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 29 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.
The Logans are farming in Mississippi in 1935, and the Depression has made a hard life harder for everyone in their community. Cassie Logan watches the adults around her work out how to keep the land, the family and their standing with their neighbours while the law, the county's white residents and the falling price of cotton make all three uncertain.
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, published in 1830, was the work of Sir Walter Scott, who had been collecting folklore and stories of the supernatural since childhood. It is built out of ten letters that Scott addressed to J. G. Lockhart, who had married his daughter, and it works through what people had believed about demons, witches, ghosts and second sight from biblical times down to Scott's own day.
The last book of the Expanse opens with the human worlds under attack by something from beyond the gates, and with the crew of the Rocinante scattered by the events of the previous volume. The question is no longer who wins the war but whether humanity can keep using the ring network at all.
The ice haulers working the outer planets have spent generations resenting Earth, and when the Canterbury answers a distress call that turns out to be a trap, its surviving officer Jim Holden sends the wrong message at the wrong moment and gives everybody a reason to shoot. On Ceres, detective Joe Miller is handed a missing-person case that his own employers would rather he dropped, and the trail runs into a corporation willing to weaponise something nobody understands. Holden and his crew, Miller, and a Martian navy crew all end up chasing the same answers across the solar system, while the outer planets and Earth move closer to war.
Micah Wilkins promises at the beginning of the book to tell the whole truth about what happened to her boyfriend, whose body has been found after he went missing. She is seventeen, she lives in New York with her parents, and she is, by her own account, a compulsive liar. Some of what she says is true, and working out which parts is the reader's problem.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer in eighteenth-century Gottingen and an aphorist and satirist on the side. This novel tells the story of his real relationship with Maria Stechard, the flower seller he met near his laboratory and called the model of beauty and sweetness, and of the household the two of them made together.
Lady Genevieve will do anything to save Edenby Castle, including sharing a name and a bed with the enemy who has taken it. Lord Tristan is a nobleman and knight leading an invading army through England, and the woman who gives herself up to him is secretly plotting his destruction. Surrender, in this book, is only ever the beginning of another campaign.
A newly arrived lieutenant joins HMS Renown and finds that her captain's suspicions of his officers have grown into something close to madness. The story is told by William Bush, one of those officers, which leaves the reader to work out for themselves what happened in the hold on the night the captain fell.
Michael K is a poor man with a cleft lip who has spent his childhood in institutions and works as a gardener in Cape Town. When civil war and martial law close over the country and his mother falls ill, he builds a cart to carry her back to the rural birthplace she remembers, Prince Albert.
Ursula Todd is born on a snowbound night in 1910, dies before she can take a breath, and is born again a few pages later. As her lives accumulate she moves through the decades around two world wars, and each version of her history gives her another chance to act on what the previous one taught her.
Beaufort Swan leaves Arizona to live with his father in the small, wet town of Forks, Washington, and finds the people at his new school strange and the Cullens stranger still. He is drawn to Edythe Cullen, who seems to find his presence intolerable and who is not what she appears to be. The novel retells Twilight with every character's gender changed.
Piscine Molitor Patel grows up in Pondicherry, the son of a zookeeper, and is named after a swimming pool; he shortens his name to Pi. He is interested in religion from an early age and practises three of them at once, to his family's exasperation. When the family sails for Canada with a cargo of zoo animals, the ship sinks, and Pi spends 227 days in a lifeboat in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. The novel is presented as a story being told to a writer, and it asks the reader to decide what kind of story it is.
The third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequence continues the travels of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and the rest of the crew through a universe that keeps producing absurd explanations for itself. The title refers to the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, which the earlier books had already established as a number rather than a solution to anything.
Ned Kelly works as a lifeguard at a Florida resort and has fallen for a guest who is far out of his league. When his cousin offers him a share of a break-in worth five million dollars, he takes it. On the night of the robbery everything goes wrong, and Ned runs, because speed and secrecy are the only things that will keep him alive.
A television report says that nobody survived the plane crash, including Morgan's sister and brother-in-law. In fact there is one survivor, Morgan's baby nephew, and she becomes his guardian. So, it turns out, does Alex Hammond. The battle lines are drawn between a lone woman with a great deal of love to give and a handsome, aloof man backed by a family that is bitter and out for revenge.
During the Blitz, Elizabeth White is sent from London to the small Irish town of Kilgarret, where she meets Aisling O'Connor and her crowded household. The two become best friends, and the novel follows them for three decades of marriages, children and disappointments, through the sort of trouble that only a friend would ever be told about.
A pregnant white woman arrives in a Mississippi town on foot, looking for the father of the child she is carrying, and a man who passes as white but believes himself to be of mixed ancestry is living in the same part of the country. The book follows the two of them and the people they are connected to. The town they are in has its own opinions about both of them.
Zoe Luce is an interior designer in the Arizona town of Whispering Springs who specialises in helping divorced clients start again. She can sense the history hidden inside a house, and when she suspects one of her clients is keeping a dangerous secret she hires the private investigator Ethan Truax, whose work puts her carefully arranged new identity at risk.
Every hundred years the island of Lightlark appears in order to host the Centennial, a deadly game that the rulers of the six realms are invited to play. It is their last chance to break the curses that have afflicted their realms for centuries, and each ruler has something to conceal: to destroy the curses, one ruler has to die. Isla Crown rules Wildling, a realm of temptresses cursed to kill anyone they fall in love with.
The woman at the centre of Lights Out spends her evenings scrolling a feed that has decided she likes videos of masked men, and her imagination has gone along with it further than she would like to admit. Then she sends a message she would not have sent sober, and the fantasy takes up residence in her actual life: someone is watching her apartment and knows her routine. The novel is told from both sides.
Mr Vane owns a library that seems to be haunted by its former librarian, a figure who resembles him. Following him leads into a world where life, death and salvation are the material of the story, and where the characters have to work out what is required of them. It is among the darkest of George MacDonald's works and among the most serious.
In February 1862, Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery. The novel follows Willie into the bardo, a space between death and rebirth peopled by ghosts who will not accept that they have died, and follows the grieving president who returns at night to hold his son's body.
Linden Hills is the neighbourhood a black family moves to when it has done everything right, and its best address is Tupelo Drive. Two young men come to work there over a Christmas holiday, one of them hoping to marry into the family that has owned the place for generations. The houses on Tupelo Drive come up for sale more often than anyone remarks on.
Ipatia is an orphan living with her grandfather on the Greek island of Lipsi, and she intends to leave for Piraeus to study. The day before her trip she falls into the arms of Tony, the son of a wealthy shipowner, and the two of them have to work out whether anything can come of it.
Two years after her husband's death, Lisey Landon begins clearing out the office of the bestselling novelist Scott Landon. Going through his papers brings back the violence of her own past and the private place he retreated into, and forces her to deal with the collectors who want what he left unpublished.
On a small island in the Scilly Isles in 1915, a boy who has slipped away from school to go fishing hears a sound coming from an island nobody lives on. What he finds there is a girl who cannot or will not say who she is, and the question of where she came from slowly divides the people of his community.
Jack Crabb is 111 years old and has two fathers, one white and one a Cheyenne chief who named him Little Big Man. He has been a Cheyenne, a white man, a buffalo hunter, a shopkeeper's assistant and a survivor of the fight at the Little Bighorn. He tells the whole story to a credulous young man who has come to write it down.
Amy Dorrit was born and raised inside the Marshalsea, the London prison for debtors where her father has been held for so long that he has become one of its institutions. She sews for wages outside the walls to keep the family fed, and she thinks of the prison as home. Then Arthur Clennam comes back to England after twenty years abroad and begins asking about her family.
In Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb laid out according to a plan in which every detail was decided in advance, the Richardson family owns an apartment they rent to a woman who is not like them. Mia Warren is an artist who has moved from place to place with her teenage daughter, and the arrival of the two of them sets off something the neighbours cannot control.
Jack Holloway lives alone in the wilderness of the planet Zarathustra, prospecting for the valuable sunstones that the Chartered Zarathustra Company has made its business. One day he finds what he takes to be a small golden-furred animal, and then its family; the creatures turn out to be curious, capable tool users. Their existence matters enormously, because a planet with a native sapient species cannot be owned and worked the way the company owns and works this one.
Laura Ingalls lives with her Ma and Pa, her older sister Mary and the baby Carrie in an isolated log cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, where the nearest neighbour is miles away and the family lives off what it can grow, hunt and preserve. The book follows a year of that life, from the work of autumn through a winter spent almost entirely in the cabin.
The Ingalls family leave their house in the Wisconsin woods and travel west by covered wagon into Kansas Territory, where Pa builds a one-room log house on land the Osage have been moved from. The family plants and hunts, meets a neighbour living alone on the prairie, and then learns they are living where they should not be.
Cedric Errol is a small American boy who knows nothing about his father's English family until he is told that he is to be an earl. He goes to England to live with a grandfather who dislikes everything about him, and the two of them have to get used to each other. The boy does not hold any of it against him.
Jo March and her husband Professor Bhaer run Plumfield, a progressive school where the characters of Little Women have grown up and begun new work. With two sons of their own and twelve rescued orphan boys in the house, they try to make the school a happy, comfortable and stimulating place. The novel follows the life of the school and the children in it.
Vanja Schmidt was the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune and the dutiful servant of Princess Gisele, until her otherworldly mothers demanded a price for their care that she refused to pay. Instead she took Gisele's life for her own, using an enchanted string of pearls, and left the real princess a penniless nobody. Vanja now lives as princess and jewel thief at once.
Caroline Quiner is the girl who will one day be Laura Ingalls Wilder's mother, and she is watching the town of Brookfield in Wisconsin grow up around her as new buildings appear overnight and more families arrive. She marches in her first Independence Day parade, a circus comes to town, and then her family has the chance to move to another farm.
The long winter is over and the town of De Smet comes back to life around the Ingalls family. Laura is fifteen, takes her first paid work away from home, goes back to school, and sets out to earn a teaching certificate so that her sister Mary can stay at a college for the blind.
The four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, grow up during the American Civil War, and the novel follows them from childhood towards adulthood through their work, their friendships and their losses. It is loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, and it was published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869, before being issued as a single novel in 1880.
John Drinkwater, an architect at the turn of the twentieth century, comes to believe that the world contains another world, and another inside that, all the way to the realm of the fairies his English wife can see and speak with. He builds a house called Edgewood, a composite of many styles, and the generations of his family live in it, close to a door that leads outward.
Bond is sent after Mr Big, a criminal with links to the American underworld, to the world of voodoo and to SMERSH, the Soviet secret service, and his route into the case is Mr Big's smuggling of seventeenth-century gold coins out of the Caribbean. He meets Solitaire, a fortune teller who is both the prisoner and the instrument of the man he is hunting. The pursuit takes Bond through the jazz clubs of Harlem, into the Everglades and on to Jamaica.
Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana, who can hear other people's thoughts, and she has had a run of bad luck. A colleague of hers is murdered and nobody seems to take it seriously, and then she is attacked by a creature that leaves her poisoned. The local vampires save her life by drawing the poison out, and when one of them asks her to do something in return, she agrees. The favour takes her to Dallas to use her telepathy to find a vampire who has gone missing.
Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes travel to San Francisco to unlock a buried memory of a crime that has the power to kill again, lost somewhere in Russell's past. They go to close up the house and businesses she inherited after her family's death, and a puzzling codicil to the family will sets off an investigation.
Sophie Foster is back in the lost cities, and they have changed while she was away: war is hanging over the place, the Neverseen are causing damage wherever they can, and the line between a friend and an enemy has become difficult to see. She is warned that the people closest to her will be the next to be hurt.
Lola Bensky is nineteen, a high-school dropout who irons her hair straight and asks a lot of questions, and she has been sent by an Australian newspaper into the middle of the London music scene in 1967. She interviews musicians at the height of their fame and works out who she is at the same time.
Lolita is presented as a memoir written in prison by a middle-aged European man who publishes under the name Humbert Humbert and addresses his reader as a jury. He describes a childhood attachment on the French Riviera and the obsession it becomes, and then the journey he takes across the United States with his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, the girl he privately calls Lolita. The book is narrated entirely in his voice, and the reader is left to judge what that voice is doing. The novel was written in English and first published in Paris in 1955.
A platoon of soldiers empties a small town in Nevada in broad daylight and then a bomb destroys it, and the Russian criminal known as the Wolf claims the attack. Alex Cross is on holiday in San Francisco when he is called back, and the plan the Wolf has in mind is larger than one town and runs through several countries.
Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are former Texas Rangers living in a small border town with little to occupy them, until Call decides to drive a herd of cattle north to Montana. The novel follows the drive and the people attached to it: the cowboys who sign on, a woman they rescue along the way, a young man with something to prove, and others who have no intention of leaving Texas. It is set in the late nineteenth century and built out of the ordinary work of the frontier rather than its legends.
Will's brother Shawn is dead, shot on the street, and everybody in the building knows the rules that come afterwards: nobody cries, nobody tells, and somebody pays. Will takes the gun out of his brother's drawer, steps into the lift on the eighth floor and rides it down, meaning to keep the third rule. Seven floors is not a long way, but there is time in it for one more conversation with the people he has lost.
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.
