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 24 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.
Jacob Portman and the peculiar children leave the island where they had been safe and travel towards wartime London to find help for Miss Peregrine, who is trapped in the form of a bird. The novel follows their journey through a country at war and through loops that are closing behind them.
The ice is advancing, the Corridor is narrowing, and the empire is under siege from the Scithrowl in the east and the Durns in the west, with the emperor's armies retreating everywhere. Nona Grey faces the final challenges she must overcome to become a full sister in the order of her choice, and it is beginning to look as though she and her friends will not have time to earn a nun's habit before the war arrives.
Jack Boughton comes home to Gilead, Iowa, after twenty years away, an alcoholic carrying two decades of secrets, and he is at odds with his traditionalist father even though he remains the old man's favourite child. His sister Glory has come home too, with troubles of her own, and the two of them try to make a life in the house.
Twenty-five years ago Maggie Holt and her parents moved into Baneberry Hall, a Victorian estate in the Vermont woods, and fled it three weeks later in the middle of the night. Her father wrote a memoir about the haunting that made the family famous, and Maggie, who was too young to remember, has never believed it.
Isma Pasha has spent years raising her younger siblings in London after their mother died, and an invitation from a mentor in America gives her the chance of a life of her own. She cannot stop worrying about her sister Aneeka or her brother Parvaiz, who has gone abroad to prove himself to the legacy of the father he never knew.
Effia's marriage takes her into the household of the British governor at Cape Coast Castle, while Esi, her half-sister, is imprisoned in the dungeons of the same building, waiting to be shipped across the Atlantic. Neither sister knows the other exists. Each following chapter belongs to a later descendant of one of the two women, so the novel runs from the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century through the slave trade, plantations in the American South, the mines and jazz clubs of the twentieth century, and towards the present, one generation at a time.
Homeland is the first book of R. A. Salvatore's Dark Elf trilogy, and the story it tells begins before the better known adventures of its hero. It follows Drizzt Do'Urden from his birth in the underground city of the drow, through an upbringing in a society where kindness is a weakness, and out towards the principles he decides to live by.
Koly is thirteen and living in India when her parents arrange her marriage to a sickly boy from a family that wants her dowry. Within a year she is a widow, with no husband, no place in her in-laws' house and no way of going home, and she has to make a life for herself in a city she does not know.
Haiwen is buying bananas in a supermarket in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, the girl he knew in Shanghai, for the first time in sixty years. To him it feels like a second chance; to her it is an interruption of a life she has survived by refusing to look back.
In a parallel world the Neanderthals became the dominant human species, and their civilisation is as advanced as ours with a different history, a different society and a different philosophy. A physicist named Ponter Boddit steps through the barrier between the two worlds by accident and arrives in ours, while his colleagues at home are left with a missing body and a murder charge.
Grace Porter has just finished a PhD in astronomy and goes to Las Vegas with her friends to celebrate. She is not the sort of person who gets drunk and marries a woman whose name she does not know, until she does exactly that. Then she flees Portland for a summer in New York with her new wife, because finishing the degree has not made her feel the way she expected.
Joe Stoshack loves baseball and is not good at it, which is most of what he knows about himself. Cleaning out a neighbour's attic for small money, he finds a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card, the most valuable one in the world. When he holds it and wishes he could meet the player, he finds himself standing in front of him.
Maureen Harris works as a secretary and has been given a job that requires her to get close to a new mechanic at the company, because somebody has been tampering with its aircraft designs. She is very shy, and the man she is investigating turns out to be more than she bargained for.
James has one agenda: to destroy his enemy, Peter Michaels. When Peter's twenty-year-old daughter Wendy walks into James's bar, he sees his way in. The plan is to seduce her and use her for his revenge, and it works until his own organisation begins to come apart and he has to find a traitor in his own ranks. Meanwhile Wendy, kept cloistered by a wealthy and cold father, finds a night out turning into an affair she cannot shake.
Miles Kendig has been one of the CIA's most effective deep-cover officers, until an injury ends his usefulness in the field and the Agency offers him a desk. He retires instead, finds civilian life unbearable, and begins writing a memoir full of what he knows, posting a chapter a week to his old employer and daring them to stop him.
Hornblower's promotion to post-captain brings him the Atropos, a sloop of twenty-two guns and barely enough work to justify a captain at all. Before he can sail, he is handed one of the strangest assignments in the Royal Navy, which is arranging the funeral of Lord Nelson, whose death at Trafalgar has left the country in mourning. Then come the pearl divers, the salvage master with a temper, and a wreck full of British army pay.
In the spring of 1803, with the Peace of Amiens collapsing, Horatio Hornblower is newly promoted to commander and given a small sloop along with a task that suits it: to watch the French fleet at Brest and report what Napoleon is preparing. He has just married a woman he does not love, and the mission becomes complicated almost at once, because the war restarts while he is close inshore and nobody has thought to tell him.
Edith Hope is a romantic novelist who has been sent by her friends to a hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva to think about the mess she has made of her life. She arrives determined not to change, and spends her time watching the other English guests, among them a wealthy mother and daughter and an attractive middle-aged man.
A husband and wife whose marriage is in trouble are stranded on a road in the middle of nowhere in Alabama, and they take shelter in what looks like a fine Victorian house. Inside, they find that it is occupied, and that whoever is there means the two of them to face something about themselves before either of them leaves.
Bryce Quinlan's life in Crescent City ends the night a demon kills the people closest to her. When the murders start again with someone else already imprisoned for them, Bryce joins the investigation on her own terms, and the Archangels hand her a partner with nothing left to lose either. Hunt Athalar is a Fallen angel bound into service, and the deal on offer is simple: find whoever is killing in the city and his freedom is back on the table. Working together means going through the parts of Crescent City that respectable people avoid, and it means both of them admitting what they want. The first Crescent City novel starts with a murder and opens out into the city's politics, its magic and its oldest grudges.
Bryce Quinlan never expected to see a world other than Midgard, and now that she has, all she wants is to get back to it: her family, her friends and her mate are all there. Stranded in a strange world, she needs every bit of her wit to find a way home, and she has no idea who she can trust. Meanwhile Hunt Athalar is back in the Asteri's dungeons, stripped of his freedom.
Three sisters disappeared from a suburban street in Scotland when they were children and came back a month later with no memory of where they had been. Afterwards their hair grew white, their eyes darkened, and people found them disturbingly beautiful and slightly dangerous to be near. Ten years later the eldest, Grey, vanishes again, and the clues she leaves behind are strange.
A family discovers that their house is bigger inside than it is outside, and that the extra space keeps growing. Their attempts to measure it and film it become a documentary called The Navidson Record, and the novel around that record is assembled from a recovered manuscript, footnotes, letters and commentary. It is the author's debut, published in 2000.
Diana Wynne Jones's House of Many Ways, published in 2008, belongs to the same invented world as her earlier book Howl's Moving Castle. Charmain Baker, who was raised to be respectable and has never had to do a day's housework, is asked to look after the home of her great-uncle William, who is the Royal Wizard of Norland. The house does not behave like a house at all: its one front door opens onto other rooms, other countries and other times.
Massoud Behrani is a former colonel in the Iranian air force who fled his country after the revolution, works in America at jobs far beneath his old life and hides the fact from the other exiles. Kathy Nicolo has been evicted from the house her family owned, because of unpaid taxes the county wrongly claimed she owed, and both of them want the same small bungalow.
Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar have saved their city and would now like a quiet life, but a rebellion is forming against the rulers who have left them alone so far. They are drawn into the rebels' plans, and the choice in front of them is whether to keep their heads down while other people are oppressed or to join in.
Six million years ago a woman named Abigail Gentian split herself into a thousand male and female copies, called shatterlings, and sent them out to watch civilisations rise and fall. Once every two hundred thousand years the shatterlings meet to trade memories of what they have seen. This time nobody arrives, and the line is being murdered.
A young woman born out of wedlock and shunned by the society she was raised in makes a bargain with a god, and the bargain is for revenge on the aristocratic family that turned its back on her. What the god wants in return, and what the house he keeps turns out to contain, is not explained to her in advance.
Dr Cliff Miyashiro travels to the Arctic Circle to continue his late daughter's research and finds a virus newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague it releases reshapes life on earth for generations, and the novel follows the people adjusting to that new world, including an aspiring comedian employed at a theme park built for terminally ill children. Grief is the book's subject as much as the catastrophe.
Sammy, a shoplifter and ex-convict in Glasgow, wakes in a lane after two days of drinking and is beaten badly by plain-clothes policemen. When he comes round he is blind, and the novel follows him as he learns to manage a city he can no longer see, in a working-class Scottish dialect that runs the whole length of the book.
The Grinch lives in a cave above the town of Whoville with his dog Max and cannot stand the noise the Whos make at Christmas. He decides to stop the holiday altogether by dressing as Santa Claus, stealing every present, tree and decoration on Christmas Eve, and waiting on the mountainside to hear the wailing that should follow.
They came west by river and by wagon train, across the distances of the Great Plains and through the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada, and the novel follows a set of them: men like Linus Rawlings and women like Lilith Prescott, who fled her family and fell for a gambling man.
Katie Carr is a doctor in London, married to David, who has spent years being furious about everything and has made a career out of it. She is also having an affair, and she has decided that the two facts balance out. Then David meets a healer, stops being angry and starts giving his money away, which is much harder to live with.
Edie was a ruined American heiress until the devil-may-care Duke of Margrave agreed to her proposal of a marriage of convenience. Five years later she is delighted with the arrangement, particularly because her husband is living on another continent. Then a brush with death brings him home, and he proposes a new bargain: ten days to win a willing kiss from his wife.
Louise's parents die suddenly, and she flies with her daughter to the South Carolina house she grew up in to get it ready for sale. It is packed with what is left of her mother's decades of puppets and dolls and her father's academic papers, and clearing it means working with her brother Mark, who stayed in town and resents her. The house, it turns out, has no intention of being sold.
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was an awesome sword-fighter, a dragon-whisperer and the greatest Viking hero who ever lived, though it was not always like that. At the beginning he was the most put-upon Viking imaginable: not loud enough to be heard at dinner with his father Stoick the Vast, not strong enough to beat his rival Snotlout at the school's main sport, and not stupid enough to avoid a cave full of dragons.
Daniel de La Luna arrives at an elite university on the American east coast carrying his family's hopes and the name of an uncle who died before he was born. He flounders until his roommate Sam changes what seems possible, and the friendship between them turns into something more just as the life Daniel came for begins pulling him away.
The Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, live in a London of books, music and conversation, while the Wilcox family lives in a London of business and property. Between them stands Howards End, the Hertfordshire house where the two families and the people they have damaged have to work out what they owe one another.
Sophie Hatter is the eldest of three sisters, which in the fairy-tale logic of her country means she will not amount to anything, and she has accepted this until the Witch of the Waste curses her into an old woman. She talks her way into the moving castle of the wizard Howl, who has a reputation for eating hearts and whose household is run by a fire demon bound by a contract nobody will explain. Sophie takes over the cleaning, which turns out to be a form of magic, and starts working out what the fire demon, the apprentice and the wizard are each hiding.
A man wakes up naked and freezing, with no memory, on a ship he does not recognise. A small girl leads him through a series of corridors in search of somewhere warm, calling him Teacher, and together they meet other strange inhabitants of the vessel as they try to stay alive. The ship is a generation ship that has lost its way, and the answers to what happened to it are stored in fragments left behind by people who have been through this before.
Two men wounded in the same train robbery are left on Abigail McKenzie's doorstep in frontier Colorado, and she nurses both of them back to health. One is gentle David, who offers her a happiness she had given up expecting. The other is Jesse, rude and violent, who challenges every idea she has about herself and about the life she intended to lead.
Three months after every adult in the town disappeared and a barrier sealed the children inside, the food has run out and nobody has a plan. Some of the younger survivors are developing powers that set them apart from the rest, and the ordinary children are starting to be afraid of them. In the hills above the town, something old has begun calling to a handful of teenagers.
Cale Valens is one of the oldest vampires in the Argeneau family, and he has given up on finding a life mate. His relatives have not given up on him, and the plan they settle on involves a small lie: Alexandra Willan's restaurant opens in two weeks and her chef has just walked out, and the man they send her as a replacement is handsome, convincing and quite unable to cook.
Zoey's friends have her back again and the red fledglings are no longer Neferet's secret, but an unexpected danger has emerged: Neferet is guarding her powerful new consort, Kalona, and nobody at the House of Night seems to understand the threat he poses. Kalona looks gorgeous, and he has the House under his spell.
Kim Lyttleton decides that the only way to stop her foster sister ruining her life is to kidnap the married man the girl intends to run away with. She takes the wrong man, and the person she has abducted is a Greek called Damon Souris, who offers her a choice between the police and marriage.
Ramón Espejo left Earth for a colony world and found the same poverty he had run from. He is a prospector with a temper, and one night a fight outside a bar becomes a murder and sends him into the wilderness to hide. What he finds out there is a hidden installation and a race of aliens, and they do not intend to let him go home with what he knows.
Hunting Adeline is the second half of a two-book story told from two points of view. One of them belongs to a young woman who has been taken and is being held by people she describes as monsters in the shape of men, and who is surviving it and trying to get back to the man who hunts for her. The other voice belongs to that man, who is looking for her.
Audrey Rose Wadsworth leaves London and its memories after discovering the identity of Jack the Ripper, travelling with Thomas Cresswell to Romania, to one of Europe's best schools of forensic medicine and to the country of Vlad the Impaler. Bizarre murders are then found in the castle of the prince known as Dracula.
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.
