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 27 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

Ivanhoe

Walter Scott · 1819

Wilfrid of Ivanhoe comes home from the Third Crusade in disguise, disinherited by his father for following King Richard instead of marrying as he was told, and finds England split between the Normans who hold it and the Saxons who do not. He rides in a tournament at Ashby, becomes caught up in the fate of a Jewish moneylender and his daughter, and ends up among the outlaws and loyalists trying to raise the king's ransom. The novel runs on disguise, trial by combat and the slow return of Richard.

Historical fictionMedieval fictionHistorical adventure

Jack & Jill

James Patterson · 1996

A senator is found murdered in bed in his Georgetown apartment, and the only clue the police recover is a rhyme signed Jack and Jill, promising that this death is the first of many. Meanwhile Detective Alex Cross of the Washington police is called to a murder scene a few blocks from his own house, where a young girl has been beaten to death.

Serial killer thrillerPolice procedural

Jack the Bodiless

Julian May · 1992

In the year 2051, Earth stands on the brink of acceptance as a full member of the Galactic Milieu, and the powerful Remillard family is leading humanity towards it. Somebody, or something, known only as Fury wants the Remillards out of the way, and it begins killing operants wherever it can reach them. The campaign is aimed at the strongest minds on the planet as well as at the family.

Hard science fictionConspiracy thriller

Jackie and me

Dan Gutman · 1999

Joe Stoshack has to write a report about an African American who made an important contribution to society, and he has an unusual advantage: with the right old baseball card in his hand, he can travel through time. He decides to go and meet Jackie Robinson. What he finds is a trip that changes how he looks at everything afterwards.

Time travelYoung adult science fiction

Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf · 1922

Jacob Flanders grows up in pre-war England, goes to Cambridge, reads whatever he can find and later moves to London, and the reader learns almost nothing about him directly. He is assembled out of what other people notice: his mother's letters, the impressions of the women who fall in and out of his life, and the rooms he leaves behind.

Experimental fictionModern classics

Jade City

Fonda Lee · 2017

Kekon is an island that produces jade and the only people who can safely wear it, which makes the clans who control the trade a matter of national security. The Kaul family runs the No Peak clan: Lan is the eldest and the Pillar, Hilo leads its street fighters as the Horn, and their sister Shae comes home from studying abroad and wants nothing to do with any of it. Their rival is the isolationist Mountain clan and its Ayt family, and a new drug called shine lets anyone, including foreigners, use jade. The novel follows the family business through the summer the peace breaks down, in a city where the jade trade, the police and the politicians are all connected.

Urban fantasyEpic fantasy

James

Percival L. Everett · 2024

Jim overhears that he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, and he runs while he works out what to do next. At the same time Huck Finn has faked his own death, and the two of them set off down the river together, with Jim's own account of the journey replacing the one that readers know.

Literary historical fictionAdventure fiction

James and the Giant Peach

Roald Dahl · 1961

James Henry Trotter loses his parents and is sent to live with two aunts who work him hard and give him nothing. An old man hands him a bag of green crystals and tells him they will make wonderful things happen, and James spills them by the old peach tree. One peach grows and grows, and James finds company for the first time inside it.

Classic fantasyFairytale retelling

Jamrach's Menagerie

Carol Birch · 2011

Jaffy Brown is running through the back streets of east London when he comes face to face with a tiger that has escaped from a menagerie. Charles Jamrach takes him out of its jaws and gives him a job. Some years later Jaffy, now sixteen, is sent to the other side of the world on a whaling ship to catch something for the collection.

Sea adventureHistorical adventure

Jane-Emily

Patricia Clapp · 1969

Emily was a selfish, wilful and hateful child who died before her thirteenth birthday, and that was a long time ago. Jane is nine and an orphan when she and her young aunt come to spend the summer at her grandmother's house in Massachusetts, and one day in the garden she looks into a reflecting ball and sees a face that is not her own.

Ghost storyClassic horror

Jar of Hearts

Jennifer Hillier · 2018

Angela Wong disappeared when she was sixteen, and nobody suspected that her best friend Georgina Shaw knew anything about it. Fourteen years later Angela's remains are found in woods near Georgina's childhood home, and the detective on the case, an old friend of both women, learns who killed her and what Georgina's part in it was.

Crime thrillerDomestic suspense

Jaws

Peter Benchley · 1974

A great white shark begins attacking swimmers off a summer resort town on the coast of Long Island, and the town has a problem that has nothing to do with the animal: the season is starting, the businesses depend on it, and closing the beaches would ruin the people who vote for the officials making the decision. The police chief who wants the water closed is overruled, the attacks continue, and the novel's second half leaves the shore behind for a boat and three men who do not like each other. The shark is hunted by a police officer, a scientist and a professional fisherman.

Creature featureModern horror

Jazz

Toni Morrison · 1992

It is 1926 and the city is Harlem, where a man in his fifties has killed the girl he was in love with and his wife has taken a knife to the body at the funeral. The story of all three of them, and of what brought each of them to that room, reaches back into the American South of the previous century.

Modern classicsFamily novel

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and me, Elizabeth

E. L. Konigsburg · 1967

Elizabeth has just moved into a large apartment building in a town where almost everyone else lives in a house, and she has made no friends at all by the time she meets Jennifer on the way back to school on Halloween. Jennifer, dressed as a Pilgrim, says she is a real witch, and after one Saturday meeting she takes Elizabeth on as her apprentice.

Occult and possession

Jim & Me

Dan Gutman · 2008

Stosh is surprised when Bobby Fuller, the boy who has always been his enemy, asks him for a favour: to take him back in time to meet Jim Thorpe, the Olympic champion who lost his medals after a scandal and never recovered his fame. The two of them travel into the past on a quest to save Thorpe's reputation.

Time travel

Jinx

Meg Cabot · 2007

Jean Honeychurch has been called Jinx since childhood, and misfortune does seem to follow her wherever she goes, including to New York City, where she has moved to escape a mess she caused at home. Her aunt and uncle take her in, her beautiful cousin Tory does not welcome her, and Tory is hiding something dangerous of her own.

Witch and magicYoung adult fantasy

Johnny and the Dead

Terry Pratchett · 1993

Johnny Maxwell is twelve and takes a shortcut home through the local cemetery, where he meets the spirit of Alderman Thomas Bowler and discovers that he can talk to the dead. The other occupants of the cemetery object to being called ghosts, and they have a problem: the council has sold their neglected graveyard to a developer. Johnny and his friends take on the job of stopping it.

Ghost storyCozy fantasy

Johnny Tremain

Esther Forbes · 1943

Johnny Tremain is a fourteen-year-old apprentice silversmith in Boston in 1775, badly burned when a crucible he has been told to hold breaks. With his hand ruined he has to find another trade, and the work he takes up brings him into the town's political circles just as the quarrel with Britain becomes the Revolutionary War.

Historical fictionComing-of-age

Jonah

Louis Stone · 1911

Jonah is a hunchback larrikin who lives in a Sydney slum and leads the local street gang, which is known as the Push. He is feared and respected in the neighbourhood, and his life changes when he becomes the father of a son, after which he sets out to break away from the world he has grown up in.

Social realismAustralian historical fiction

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke · 2004

In 1806 practical magic in England has been reduced to a theory that nobody practises, which is a problem for a country at war with Napoleon. Mr Norrell is a reclusive Yorkshire magician who can still do it, and he moves to London to prove as much and to keep the practice of magic to himself. Jonathan Strange arrives later, younger, more willing to share and better with people, and becomes the pupil Norrell did not want and then the rival he cannot control. Between them they bring a fairy gentleman into English politics. The novel's language is a pastiche of nineteenth-century writing, complete with a historian's footnotes.

Historical fantasy

Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating

Christina Lauren · 2018

Hazel Camille Bradford talks constantly, keeps a houseful of pets and says exactly the wrong thing at the wrong moment, and most of the men she meets leave. Josh Im has known her since college, where her chaos and his composure were plainly incompatible. By the time they meet again they are friends, and they have a plan: they will set each other up on a series of blind dates and find one another suitable partners, and they will certainly not be dating each other, however much time the project takes.

Contemporary romanceFriends to loversRomantic comedy

Joy in the Morning

Betty Smith · 1963

Annie McGairy is eighteen and Carl Brown is twenty when they marry against the wishes of both their families, and Annie takes a train alone to the university town where Carl is studying law. They rent a room near the campus with very little money and no idea how to run a household. The novel covers their first year together.

Modern classicsFamily novel

Joyland

Stephen King · 2013

In the summer of 1973 a university student called Devin Jones takes a job at a small amusement park in North Carolina, where the work involves maintenance, a mascot costume and keeping the children entertained. The park also has a history: a crime was committed there, and the young man who learns about it finds the story harder to leave than the job.

Modern horrorAmateur sleuthHistorical mystery

Jubal Sackett

Louis L'Amour · 1985

Jubal Sackett's urge to explore drove him westward, and when a Natchez priest asks him to undertake a nearly impossible quest he ventures into the endless grassy plains that the Indians call the Far Seeing Lands. He is looking for a Natchez exploration party and for its leader. That leader, Itchakomi, is the woman who will rule her people when their aging chief dies.

WesternExploration fiction

Judas Unchained

Peter F. Hamilton · 2005

The Intersolar Commonwealth is a star-spanning civilisation in the twenty-fourth century, wealthy, peaceful and confident, until a ship sent to investigate a disappearing star releases something predatory that turns on the people who let it out. The alien invaders can take on human form, and the war against them is being fought by corporations, colonies and soldiers who cannot agree on what is happening.

Space operaMilitary science fiction

Julia

Peter Straub · 1975

Julia Lofting leaves her husband after the death of their daughter and buys a house in London where she hopes to start again. The house has a history, she begins to see a girl who is not there, and she sets out to find out what happened to the child who used to live in it.

Ghost storyHaunted housePsychological horror

Julie

Jean Craighead George · 1994

Julie returns to her father's Eskimo village in the Alaskan Arctic, where she has to find a way to save the wolves she loves and to persuade the people around her that the animals should be spared. She falls in love with a young Siberian man, and the world she grew up in is changing faster than anyone in the village expected.

Wilderness adventureComing-of-age

Julie of the Wolves

Jean Craighead George · 1972

Miyax is thirteen, and she has run away from her husband's parents' house with the idea of reaching the coast and travelling to San Francisco. Instead she is lost on the tundra of the Alaska North Slope with nothing to eat, and the only others out there are a pack of wolves whose habits she has to learn in order to live.

Survival fictionComing-of-age

Juniper Hill

Devney Perry · 2022

Memphis Ward arrives in the small town of Quincy, Montana, with her newborn daughter and very little else, on the worst week of her life. She takes a job as a housekeeper for Knox Eden, a chef who wants to be left alone in the house his family owns, and the two of them get in each other's way.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romance

Jurassic Park

Michael Crichton · 1990

A billionaire has bought an island off Costa Rica and filled it with dinosaurs cloned from blood preserved in amber, which he intends to turn into the world's most profitable theme park. Before he opens it he invites a palaeontologist, a palaeobotanist and a mathematician whose speciality is chaos theory to sign off on the safety case. The gaps in the recovered DNA have been filled with other species' code, the animals have been engineered to be docile and countable, and the systems that keep them contained rest on assumptions nobody has tested against a living population. The mathematician is there to say the park cannot work, and the book spends its second half showing why.

Hard science fiction

Just by Looking at Him

Ryan O'Connell · 2022

Elliott writes for television, has a boyfriend who adores him and presents a life that photographs well. Underneath it he is drinking more than he admits, paying for sex behind his boyfriend's back and struggling with what cerebral palsy means for how he is seen, and the novel follows his attempt to change all of it.

Literary fictionQueer romance

Just David

Eleanor Hodgman Porter · 1916

David is ten years old, plays the violin and does not know his own surname. He has grown up in the mountains with his father, and when the man's health fails they come down into the valley. The night his father dies in a barn, David is found playing for him, and the boy who has never lived among other people has to begin.

Classic adventureComing-of-age

Justice Hall

Laurie R. King · 2002

Hours after returning from solving the riddle of The Moor, Holmes and Russell are visited by a bloodied stranger who pleads for their help. Recovered, he tells them the story of Marsh Hughenfort, younger brother of the Duke of Beauville, who returned to England on his brother's death and wants the truth about the death of the hall's expected heir, Gabriel Hughenfort, which scandalised the family during the First World War.

Historical mysteryDetective fiction

Justin

Diana Palmer · 1988

Six years ago Shelby Jacobs ended her engagement to Justin Ballenger and gave him no explanation he was willing to accept. Her family is now in financial trouble, she is living on her own in Jacobsville, and the person she finds herself relying on is the rancher she walked away from.

Second chance romanceSmall town romance

Kane & Abel

Jeffrey Archer · 1979

Two boys are born on the same day in 1906 on opposite sides of the world: William Lowell Kane, the son of a Boston banking family, and Abel Rosnovski, born in a Polish forest and raised in poverty. Neither knows the other exists, and the novel follows the rivalry that grows between them over the next fifty years.

Historical fictionFamily saga

Katherine

Anya Seton · 1954

Katherine de Roet is the daughter of a minor knight from Flanders with no prospects of her own apart from a sister who serves the queen and is to marry Geoffrey Chaucer. Through that connection she marries Sir Hugh Swynford, and through her husband's service she meets John of Gaunt, the duke whose notice changes the whole course of her life.

Biographical fictionMedieval fictionHistorical romance

Keeper of the Dream

Penelope Williamson · 1992

Lady Arianna has the Welsh gift of sight, and in a golden bowl she sees a knight with eyes the grey of the English sea who is about to run his sword through her heart. She trembles, but not with fear: what she feels is a desire that engulfs her whole soul.

Historical romanceMedieval fiction

Keeper of the Lost Cities

Shannon Messenger · 2012

Twelve-year-old Sophie has never quite fitted into her life. She has skipped several grades and does not connect with the older pupils, and she is not comfortable at home either, because Sophie is a telepath who can read minds. Then she meets Fitz, who is a telepath too, and who tells her that the reason she has never felt at home is that she is not.

Young adult fantasyPortal fantasy

Keeping 13

Chloe Walsh · 2020

Johnny Kavanagh has been living a different life since an injury sidelined him, and he has never known a life without his number 13 jersey. Shannon Lynch has always been good at keeping secrets, and after a traumatising trip to Dublin she is trying to protect her little brothers above all else. There is only one boy who can pull her out of the shadows she is retreating into, and secrets are about to be revealed.

Contemporary romanceNew adult romance

Kender, Gully Dwarves and Gnomes

Margaret Weis · 1987

Kender, Gully Dwarves and Gnomes is an anthology of fantasy stories published by TSR in 1987, the second of the three Dragonlance Tales books. All ten of the stories are set in the world of Krynn, and together they range across races and places that the novels of the period never got round to, with a cast that changes from story to story.

Sword and sorceryCozy fantasy

Kensuke's Kingdom

Michael Morpurgo · 1999

Michael's parents buy a yacht and take him to sail around the world. Washed overboard in a fierce storm, he finds himself on the shore of a remote island, and soon discovers that he is not alone. Kensuke is a former Japanese soldier who survived the war and the bombing of Hiroshima but lost his family, and the bond between the two of them forces a choice about the life Kensuke has built.

Survival fictionWilderness adventure

Kentucky Woman

Norah Hess · 1993

Spencer Atkins is certain that trapping, drinking and carousing leave him no time for settling down, and he changes his mind when he meets Gretchen Ames, a beautiful woman who has just come from the poorhouse. The novel sets his settled habits against the arrival of somebody with nothing and nobody, in a frontier setting where a woman on her own has very few options.

Historical romanceWestern

Kidnapped

Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886

David Balfour, seventeen and newly orphaned, is cheated of his inheritance by an uncle and sold to a ship's captain to be carried to America. He survives a wreck and a stay on a small island, joins the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart, and is hunted across the Highlands for a murder he did not commit.

Classic adventureHistorical adventureComing-of-age

Kill Switch

Penelope Douglas · 2019

Two people who grew up near each other have spent years in a conflict that ended with one of them in prison. He is out now and has spent the time inside planning what to do about the family that put him there, while she expects him to come after her and is not prepared for what he actually does.

New adult romanceDomestic suspense

Killers of the Dawn

Darren Shan · 2003

Outnumbered, outsmarted and desperate, the hunters are on the run, pursued by the vampaneze, the police and an angry mob. With their enemies calling for blood, the vampires prepare for a battle they may not survive, and the question is whether this is the end for Darren and his allies. The chase is fought on three fronts at once, which is what makes the position hopeless.

Monster horrorYoung adult fantasy

Killing Floor

Lee Child · 1997

Jack Reacher is a drifter who has just got off a bus in Margrave, Georgia, and within an hour he is under arrest for murder. It is a poor welcome from the town, and all Reacher knows is that he did not kill anybody, at least not here and not recently. He does not stand a chance of convincing anyone of that in Margrave, which is exactly the position the novel leaves him in.

Crime thriller

Killing Mr. Griffin

Lois Duncan · 1978

Mr Griffin is the English teacher nobody at the high school can please, and a group of his students decide to frighten him into changing. Their plan is to take him away for an evening, and it is meant to be a lesson rather than a crime. It goes wrong, and the five of them are left with something they cannot undo.

Young adult mysteryCrime thriller

Killing Time

Della Van Hise · 1985

The Enterprise is on patrol near the Romulan neutral zone, and the crew has begun to dream. Kirk and Spock both admit to the same dream, in which Spock commands the ship and Kirk serves as an ensign, and Starfleet intelligence reports that the Romulans are attempting to use time travel and are moving more ships towards the region.

Space operaTime travelScience fantasy

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 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.