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 28 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.
Two people who have reasons to spend their lives in a game log in as their characters and settle in to play. One of them is a police officer confined to a wheelchair. What neither of them knows is that a hacker has decided to keep them there, and that the machine they are attached to can deliver pain as well as sensation. The only way out is a menu inside the game.
Kimball O'Hara is an orphaned boy growing up on the streets of Lahore in British India, able to pass between communities and languages. He attaches himself to a Tibetan lama who is looking for a holy river, and then to the British secret service, and the novel follows both apprenticeships at once.
Dana is a Black writer in Los Angeles in 1976, married to a white man older than she is, moving into a new house. Then she is somewhere else: a riverbank in antebellum Maryland, where a small boy is drowning and she has been pulled across two centuries to save him. It happens again and again, and every trip costs her more time and leaves her less able to control when she goes back. The boy grows up into a man who owns people, and Dana has to keep him alive long enough to become her ancestor. She can be summoned without warning, cannot return until her own life is in danger, and never knows how long she will be gone.
Kai Young is reserved, controlled and proper to a fault, with no time for chaos. Isabella, with her purple hair and unsuitable jokes, is chaos personified. With a crucial vote for the chief executive position approaching and a media empire at stake, the billionaire heir cannot afford the distraction she brings, yet every look and every touch tempts him to break his own rules.
Nikolai Lantsov is the young king of Ravka, and the country he inherited is bankrupt, its borders are under pressure and its army has been reduced. He also carries something inside him that arrived during the civil war and that he has told nobody about, and it is getting harder to keep it where it is.
In a Japanese prison camp in Singapore during the Second World War, an American corporal called King has built a position for himself by trading with the guards and the other prisoners. Peter Marlowe, a captured RAF officer, is drawn into his operation, and the novel follows what survival costs in a place with no rules.
An expedition through an unexplored region of Africa is led by Allan Quatermain, a hunting guide, and his party is searching for the missing brother of one of its members. The journey takes them into country that no European has mapped, towards a range of mountains and a legend of treasure, and it is among the first English adventure novels to use the African interior as its setting.
Mare Barrow was the lightning girl, and the third book of the Red Queen series begins with her a prisoner, her ability suppressed and her mistakes weighing on her. She is held by Maven Calore, who was once the boy she loved and is now the king. The book alternates between her captivity and the war being prepared outside the palace.
Aelin Galathynius has gone from slave to king's assassin to the queen of a kingdom that was once great, and the war that will decide what happens to her world has begun. Locked in an iron coffin by the Queen of the Fae, she endures months of torture and holds on to the knowledge that yielding would doom the people she loves. With Aelin captured, Aedion and Lysandra are the last line of defence for Terrasen.
Emilia and her twin sister Vittoria are streghe, witches who live quietly among humans and keep their magic out of sight. They work at the family's Sicilian restaurant, and one night Vittoria does not come back for her shift. Emilia finds her sister's body, and what was done to it is worse than the murder itself. Grief turns into something she can act on: she will find whoever did this and make them pay, whatever the price turns out to be. The price, as it happens, is forbidden magic, a summoning that answers, and the attention of a prince of Hell who has his own interest in the family. The first Kingdom of the Wicked novel is a revenge story with a demonic bargain at its centre.
Emma went to Dorset to research Thomas Hardy and ended up looking after three young children while their mother was in hospital. She finds the work far more enjoyable than she expected, apart from the disapproving presence of the children's uncle Ross, who has been described to her as a male chauvinist of the worst sort. The description, she decides, is fair. Then there is the mystery of what is really going on in this apparently happy family, and its connection to a shadowy figure called Leon Daumaury.
Kate Lundy owns the Tumbling B and Conn Dury is her foreman, and both of them told Tom the rules: men from the cattle drives are not allowed on the north side of town. The townspeople took the cowboys' money, but they thought them too coarse to be near their homes.
Kirsten has come from Sweden with her family to a prairie community in America, and the new school is an ordeal: she cannot follow the lessons and her teacher, Miss Winston, is strict and unsympathetic. Her one escape is a secret friendship with Singing Bird, an Indian girl, but when her friend suggests running away Kirsten has to decide where she belongs.
Blaire Calloway has planned every part of her cupcake and cocktails shop launch down to the smallest detail. What she did not plan for is Ronan Knight and his old-school sports bar next door opening on the very same day, and she has not spent years working on buttercream and bourbon in order to have him ruin her chances.
A stranger comes to the veterinarian Tess Culver more dead than alive, a towering man in black riddled with bullets and losing blood fast. As she works to save him she does not know that the man calling himself Dante is not a man at all but one of the Breed, vampire warriors fighting a desperate war. In one charged moment she is pulled into his world, where bands of rogue vampires hunt at night.
Gabrielle notices a sensual black-haired stranger watching her from across a crowded dance club, and nothing about that night or that man is what it seems. When she witnesses a murder outside the club, reality shifts into something dark and deadly, and she is thrust into a realm where vampires stalk the shadows.
Highland laird Drustan MacKeltar is trapped between centuries, having slept for nearly five hundred years in a cave under a powerful spell until an unlikely saviour wakes him. The woman who dresses and speaks like nobody he has ever known is from his distant future, where crumbled ruins are all that remain of his vanished world.
Kissing the Witch is a collection of thirteen interconnected stories by the Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue. Each one retells a well-known European fairy tale, and several of them look at the familiar material through feminist and queer eyes. The stories are linked like a chain, with the narrator of one becoming the listener of the next, and none of the characters is ever given a name.
Klara is an Artificial Friend, solar-powered and built for empathy, who watches the street from a shop window and waits to be chosen. She is bought for a girl called Josie, whose health is uncertain and whose family is keeping something from her. Klara's job is to observe, to learn what people need from very little evidence, and to be what she is asked to be. She is also trying to work out what the Sun can do for Josie, and she makes arrangements of her own about it. The novel is narrated from inside Klara's mind, from a position of limited information and considerable faith.
After her husband Afton, Lord of Langley, dies of plague, the Englishwoman Igrainia finds herself a captive in her own castle, held by the Scottish warrior Eric Graham, whose wife and son died as prisoners of Lord Langley. When the king refuses a trade, Graham forces Igrainia to marry him, though she would rather rot in her own dungeons than accept a kindness from her captor.
Randall is an orphan, the son of a Breton soldier and a Saxon mother, and he works as a dog-boy at Arundel Castle. A knight called Sir Everard d'Aguillon takes him home, and he is brought up alongside Sir Everard's grandson, Bevis. The novel follows the two of them as they grow up in England thirty to forty years after the Norman conquest.
Kobane Calling is a comic report by the Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare about a journey he made to the Kurdish region of northern Syria. Parts of it were published in 2015 in the Italian weekly Internazionale, and the book appeared the following year, with an English edition calling itself Greetings from Northern Syria.
The book moves between San Francisco in the years of the AIDS epidemic and Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, following a circle of friends and family through both. It is told in short fragments rather than a single storyline, and the people in it speak from the middle of events they are still trying to make sense of.
A forty-foot specimen of giant squid, preserved in formalin, disappears overnight from the Natural History Museum in London, and a murder victim is found folded into a glass bottle. A naive member of the museum staff, a secret squad of London constables and a number of other interested parties all want the squid back. China Mieville has described the book as a dark comedy about a squid-worshipping cult and the end of the world.
Delia Grinstead is forty, and on a family holiday she is last seen walking down the Delaware shore with a beach tote holding five hundred dollars inside. To her husband and her three nearly grown children she has vanished without trace or reason. Her family has no explanation for the decision, and neither, at first, does she.
George Talboys comes home from the Australian goldfields to the wife and baby he left behind three years earlier, and learns that his wife is dead. He is drawn into the household of a friend's future family, and he and his companion begin to wonder about Lady Audley, whose past nobody can account for and whose composure seems harder to explain the longer they look.
Emma Carstairs was a child when her parents were murdered, and she has spent the five years since then training to find out why. She and Julian Blackthorn are parabatai, bound to fight as a pair, and they run the Los Angeles Institute with Julian's younger brothers and sisters. Then the faeries ask for help with their own dead, and the bargain they offer brings one of the family home.
Annis Wychwood is twenty-nine, wealthy, unmarried and long past the age when society expects her to marry. When she takes up the cause of Lucilla Carleton, a runaway heiress, she cannot avoid the girl's guardian, Oliver Carleton, a man with a reputation for rudeness, and the two of them meet far more often than either would choose.
In 1940, with France defeated and an invasion of Britain expected, a British agent brings back intelligence showing that Hitler intends to support the invasion with occult means. The people who can answer that are the country's witches, and the officer who has to organise them is a practising occultist as well as an MI6 man.
When the vuvv landed, it came as a surprise to Adam and the rest of the planet, though not necessarily an unwelcome one, since the aliens offered free advanced technology and cures for every illness imaginable. It turns out that it can be called an invasion after all: his parents' jobs have been replaced by alien technology, and there is no money for food or water.
The Talamasca, the order that documents paranormal activity, is hunting for the newly born Lasher. Mayfair women are dying of haemorrhages, an unusual genetic anomaly has turned up in Rowan and Michael, and Lasher, who was born from Rowan, belongs to another species altogether and is now in a physical body.
A film producer with money and nerve pays a young filmmaker to make a documentary about a cult that ended in bloodshed decades ago. The crew travel to the house where it happened and to the other places the cult used, and the record they are making starts to include things none of them can explain and none of them can leave out of the final cut.
A group of men who have been friends since the Second World War travel from Bermondsey to Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds into the sea, as he asked them to do. The journey gives the novel its spine, and their memories of work, family, the racetrack and the pub, and of the women they married and the children they raised, fill it out.
Kate's father has left a will she cannot believe: she and Rhyno van der Bijl will jointly inherit the whole estate only if they marry within thirty days of his death. She detests Rhyno, but refusing the condition means losing the home she loves, and he stands to lose his inheritance on the same terms. He suggests they treat it as a business arrangement, just for a year. Kate never expects to wish it were forever, but then he begins to talk about plans that do not include her.
Jamie Conklin is the son of a single mother in New York, and he has a talent his mother has told him to keep quiet about: he can see and speak to the dead. The dead have to answer his questions honestly, which makes him useful to people who want the truth, and the arrangement is not safe for anyone involved.
Judd Dunn is a Texas Ranger who put his neighbour's father in prison, and five years later he married the man's daughter in name only to keep the ranch they both own out of bankruptcy. He is now thinking about ending the arrangement, and somebody has worked out that the way to hurt him is through her.
Garon Grier is an FBI agent from San Antonio who has bought a ranch in Jacobsville hoping to repair his relationship with his family. Grace Carver has lived in the town all her life and never married. The case that brings them together is the hunt for an escaped child predator.
At a party in Portofino in 1953, the playwright Tennessee Williams and his partner Frank Merlo meet a young Swedish woman who will not say much about herself. The novel follows the three of them across the next decade, through the theatre, the film business and the friendships that held Williams's work together, and the success that came to one of them rather than the other.
A human generation ship arrives at its destination star to make first contact with whatever is there and finds an industrial-age civilisation, the first alien species humanity has met. That changes what the ship's protocols say to do and divides the people aboard, while on the planet below nobody is expecting visitors.
Cason Statler comes back to his home town of Camp Rapture, Texas, after being run out of Houston by a scandalous affair, and takes a reporting job at the local paper because there is nothing else to do. In the office he finds his predecessor's notes on an old murder case and decides that working it will keep him out of trouble.
Sophie Foster wants answers about who she is and what was done to her, and she has learned that the truth about her own past is the most dangerous thing she could go looking for. She is not the only one with gaps in her history, and the people around her have family secrets of their own.
The ruling families of the Tressian Republic have turned on one another, and their knives are metaphorical only some of the time. None of them has noticed the armies of the Hadari Empire gathering on their borders. Viktor Akadra is the Republic's champion and hides something that would have him burned as a heretic, and Josiri Trelan, his sworn enemy, is a political prisoner whose sister wants only to escape the family name.
A year has passed since an unlikely alliance saved the Tressian Republic from fire and darkness at great cost. Thousands died, and Viktor Akadra, the Republic's champion, has disappeared. The ruling council struggles to mend old wounds while other factions sense opportunity: the Parliament of Crows schemes in the shadows, and to the east the Hadari Emperor gathers his armies.
The western United States is now the Republic, a country permanently at war with its neighbours, and June is fifteen, rich and being trained for the highest military circles. Day is fifteen too, born in the slums and the Republic's most wanted criminal, and the two of them have no reason to meet until June's brother is murdered and Day becomes the prime suspect.
Tella has escaped her father and saved her sister from a marriage she did not want, but she is not free: she owes a criminal something nobody has ever managed to deliver, which is the true name of Caraval's master. To pay the debt she enters the competition again. The book is the second of the series and the competition is the same one her sister survived.
Viv is an orc mercenary who has spent years solving problems with an axe and has decided to stop. She claims one treasure from her band's last job, a Scalvert's Stone that is reputed to bring its owner fortune, and arrives in the town of Thune with a plan to open the first coffee shop anybody there has seen. She buys an abandoned stable and starts hiring: a hob carpenter called Cal, an artistic succubus called Tandri, and eventually a baker, a bard and a dire-cat. The coffee takes time to catch on, the local protection racket is suspicious of her, and one of her old colleagues wants the stone. What they build is a small business, a neighbourhood and a new life.
Jean Valjean is released from the galleys after nineteen years and finds that no one will take him in, until a bishop gives him a bed and, in doing so, alters the direction of his life. The novel follows him from 1815 to the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, along with the people whose paths cross his: a dying seamstress, her daughter Cosette, a police inspector who will not allow a former convict to become an honest man, and the students who build the barricades.
Arthur Less is a novelist of middling success in San Francisco, about to turn fifty, and he has just received an invitation to the wedding of a former lover. Rather than attend, he accepts every literary invitation he has spent years declining and leaves the country, which means travelling around the world in the company of his own habits and his unfinished manuscript.
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.
