content with her job and not much interested in changing anything, except that she has inherited powers she cannot control and will not talk about. Then a researcher arrives to investigate the island's reputation for witchcraft, and he takes an interest in her that she has no intention of encouraging.
Blair Simpson has enclosed herself in the fortress of her dancing, and no man has ever got past the walls she built around herself. Then an injury puts her career at risk and Sean Garrett begins the patient work of helping her body recover, kneading the muscles in her legs with hands that are strong, callused and gentle. He is determined to love her, and Blair has to decide what that love will cost.
The brutal enemy that has pursued the fugitive settlers of Jijo for centuries has arrived, and both the human and the alien inhabitants brace for a final confrontation. Their only hope is the Earthship Streaker, crewed by uplifted dolphins and commanded by a human who has never held that responsibility before. The confrontation the Jijoans have been expecting for centuries is at hand.
By 2031 the greenhouse effect has rebuilt the weather, and Texas has become a place of storms that no insurance market will cover. Janey Unger arrives from an illegal clinic in Mexico with her sick brother in tow, and joins the Storm Troupe, a group of scientists and computer people who chase tornadoes to measure them. This year there is talk of an F-6.
Heidi is a five-year-old orphan who goes to live with her grandfather and his goats on an Alpine pasture. She brings happiness to the people around her on the mountain, and when she is sent to Frankfurt to work in a wealthy household she dreams of returning to the mountains, her friend Peter and her grandfather.
A dying millionaire offers a physicist and two mediums a large sum each if they can settle whether anything survives death. They choose the Belasco House in Maine to work in, a place shut up since 1949 after years of drink, drugs and worse, and known locally as Hell House. One of the mediums has been inside it before.
Sadie Montgomery is a struggling artist who has just been named a finalist in the portrait competition of her dreams, and then she develops a rare condition that makes human faces look like jumbled puzzle pieces. She has weeks to paint the best portrait of her life, and she can no longer read a face, so she has to judge everybody from what they say instead.
Paris Gibson hosts a late-night radio show in Austin, where listeners call in with their problems and she offers advice. One caller, who signs himself Valentino, tells her that her advice to the woman he loves has driven her away, that he has taken the woman prisoner, and that he will kill her in seventy-two hours and then come for Paris. The police take it seriously.
Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris grew up in the same house as stepbrother and stepsister, and their marriage was the subject of gossip before it happened. In April 1865 they accepted an invitation to sit in the President's box at Ford's Theatre, and the night of the assassination became the event that defined the rest of their lives.
Luc Boudreau is a Green Beret who had planned to spend his leave doing something other than teaching wilderness survival to a congressman's daughter. Then he meets Claire Cook, and the assignment becomes considerably more interesting to him. He is supposed to be her instructor, and both of them are supposed to be sensible about it.
After years on the run, Juniper makes a bargain with a demon who has wanted all of her for a long time: she gives him her soul and he helps her claim the revenge she is owed. Blood will be spilled, and the monsters she has been running from will soon be the ones running.
The demon did not only want her body; he wanted her soul. That is the voice of the hunter telling the story, a magician and killer with an unblemished reputation whose rule is that one wrong move ends in death. Then he meets the one woman he was supposed to take, and does not take her.
Giordano Bruno has left the monastery and the Inquisition behind and reached Elizabethan England, where his ideas about astronomy and other worlds attract the attention of the queen's spymaster. Sent to Oxford to look into a matter for Francis Walsingham, he finds the university full of old arguments, a killer at work among the fellows, and the deaths treated as accidents.
Florian Herscht is a gentle giant in the small eastern German town of Kana, convinced after adult education classes in physics that the destruction of all physical matter is imminent. He writes one-sided letters to Chancellor Angela Merkel about it, works as a graffiti cleaner for the local neo-Nazi boss, and is dragged into the hunt for whoever is defacing the region's Bach monuments.
Black Spring in the Hudson Valley is watched by more cameras than a small town should need. The reason is a seventeenth-century woman the locals call the Black Rock Witch, whose mouth and eyes were stitched shut, and who walks the streets and enters houses as she likes. The elders keep Black Spring sealed off to stop the curse spreading; the teenagers, bored, put the haunting online.
In a distant future, human beings are one of only three intelligent races known in the galaxy, and we have had star travel for only a few centuries. The second race, the Ildirans, are ruled by their Mage-Imperator, and the third, the Klikiss, appear to have vanished, leaving behind artefacts and technology that humans are beginning to use.
Pearl Andreas has been raised in a New Orleans mansion filled with kindness and laughter, and she wants to go to college and become a doctor. Her graduation party is almost as festive as Mardi Gras. What she keeps wondering about is the family history nobody discusses, and in the summer that follows she takes a job as a nurse's aide at an elegant old hospital, where an intern befriends her.
Mallory Quinn is out of rehab and glad of the job: looking after five-year-old Teddy Maxwell in a comfortable house, with a room of her own and a routine that suits her. Teddy draws constantly, mostly trees and animals, until he produces a picture of a man in a wood dragging a woman's body. Later drawings start matching details from a case that was never solved.
In the shadows of the city stands an abandoned hotel called The Pope, and inside it, supposedly, a hidden twelfth floor and a dark guest who checked in and never left. Kai Mori thinks it is only a story. Banks, who has watched him since she was a girl, tells him that what he is hunting is closer than he realises, and that she will not betray the man she protects. On Devil's Night the hunt comes to him.
Rob Fleming is thirty-five, he owns a record shop in London, and he has just been left by his girlfriend Laura. What follows is his attempt to work out what went wrong, beginning with a list of the five most memorable break-ups of his life. Rob has some work to do on himself, and he knows it.
Jamie Canning and Ryan Wesley were roommates at hockey camp until Ryan cut him off without explanation four years ago, after something happened between them on the last night. Their college teams are now meeting at a national championship, which gives Ryan the chance to explain himself, and the championship turns out not to be the last time the two of them have to deal with each other.
In 1869 three people are killed in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, and a young man called Roderick Macrae is arrested for the murders. The memoir he writes in prison makes it clear that he did it, and the courts then have to decide why: what kind of man kills his neighbours, and whether the law should hold him responsible.
Dylan Warren and Jenna Scott were best friends as children and then something went wrong between them. Their mothers, who have decided that the two families should spend Christmas together, pair them up on a project to give a Christmas to a family that has lost everything. Dylan and Jenna have been avoiding each other for years.
In 1804 a Royal Navy captain takes a French frigate and finds a dragon's egg among the prizes. It hatches on his ship, and the creature that comes out of it decides that he is its handler, which ends his career at sea and puts him in the Aerial Corps instead. The two of them have to be trained in time for a war that is already underway.
Cameron MacKay, the last member of a broken Highland clan, has one aim: find Meredith Munro, last daughter of his sworn enemies, and force her to give him an heir. What he finds in the priory where she has taken refuge is a woman who bargains hard for her freedom instead of weeping, and a plan that becomes harder to carry out.
On Hogswatchnight, the Discworld's version of Christmas Eve, the Hogfather goes missing, and Death takes his place in the sleigh so that the sun will rise and the year will turn. His granddaughter Susan, a governess with a firm grasp of what is real, sets out to find who arranged the disappearance and why.
Holly has just finished nursing school and cannot afford to be distracted by anything, because she believes that a mistake on her part could cost a patient's life. When she meets Matthew Cook, a baker she knew in high school but never noticed at the time, she has to decide whether she can risk letting anyone get close to her again.
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.
