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 26 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.
Rachel Fleischer has good reasons not to be at her father's deathbed, and she nearly misses the funeral entirely. When a stranger there gives her an odd gift and an apology, she is drawn into the story of her father's war as a Jewish sergeant in charge of a platoon of Black soldiers, and the scandal that shaped his life.
In 1984 three children go into woods near a Dublin suburb and only one comes out, holding on to a tree, wearing shoes full of blood and with no memory of the hours before. Twenty years later that boy is Rob Ryan, now working as a murder detective in Dublin, and nobody he works with knows about it. Then the body of a child, a twelve-year-old girl, is discovered in the same woods.
Dirk Pitt is called in when a colleague disappears while working on a case involving a stolen relic, and the investigation reaches back to a fleet of boats that landed on an island in an inland sea and to an Andean hoard of gold. Pitt and his team have to find the people dealing in the artifacts before the trail closes.
Ben is a shy and lonely six-year-old living on the Canadian prairie, and he is different from the rest of his family. When he wanders away from the farm and gets lost, he spends a summer in the open country under the protection of a badger, and the arrangement keeps him alive while his parents search for him.
An officer is shot at point-blank range inside the Grant County police station and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver is wounded, which sets off a hostage situation with the medical examiner Sara Linton at the centre of it. Outside, a newly reinstated officer and Jeffrey's second in command must work out who the shooter is before Jeffrey dies.
Mary Jemison is twelve and takes her family's farm in eastern Pennsylvania for granted until a war party takes the household captive in 1758. She is separated from her parents and travels to a Seneca village, where she has to learn the language, the work and the customs of people she was brought up to fear. She tries several times to run away.
Winslow Covington has just become chief of police in the small Montana town of Quincy and is trying to prove she was not given the job because her grandfather is the mayor. On her first night there she slept with Griffin Eden, of the town's founding family, and then a woman is found dead on Eden land.
Robert Langdon wakes in a Florence hospital with a head injury and no memory of the days before it, repeating a phrase in his sleep: seek and find. There is no time to work out what happened to him, because somebody is coming up the corridor with a gun, and the days that follow lead him through Dante's circles of hell and an old map left by a man with a plan.
For the fugitive settlers of Jijo, the arrival of starships in the sky is the beginning of the end. The planet that once sheltered six bands of sapient beings now faces the threat of genocide, and the human settlers are among those who have to decide what to do about it. The ships are the first the planet has seen in a long time.
Eragon, once a farm boy and now a Dragon Rider, returns for the last stage of the war against the king who destroyed his order. With his dragon Saphira and his cousin Roran he has to gather allies, break a siege and face Galbatorix, an opponent who holds the true names of things.
After her final year at college, a young writer takes a part-time job as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift she is dropped into hundreds of crises and hears only a piece of each, and the stress of listening to faraway disasters seeps into the rest of her life.
Miranda leaves a French convent for the New World and an arranged marriage to a prosperous Texas rancher. On the journey she meets Derek Bragg, the fiancé's friend, a Texas Ranger whose blunt manner and frank comments about her beauty infuriate the shy young woman, and the two of them cross the wilderness together.
In February 1975, Hà Kim and her family celebrate the new year in South Vietnam while the war continues. As the fall of Saigon approaches, she leaves school early, the search for her missing soldier father goes on, and the family prepares to evacuate. On 30 April they flee on a navy ship, and the novel follows the first year of their life in the United States.
Ralph Roberts is a retired widower whose sleep is steadily shortening. The insomnia turns out to have a consequence: it lets him perceive auras and other things that are normally hidden, and it draws him into a conflict between the forces of the Purpose and the Random. The novel is set in Derry, Maine, and connects to King's other work. His sleeplessness is treated throughout as a medical problem before it becomes anything else, which is what gives the book its slow pressure.
Prudence Barnett is an overachiever with strong opinions about the people around her, and after a night out she wakes up able to make bad behaviour come back on the person who did it. The power works on almost everyone in her coastal town, with one stubborn exception: her lab partner, Quint Erickson.
One choice can transform a person or destroy them, and every choice has consequences. As unrest grows in the factions around her, Tris Prior tries to save the people she loves and herself while working through questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love. Her initiation day should have ended in celebration with her chosen faction, and instead it ended in horror.
Chyna Shepherd is twenty-six and spending a weekend with the family of her best friend in the Napa Valley when a man lets himself into the house at midnight. He kills everyone in it, and Chyna, who has spent her life learning to survive people, escapes, and then learns the identity of the next person he means to kill.
Interesting Times is Terry Pratchett's seventeenth Discworld novel, published in 1994 and set in the Aurient, his version of the Orient. The title comes from the saying about living in interesting times, and the story sends Rincewind, the least successful wizard on the Disc, a very long way from home, and into a fight over an empire he has never seen.
Aside from being brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek appear to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties, successful and apparently unassailable, and since their father's death he has been medicating himself to sleep while managing relationships with two very different women. Ivan is twenty-two, a competitive chess player who sees himself as socially awkward, and he meets an older woman in the early weeks of his bereavement.
Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, published in 1999, holds nine short stories about Indians and Indian Americans who live between the country their families came from and the country they now call home. The first of them follows a married couple whose house has gone quiet, and the collection took the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000.
For sixty thousand years the five races of the Galactic Milieu have watched and waited for the moment when human mental development on Earth would be ready for the Intervention. As the twentieth century ends, operants across the planet begin to display phenomenal abilities: telepathy, mental shields and coercion by power of mind. By then their abilities are already changing the world they live in.
Louis tells his life story, beginning with the night the vampire Lestat turned him in New Orleans and then taught him what being one of the undead involves, whether or not Louis wanted the lessons. Later he finds a lost child, Claudia, and makes her a vampire too, leaving a grown woman's mind sealed inside a body that never ages. The two of them become allies against Lestat.
Seven years ago a ship called the Atargatis sailed for the Mariana Trench to film a documentary about legendary sea creatures and was lost with everybody aboard. Footage recovered from the vessel appeared to show mermaids killing the crew, and the world decided it was a hoax. Now a second expedition is being assembled, and the scientists on it are not out to entertain anybody.
Nell and Eva live with their father in a house deep in a Northern California forest, more than thirty miles from the nearest town. When the electricity fails and stays off, and the shops run out of fuel and food, the family discovers that nobody is coming to put things right. The sisters have to work out how to live in a place that is suddenly all they have.
A young domestic cat called Rusty leaves his human owners to join a group of forest-dwelling feral cats known as ThunderClan, and takes a new name, Firepaw. He is trained to hunt and defend the clan, and is drawn into a murder and a betrayal inside it. At the end of the book he receives his warrior name after a battle with another clan.
A young black man from the South narrates the story of his own invisibility, beginning with the college he is expelled from after he shows a white benefactor the reality of black life, and continuing in Harlem, where he becomes an orator for an organisation known as the Brotherhood. In his new position he is both praised and threatened, and he is carried into a movement whose logic he does not fully understand.
Shannon McFarland is a fashion model whose life ends the day someone shoots her in the face while she is driving, and the novel she narrates is scrambled out of order on purpose. Her career, her boyfriend and her best friend are all gone, and she hides what is left of her jaw behind a veil until she meets Brandy Alexander in speech therapy, a woman one operation away from completing her transition. Brandy teaches Shannon how to invent a new life, and the two of them set out to settle accounts.
Violet survived her first year at Basgiath War College when almost nobody expected her to. The second year is built to break the survivors instead: harder training, worse injuries and a new vice commandant who wants her to prove how powerless she is by turning on the man she loves. Violet has two things he has not counted on, a mind that refuses to stop working and the stubbornness to match. What she also has now is the truth about what the college has hidden for centuries, and that knowledge is worth killing for. The war outside the walls has stopped being something cadets read about, and the people who have been lying to Navarre are running out of ways to keep it quiet.
Humanity was lifted off the Earth and scattered across the galaxy at random by a machine intelligence called the Eschaton. When a young planetary civilisation is murdered by something that makes its sun explode without warning, the investigation has to work out who owns a weapon that breaks causality. Meanwhile Rachel Mansour is asked to explain her expenses, and Martin Springfield is looking for work.
Huaxia is at war with an alien swarm that only giant mecha can stop, and the mecha are flown by pairs whose shared psychic link burns one pilot out. It is usually the girl. Zetian trains for one reason: to get into a cockpit and kill the pilot responsible for her sister's death, and she does it in a way that leaves her alive and famous. That makes her an Iron Widow, a pilot who can use up her partner instead of the other way round, and the army has to pair her with someone it thinks can hold her. She is given Li Shimin, and neither of them intends to make it easy.
Francis Phelan returns to Albany in 1938 after years on the road, drinking and taking casual work, and the novel follows him through two days of Halloween as he visits the graves and the houses of the people he left behind. The dead he has known keep him company while he decides whether he can stay.
In a universe protected by the Three Laws of Robotics, humans are safe from their machines: a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow one to come to harm. Then an experiment with a new kind of robot brain goes wrong, and Caliban is created, a robot with no knowledge of and no compassion for humanity, and no Three Laws at all.
A politician is murdered on a world where robots are built to obey human beings and to keep them from harm, and the chief suspect is the one robot in existence who has no such obligation to anyone. His existence raises a question about the place society has given machines, and the answer is not only about one dead man.
Inferno is a planet whose terraforming failed, and its surface will not support human life for much longer. Its inhabitants live alongside robots built to the Three Laws and, more controversially, robots built to a revised set of laws that let them protect humanity as a whole rather than an individual. A young man proposes to dig a northern sea with a redirected comet, and not everyone wants the plan to happen.
A man answers an advertisement from a teacher looking for a pupil, and finds that the teacher is a gorilla named Ishmael who communicates by telepathy. What follows is a long conversation about the assumptions that drive modern civilisation, about the cultural myths those assumptions rest on, and about the consequences they have for the planet.
Iris Catherine Villiers grows up at Belerion Hall on the coast of Cornwall, in the gardens and on the cliffs, under the judgement of her grandfather and the taunts of her governess. The old gardener, Marsh, warns her away from the ruins above the sea and tells her never to say a prayer at their door or make a vow by the Laughing Maiden stone. She is unhappy, and she has a brother she loves.
Will Farnaby, a journalist working for interests that want an island's oil, is shipwrecked on Pala, a small country in the Indian Ocean that has been left to run its own affairs for a century. He is taken in by a family who explain their society to him: its medicine, its schools, its psychology and the way it deals with the outside world. Pala is rich, and its neighbours want what it has.
A young girl named Karana is stranded alone for years on an island off the California coast after being left behind by her family and her village. She learns to do the work that only the men of her tribe did before, and she has to deal with the hunters who visit the island as well as her own loneliness.
On a June evening in 1925, at their home on the Sussex Downs, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes take a telephone call about an old friend's aunt, who has not returned from a supervised outing from Bedlam. Russell has had a difficult few weeks, and the search for the missing woman takes her from the asylum to Venice.
Laura Webster is a young executive on the way up inside a multinational conglomerate, in an early twenty-first century that looks peaceful and prosperous because the great powers have settled into a system of networks and delocalised companies. Her career takes her into a dispute about where the boundaries of that system run, and the answer turns out to lie in the parts of the world the network has never reached.
Roy Malcolm is sixteen and knows the history of aviation better than anyone else on his television quiz show, which is how he wins a prize he insists on taking five hundred miles up. The Inner Station orbits inside the limit that the law of the time treats as Earth, so his trip to it is technically covered, and he spends two weeks living with the apprentices who run the place. Then a secretive ship anchors off the station and the apprentices go looking for a crime.
Marguerite is the heir to a fortune until she is orphaned and her guardian takes charge of both her money and her life, spending the inheritance and taking her with him on an expedition to New France. On the voyage she and the guardian's servant fall in love, and when the affair is discovered the two of them are punished and left on a small island with no prospect of rescue.
Children keep dying in a small Maine town, and whatever is responsible wears the shape of whatever frightens its victim most, usually a clown called Pennywise. Seven friends work out as children that it is far older than the town and that it feeds on fear, and that knowing what it is does not make it any easier to face.
Lily Bloom leaves her Maine hometown for Boston and builds a business of her own, and meets Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon who is direct about how little he wants from a relationship. Then Atlas Corrigan, the boy she knew in high school, reappears, and the choices Lily believed she had already made become harder to hold. The novel follows her through the distance between the life she set out to build and the one she is living, including the pattern in her own family that she swore she would not repeat.
Lillian Bowman is an American heiress whose blunt manners have not gone down well in London society, and Marcus, Lord Westcliff, is the most eligible and most disapproving aristocrat in it. The two of them are thrown together at a house party, where four friends who have agreed to help each other find husbands are also at work.
Piper Bellinger's life of fashion, parties and photographers ends when a rooftop party gets out of hand and her stepfather cuts her off. He sends her and her sister to run the dive bar their late father left them in a small fishing town in Washington, where Piper meets Brendan, a bearded sea captain who doubts she will last a week. She is determined to prove him and her stepfather wrong. The bar, the town and the man in front of her all turn out to be more interesting than the life she has left behind.
Sixteen months after the ending of It Ends with Us, Lily is running her flower shop in Boston and co-parenting her young daughter with her ex-husband, Ryle, on terms the two of them have worked out slowly and with difficulty. When she runs into Atlas Corrigan, the first love she lost in her teens, the two of them have to work out whether the timing is finally on their side. Atlas is building a life of his own in the city while carrying a complicated family history, and he knows exactly how much Ryle will resent his return. The novel alternates between Lily's and Atlas's viewpoints.
Gareth St. Clair has been left an old family diary by a father who detests him and who is determined to ruin what should have been his inheritance. The diary may hold the secret of his past, but it is written in a language he cannot read, and the woman he asks to translate it is Hyacinth Bridgerton.
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.
