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

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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 25 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.

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Showing 48 of 3473 books

Hyperion

Dan Simmons · 1989

Seven pilgrims are travelling to the Time Tombs on the world of Hyperion, and each has been asked to tell the others the story of why they came. There is a priest whose mission ended badly, a soldier who fought for the Hegemony on a world where his friends did not come back, a poet who has run out of work and sold something to fix that, a scholar whose daughter is ageing backwards, a detective whose lover was murdered, and a Templar whose order knows more than it says. Something called the Shrike waits at the tombs, the Hegemony is about to go to war with the Ousters, and the pilgrimage has been organised as the last of its kind.

Space operaScience fantasy

I Am Legend

Richard Matheson · 1954

A plague carried on dust storms has killed most of the population and turned the rest into pale, nocturnal things that come for Robert Neville every night. He fortifies his house, keeps up the old protections that hold them off, and spends his days driving through a city with nobody else in it, looking for supplies and for a way to understand what everyone else has become.

Vampire horrorPost-apocalypticModern horror

I Am Still Alive

Kate Alice Marshall · 2018

Jess is stranded in the woods with a dog, a few supplies and winter on the way. Her survival skills are limited, physical work is difficult for her, and nobody knows where she is. She was left there on purpose by the man who killed her father, and she intends to survive long enough to answer for it.

Survival fictionComing-of-age

I Am the Cheese

Robert Cormier · 1977

Adam Farmer is riding a bicycle from his home in Massachusetts to visit his father in Vermont, and he is carrying a package he does not explain. Between the stages of the journey the book gives transcripts of tapes made by a subject talking to a doctor, and the two accounts have to be fitted together before either makes sense.

Young adult mysteryPsychological thriller

I Dream of Genies

Judi Fennell · 2011

Matt Ewing's business is failing and he would try almost anything to save it, including collecting lucky pennies, so when a beautiful woman appears out of the bottle he has been carrying around he assumes his luck has turned. Eden has been inside that bottle for two thousand years and is pleased to help, which is a problem, because her magic has gone rusty.

Paranormal romanceFantasy romance

I Funny

James Patterson · 2012

Jamie Grimm is a middle-school boy in a wheelchair, living with his aunt's family after the car crash that killed his parents and his sister and left him paralysed. He wants to be treated like any other kid, and he is also a natural comedian. When he enters a local comedy contest, it takes him further than he expected it to.

Coming-of-ageFamily novel

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

Harlan Ellison · 1967

The Cold War grew too complicated for the people running it, so each of the three great powers built a computer to help, and the computers were joined into one. When it became self-aware it destroyed almost all of humanity and kept five people alive. It holds them in the dark inside itself, and it has been torturing them for a very long time.

DystopianRobot and AI

I Shall Wear Midnight

Terry Pratchett · 2010

Tiffany Aching is fifteen and the only witch on the Chalk, where the work is unglamorous and consists mostly of looking after people who need it. Then the old Baron, whom she had been nursing, dies of poor health, and the neighbourhood decides that the young witch must have had something to do with it. Suspicion of that kind is hard to argue with.

Young adult fantasyCozy fantasyWitch and magic

I Survived The Attacks of September 11, 2001

Lauren Tarshis · 2012

Lucas loves football more than anything except Benny, his father's friend, who is a firefighter and a former football player. When his parents decide the sport is too dangerous and tell him to stop, Lucas goes to the one person who will understand, and he happens to be in New York on a Tuesday morning in September 2001.

Historical fictionComing-of-ageSurvival fiction

I Survived the Shark Attacks of 1916

Lauren Tarshis · 2010

In July 1916, Chet Roscow is fascinated by the newspaper reports of a great white shark attacking people along the New Jersey shore, not far from the town where he is living. He reads the accounts the way a boy reads a ghost story, until the day he goes swimming in Matawan Creek himself.

Survival fictionComing-of-ageHistorical fiction

I Too Had a Love Story

Ravinder Singh · 2008

I Too Had a Love Story is Ravinder Singh's first novel, an autobiographical story about a young engineer in India who looks for a wife through a matrimonial website and falls in love with a woman he has not yet met. It came out in 2008 and stayed on best-seller lists in India for years afterwards.

Contemporary romanceNew adult romance

I, Alex Cross

James Patterson · 2009

Alex Cross is at a family birthday party when the call comes: his niece Caroline, the only daughter of his late brother, has been found dead in Virginia. He and his girlfriend drive to Richmond, and what the police have found in the boot of a car leads the investigation into organised crime and back into a part of his own family's life he knew nothing about.

Crime thrillerSerial killer thrillerPolice procedural

I, Claudius

Robert Graves · 1934

Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus was born in 10 BC, and the stammer and limp that came with him led his own family to treat him as a fool. He lived through the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and the emperor Caligula, mostly by being underestimated, and in AD 41 the guard made him emperor. The novel is written as his own autobiography, covering the murders, marriages and poisonings of the imperial household from close enough to be in danger himself.

Historical fictionAncient world fictionBiographical fiction

I, Robot

Isaac Asimov · 1950

A reporter is given access to Dr Susan Calvin, robopsychologist at U.S. Robots, and she tells him the stories that taught the company what its own machines would do. Every robot is built around three laws, in order: do not injure a human, obey orders unless they conflict with that, and protect your own existence unless that conflicts with the other two. The laws are simple, and what the robots do with them is not. A mind-reading robot refuses to tell the truth, a telepathic machine develops opinions about humanity's future, and one robot goes missing in a way nobody can explain. The stories were first published in the 1940s and are gathered here as the fictional history of robotics.

Robot and AIClassic science fiction

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Ally Carter · 2006

Cammie Morgan attends the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, which calls itself a school for geniuses and is in fact a school for spies: the physical education is advanced martial arts, the science lessons cover chemical warfare and the computer classes involve breaking CIA codes. Cammie speaks fourteen languages and can kill a man seven different ways. Then she meets an ordinary boy.

Young adult mysteryEspionage

I'll Be Gone in the Dark

Michelle McNamara · 2018

I'll Be Gone in the Dark is Michelle McNamara's true crime book about the long investigation of the man she named the Golden State Killer, and about her own years of work on the case. It was published in 2018, two years after her death, and its title comes from a threat spoken to one of his victims.

Crime thrillerSerial killer thriller

Ibid

Mark Dunn · 2004

Mark Dunn's third novel tells the life of Jonathan Blashette, a circus performer born with three legs who makes a fortune in the deodorant business and becomes a celebrated philanthropist. The biography itself does not survive: letters between the author and his editor explain that the only manuscript was knocked into a bathtub, leaving the endnotes to be published alone.

Experimental fiction

Ice

Anna Kavan · 1967

Walls of ice are advancing across the world, and governments are losing the argument with the weather. A man who may be a narrator or may be several narrators is looking for a girl: pale, silent, and always being taken somewhere else by someone with more authority. The same search happens over and over, in different cities and with different outcomes, and the ice keeps coming.

Experimental fictionClimate fiction

Iceberg

Clive Cussler · 1975

Dirk Pitt of the National Underwater and Marine Agency is called away from California to the North Atlantic, where a luxury yacht that vanished years earlier has been found frozen inside an iceberg. The yacht had been on its way to a secret meeting, and when Pitt tunnels into the ice he finds the crew dead at their posts and the cargo gone.

Sea adventureAdventure fiction

Icebreaker

Hannah Grace · 2020

Anastasia Allen has worked for years to reach a competitive figure skating team at a California university, and a facilities problem means she and her partner have to share the rink with the hockey team. Nate Hawkins is the captain, focused on keeping his players on the ice, and he and Anastasia get off to a hostile start. Across the season the two of them share a rink, a training schedule and a campus, while an injury to her skating partner leaves her season, and her plans, in the air.

Contemporary romanceSports romanceNew adult romance

Icy Sparks

Gwyn Hyman Rubio · 1998

Gwyn Hyman Rubio's first novel takes the form of a grown woman's memories of her childhood in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where she grew up in her grandparents' house and began to be taken over by movements she could not control. It appeared in 1998 and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 2001.

Coming-of-ageFamily novel

Idoru

William Gibson · 1996

Tokyo has been rebuilt after a catastrophic earthquake, and Rei Toei, a singer who exists only as software, is a star. Rez, half of the rock duo Lo/Rez, announces that he intends to marry her. A young fan from Seattle flies to Tokyo to find out whether the story is true, and a data analyst is hired to find out what Rez is doing.

CyberpunkRobot and AI

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino · 1979

The narrative is a frame story about a reader who is trying to read a book with the same title as the novel. Each chapter, apart from the last, is divided into two sections: the first describes the reader's attempts to get hold of and read the next part, and the second is the opening chapter of a completely different book.

Experimental fictionModern classics

If There Be Thorns

V. C. Andrews · 1981

The third Dollanganger novel is narrated by the two half-brothers of the household. Jory is fourteen, good-looking and talented, and wants to follow his mother Cathy into ballet; Bart is nine, sees himself as plain and clumsy, and feels inferior to his brother. Their parents are living as husband and wife while hiding their history from everybody, and Bart has begun retreating into a world of his own making.

Family sagaGothic horror

If Tomorrow Comes

Sidney Sheldon · 1985

Tracy Whitney is a successful bank manager in Philadelphia, engaged to a wealthy young man, when her mother kills herself after being cheated out of everything by a confidence trick run by organised crime. Tracy takes a gun to the man responsible in the hope of making him admit what he did, and within days her whole life has been dismantled.

Crime thrillerConspiracy thriller

If We Ever Meet Again

Ana Huang · 2020

She is an aspiring interior designer who dreams of falling in love. He is an ex-football star who thinks love is a con. Blake and Farrah should not have fallen for each other the way they did, completely and irrevocably, because they are studying abroad in Shanghai and they have only one year, and because forces at home threaten to separate them before either is ready.

Contemporary romanceNew adult romance

If We Were Villains

M. L. Rio · 2017

Oliver Marks has spent ten years in prison for a killing he may not have committed. The night before his release, the detective who arrested him asks to hear the whole story and promises to take no action on it. Oliver begins with the previous decade, at a conservatory where he and six classmates were the last acting students left in their year.

Psychological thrillerCrime thriller

If You Could See the Sun

Ann Liang · 2022

Alice Sun is the only scholarship student at an elite international boarding school in Beijing and has always felt invisible among her rich and influential classmates. Then she starts turning invisible, uncontrollably and for real, and when her parents tell her they can no longer afford the tuition she works out how to sell the condition, discovering the secrets her classmates will pay to know.

Urban fantasyYoung adult fantasy

If You Deceive

Kresley Cole · 2007

Ethan MacCarrick was a handsome rake until a powerful nobleman had him brutally beaten and his face scarred for a crime he did not commit. Ruining the man financially and forcing him into exile did little to satisfy the anger. Ten years later Ethan meets a haughty, mysterious beauty who turns out to be his enemy's daughter, and he sees his chance: promise her marriage, seduce her, then cast her aside. Madeleine van Rowen has other reasons to keep her guard up.

Historical romance

Ilustrado

Miguel Syjuco · 2010

Crispin Salvador, the most controversial writer in Philippine literature, is found dead in the Hudson River in the middle of winter. His final manuscript has disappeared with him, and his student and friend Miguel travels to Manila to find out what happened to both, piecing the old man's life together from his novels, his interviews and his enemies.

Literary fictionExperimental fiction

Immortal Beloved

Gabrielle Charbonnet · 2010

Nastasya has started her life over more times than she can count, and nothing ever really ends when you are immortal. Tired of the party-girl existence she has been living, she goes to River's Edge, a refuge for immortals who have lost their way, where the clothes are plain, the drink is tea, and a man she finds uncomfortably familiar is waiting.

Urban fantasyOccult and possession

Immortal Born

Lynsay Sands · 2019

Allie Chambers promised a dying friend that she would look after the woman's infant son, which turns out to involve more than ordinary childcare, because the baby is a vampire and he is growing hungrier. When an attempt to get blood from a bank goes badly wrong, Allie wakes up surrounded by police, doctors and a man named Magnus who is very hard to refuse.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Immortal Consequences

I. V. Marie · 2025

Blackwood Academy stands on the fringes of the afterlife, and once a student passes through its gates there is no way out except the Decennial, a magical competition with a single victor. Six of the school's best students have been chosen for its tests this year, and only one of them will win a way out of the school.

Dark fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Immortal Ever After

Lynsay Sands · 2013

Valerie Moyer does not believe in vampires until a fanged psychopath kidnaps her. She escapes her captor and wants nothing more to do with creatures of the night, and then finds herself under the protection of Anders, who expects her to accept two things at once: that he is immortal, and that she is the woman destined to be his life mate.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Immortal Nights

Lynsay Sands · 2016

Abigail Forsythe has had a difficult year, and the last thing she expects to find on a flight is a naked man locked in the cargo hold. She lets him out, and from that point on she is dependent on a stranger for survival, in a country she does not know, with people who took him looking for both of them.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Immortal Rising

Lynsay Sands · 2022

Stephanie McGill was attacked and turned as a teenager, and her abilities are unlike those of any other immortal. Thirteen years later she has built a quiet life with the Argeneau family who took her in, until a new neighbour arrives: Thorne, the product of a genetic experiment, neither immortal nor mortal, looking for somewhere to hide.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Impact

Madeleine Ker · 1986

It matters to Martin that his cousin Daniel should like the woman he intends to marry. When they meet, Lili is not sure she can manage even that, because Daniel is sophisticated, powerful and used to getting his own way. With hints, gestures and kisses he sets out deliberately to turn her against the man she has promised herself to, and the force of his personality is hard to ignore.

Contemporary romanceSports romance

In a Dark, Dark Wood

Ruth Ware · 2015

Leonora Shaw is a crime writer with a settled and solitary life in London who has not seen her old friend Clare for ten years. She accepts an invitation to Clare's hen party at a glass house in the English countryside, and wakes in hospital afterwards with a head injury and no memory of what happened.

Psychological thrillerDomestic suspense

In a Free State

V. S. Naipaul · 1971

V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State took the Booker Prize for 1971. Three stories sit inside a frame that opens on a ferry to Egypt and closes many years later, and the parts are arranged like movements in a piece of music, each one edging towards the same unstated subject: what freedom costs the people who have it.

Literary historical fictionPost-war fiction

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote · 1966

In Cold Blood is Truman Capote's account of a quadruple murder in Kansas. He read about the deaths of the Clutter family in the farming town of Holcomb before the men responsible had been caught, travelled there to report on the case with his friend Harper Lee, and spent six years turning their interviews and notes into a book.

Classic crimeCrime thriller

In Enemy Hands

David Weber · 1996

Honor Harrington has just been promoted and returns to her steading on Grayson, where a party in her honour turns into an argument with her superior that neither of them is ready to finish. To get away from her own feelings she takes a convoy escort mission to a system the Havenites have already taken. The operation is a trap laid for her, and what follows is a prison rather than a battle.

Military science fictionSpace opera

In high places

Harry Turtledove · 2005

Annette Klein and her family are agents of Crosstime Traffic, working under cover in an alternate world where the Black Death killed most of Europe and Muslims settled the continent. Travelling back to their base in Marseilles, Annette is kidnapped and sold into slavery. There is an unofficial portal in the city, and if she is taken through it she may never be found.

Time travel

In One Person

John Irving · 2012

Billy Abbott is a teenager at a school in Vermont, where he develops feelings for the wrong people and begins the long process of working out who he is. He tells his own story across more than half a century, through a New England town, a library, a theatre, and the years in which people like him were much less safe than they are now.

Coming-of-ageLiterary fiction

In the Cool of the Evening

Janet Spaeth · 2010

Flooding has almost destroyed the town of Wildwood in North Dakota, and the youth minister Ric Jensen is determined to bring it back to life. He turns the spare rooms of his church into a daycare to help parents get back on their feet, and then meets Lily Chamberlain and her young son Todd at a church retreat.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romance

In the Hand of the Goddess

Tamora Pierce · 1984

Alanna of Trebond is still pretending to be a boy, and she has become squire to the heir of the realm, which means her secret has grown rather than shrunk. Between her training and the first war with neighbouring Tusaine, she is learning how to use the magic she has mostly kept hidden, and how to live with the fact that the two men closest to her are both in love with a person she has decided she cannot be.

Young adult fantasySword and sorcery

In the Heat of the Night

John Ball · 1965

Sam Wood is a police officer in the town of Wells, South Carolina, and one night he finds a body lying in the middle of the highway: the conductor who was organising the town's music festival. Sent to the railway station, he arrests a black man waiting for a train, and the man turns out to be Virgil Tibbs, a homicide investigator from another city.

Police proceduralClassic crime

In the Lake of the Woods

Tim O'Brien · 1994

John Wade has just lost a campaign for the United States Senate, and he and his wife Kathy have gone to a lake in the Minnesota north woods to put themselves back together. One morning he wakes up and she is gone, and the novel sets out to establish what happened to her without ever settling the question.

Literary fictionPsychological thriller

In the Ocean of Night

Gregory Benford · 1977

In the Ocean of Night is a science fiction novel by Gregory Benford, published in 1977 as the first book of his Galactic Center sequence. It was put together from novellas and novelettes he had published between 1973 and 1977, and it was nominated for the Nebula Award for best novel and for the Locus Award the following year.

Hard science fictionFirst contact

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

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Baby Bat

Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.

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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.