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 30 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.
Johnny O'Brien, better known as White Folks, learned to use his light skin to work the Chicago con game, and he is finished with small money. With his mentor Blue dead and the city used up, he takes his polished act north, where a crew of grifters is assembling around a long con and the stakes are counted in thousands.
Cynda is sixteen and unhappy about being left at the inn her father and stepmother run on the coast of Maine, where the season is over and there is nobody her age for miles. Then a guest arrives in the dead of winter, pale and charming and interested only in her, and Cynda is flattered enough not to ask what he is doing there.
Eugene Gant is born in 1900 in a small town in North Carolina, the youngest of a large family, and the novel follows him until he leaves home at nineteen. His father carves headstones and drinks, his mother takes in boarders, and the family's business is other people's money and other people's grief. Eugene reads everything and wants out.
Julian West is a young American who falls into a hypnosis-induced sleep towards the end of the nineteenth century and wakes up 113 years later in the same city. Boston is still there, but the society around it has been transformed: it is the year 2000, and the United States has become a socialist utopia that his hosts are delighted to explain.
Lord Edgware Dies is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in September 1933 and in the United States later the same year as Thirteen at Dinner. Hercule Poirot, Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp are all in it, and it turns on a request for help that comes a day too late.
Thomas Covenant is a writer whose life falls apart when he is diagnosed with leprosy; after six months of treatment he returns home to find that his wife has divorced him and his community has cast him out. Accosted by a beggar on a rare trip into town, he stumbles into the path of a police car and wakes in the Land, a fantasy world where he meets the evil Cavewight Drool Rockworm and Lord Foul the Despiser, who tells him to carry a warning to the Lords.
Jim is a young British seaman with a romantic idea of the life he means to lead, and an early voyage gives him the chance to prove it. It goes the other way: he and the rest of the officers abandon a passenger ship in distress, the ship does not sink, and the crew are publicly condemned for leaving eight hundred people aboard.
The Dark One has grown in power with many of the seals on his prison broken, and the world is being changed by it. Rand al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn, holds a throne at Caemlyn, where an unexpected visitor may change everything. In Salidar the White Tower in exile prepares an embassy to him, in Emond's Field Perrin prepares to march, and to the south lies Illian.
A colony ship brought its passengers to a new world, and its crew used the technology they carried to make themselves immortal, powerful and, to the generations born planetside, divine. The former crew rule as the gods of the Hindu pantheon, complete with reincarnation by mind transfer and a caste system beneath them. Sam, who taught the colonists to think about their own condition, is not willing to leave it there.
To keep her barony from being ruined, Madeleine de la Haute Vironge has to marry one of three lords chosen for her by the king, and the man she ends up with is the most dangerous of the three: a stranger she wants and is afraid of in equal measure. He has a secret that would destroy him if it were known.
Orphaned at five and taken in by wealthy cousins, Ellen Kellaway has been raised as a companion to their daughter and never once allowed to forget that every advantage she has was owed to somebody's charity. Her life of deference changes completely when the son of a powerful London family asks to marry her, opening a world of wealth and position.
Granny Weatherwax and her small coven come home to Lancre and find crop circles in the fields, which means that the boundaries between worlds are thin. What comes through them is the elves, and the elves are not the charming creatures of stories. The answer to them is not a magical one.
John Ridd is the son of a respectable farming family on Exmoor, and his father was murdered by the Doones, a clan of outlaws who were once noble and now rule a valley of their own. John grows up intending to be a farmer rather than a revenger, and then he meets Lorna Doone by accident and falls in love with her, which puts him on the wrong side of the clan that killed his father.
Jamie is the first boy Peter Pan ever brought to the island and the one who has stayed longest, which is the problem, because Jamie is growing up. He looks after the younger boys while Peter plays, and when Peter's jealousy of a new child turns dangerous, Jamie begins to see what Peter really is. How a lost boy became a pirate is the story of the island's rules.
For centuries dragons have told stories about another continent across the ocean, a land populated by tribes very different from the ones they know. There has never been any proof and most dragons have dismissed the stories as fairy tales, which leaves one young dragon with a grand story, a nobody's name and a decision to make.
Awasin is a Cree boy and Jamie is a Canadian orphan living with his uncle, a trapper, and both of them are drawn to the enormous emptiness of the northern country. They set out together to see it, and the journey turns out to be far longer and far more dangerous than either of them had reckoned on.
Jason is fifteen and has never fitted in at home or at school, and his only comfort is a band called Lost Souls. Then he reads the note that was left with him as a baby and works out that his father was a vampire. He renames himself Nothing, runs away from home, and is picked up on the road by three beautiful strangers who know what he is.
When Nozomi Nagai pictured the ideal summer romance, a fake one was not what she had in mind. That was before she met Willow, who is gorgeous, glamorous and heartbroken, and who asks Nozomi to pose as her new girlfriend in order to make her ex jealous. Nozomi has no intention of staying in the role of a stand-in.
Michaela arrives at Fairfax College, the only all-female residential college on campus, as a scholarship student from interstate looking for a fresh start in Sydney. She is quickly struck by the long-standing private school cliques and social circles, and her new neighbour is twenty-year-old Eve, who has already taken a gap year. Fairfax is a college with its own rituals, and Michaela has to learn them without any guidance from home.
Macy Sorensen is a paediatrics resident with a wedding to plan and a habit of keeping her heart well out of the way. Then she runs into Elliot Petropoulos, the boy who was her closest friend and her first love, and who broke her heart on the night he told her how he felt. The novel moves between the present and the years when they were teenagers, spending weekends and summers reading in a house outside San Francisco. Between the two timelines it fills in what happened to them and why neither has entirely let go of it.
Etienne Argeneau's three hundred years of bachelorhood are at an end, one way or another. He is allowed to turn only one human in his lifetime, and when the coroner Rachel Garrett saves his life he decides to save hers in return by making her immortal. Rachel had wanted nothing more than to get off the night shift in the morgue.
Marty Claridge's husband is killed in a horse accident, and she marries Clark Davis, a man who needs a mother for his daughter Missie. The arrangement is practical for both of them, and over the months that follow Marty becomes attached to the child and to her husband. When the wagon train returns in the spring, she has to decide whether to go home or stay.
Meg Jorgenson wants a fresh start after a failed relationship, so she takes a teaching position in the town of Miracle, Kentucky and vows to avoid smooth-talking men. There she meets eight-year-old Cammy, who uses a wheelchair and is certain that God will heal her, and Cammy's widowed father Vance, who has devoted his life to her care. Then an experimental procedure divides them.
Rosie and Dominic Vega have been together since high school, and somewhere in the years since his return from the army they stopped talking to each other. Rosie wants to open a restaurant and wants her husband back. What she proposes is a boot camp for their marriage, and to her surprise he agrees.
Adrian Montfort, Earl of Mowbray, has been warned that Lady Clarissa Crambray is dangerous: she steps on toes and sets things alight, and she has earned a nickname for the mayhem she causes. He is a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and considers one woman and her unfortunate past to be a challenge he can handle. Clarissa, meanwhile, wants a husband, though possibly not as much as her mother wants one for her.
A single mother takes her son into a shop called Dixie's Vampire Emporium to let him browse, and finds herself talking to the assistant, a man with a dark-eyed charm and an English accent that makes her heart skip. What she does not know is that he is not entirely a stranger.
June Morrissey dies in the snow on her way home one Easter Sunday, and the novel that follows circles backwards and sideways through the families she belonged to. The Kashpaws, Lamartines and Morrisseys live between Ojibwe reservations in North Dakota and Minnesota and the cities around them, and a different voice tells almost every chapter.
Bee Konigswasser has built a career in neuroscience and a rule for living: work out what Marie Curie would have done, then do that. NASA offers her the lead on a neuroengineering project, the sort of work that would make years of scraping through academia worthwhile, with one complication. The project is jointly led with Levi Ward, who made his opinion of her plain when they were graduate students. Bee has a project to run and a deadline to meet, and she has to work out how much of her old grudge is about the past.
Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, the twenty-two-year-old army veteran Atticus Turner sets off for New England with his uncle George, who publishes a travel guide for Black motorists, and his childhood friend Letitia. At the manor of a Mr Braithwhite they encounter the ordinary terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem to come straight out of the weird tales George reads.
Balthazar is possessed by a demon and has been given the job of finding the Book of Spells, which he is pursuing in the middle of a city where a homicide detective is trying to account for a series of mutilated bodies. Detective Erika Saunders knows that something outside her experience is at work in Caldwell, and she has been dreaming about a man she cannot place.
The vampire warriors of the Black Dagger Brotherhood defend their race against the people who hunt them, and one member's loyalty is about to be tested while his dangerous mixed blood is revealed. Rehvenge has always kept his distance from the Brotherhood, even though his sister is married to one of its members.
Phury has been fiercely loyal to the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and he has sacrificed himself for the good of the race by becoming the male responsible for keeping its bloodlines alive. As Primale of the Chosen he is obliged to father the sons and daughters who will keep the traditions of the race alive.
Butch O'Neal is a fighter by nature and a hard-living former homicide detective, and he is the only human ever to have been allowed into the inner circle of the Black Dagger Brotherhood. He wants to go further still, into the vampire world and the turf war with the lessers, and he believes he has nothing left to lose.
Erin Kelley and Darcy Scott are best friends who come to New York after college to start their careers, Erin as a jewellery designer and Darcy as a decorator. On a whim Darcy talks Erin into helping a television producer research the people who place personal advertisements, and the seemingly harmless exercise ends when Erin disappears.
Carolina Lightfoot is a colonial beauty who sets her heart on Lord Thomas Angevine, the most notorious rake in London, and the scandal that follows sends her back to Virginia. From there she is taken at sea by buccaneers and carried to Tortuga, where she becomes the prisoner of a man with a mysterious past.
Juliet has devoted her life to the care of crippled and deprived children, and leaves London to work in the south of France. There she falls in love with Lucien de Maureville, a gentle man betrayed by a faithless wife, and has to weigh the promise she made never to love a married man against the love she now feels.
Robert Cannon is certain that the woman calling herself Evie Shaw is the key to the conspiracy threatening his computer company, and he means to deal with her personally. He follows her south into a long, hot summer and finds his certainties harder to hold, because the woman he is pursuing on suspicion is also the woman he wants, whatever the evidence says.
Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet leave Pemberley to travel through England, visiting friends and relations, and this is the story of the first part of their marriage. The weddings are over and the story that Pride and Prejudice left unfinished has to be arranged: a great estate to run, a household to establish, and a family that includes the relations Elizabeth's husband has spent years avoiding.
Lucinda Vane is born into a wealthy Melbourne family, and she spurns the love of a distinguished family friend to marry the dashing aide-de-camp to the Governor, Hugo Brayford. Her life of ease ends when Hugo takes her to England just before the First World War. The novel spans the early 1900s to the Second World War and moves between Melbourne and England.
Bret Ellis, the narrator of this novel, is the author whose first book made him famous while he was still at college. After years of wealth, drugs and grief he tries to build a family life with a former partner and their son, and a series of bizarre events and murders connects everything happening to him back to his own past.
Mary Elizabeth Potter, a schoolteacher who has settled into the idea of being a spinster, arrives in a small Wyoming town with a straightforward request: she wants a boy who has dropped out to come back to school. The boy's father, Wolf Mackenzie, has no patience for the town or for her, and the confrontation between them changes her life. She sees a decent and honest man where the town has decided he is dangerous.
Uilleam MacRieve believed he had put the ghosts of his boyhood to rest, until a brutal torture revives them and destroys his Lykae instinct, leaving him craving death. Chloe Todd is a young human seized for an auction block and forced into a world of monsters, and when she is offered up to the immortals she becomes the person who pulls him back.
Emma Bovary, the wife of a country doctor, lives beyond her means in an attempt to escape the dullness of provincial life. Her first affair introduces her to luxury and the prospect of a shared future, and then she is abandoned. She continues to spend recklessly, and the debts accumulate until they carry her towards ruin and disgrace.
Terry Brooks's Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold!, published in 1986, opens his Magic Kingdom of Landover series. It begins with a Chicago lawyer who has lost his wife and his unborn child, and who answers an advertisement in a Christmas catalogue offering a whole kingdom of magic in return for a million dollars.
Nimira dances for a living in a foreign city, having lost her mother and her father, and she does not hesitate when a mysterious magician offers her a place in his house and a performance to give. The performance is with an automaton that plays only when a silver key is turned, and the machine turns out not to be a machine.
Susan Ryeland edits crime novels, and her best-selling author has just delivered a new Atticus Pund mystery about a murder in an English village. The further she reads the more certain she becomes that there is a second story underneath the one she was given. Then the author is found dead, and everything Susan noticed in the manuscript has a use.
Carol Milford marries a doctor and moves with him to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a small town she intends to improve. The town has its own opinions about a young woman with ideas, and the novel follows the years in which she tries to live there without giving up what she thinks, while the judgement of her neighbours follows her into everything she does.
Jack Reacher steps off a train in a small town in the middle of the wheat fields for one reason: he wants to know why it is called Mother's Rest. Nobody will tell him, and the locals watch him while he asks. Then a woman named Michelle Chang mistakes him for a colleague of hers who has disappeared while working a case she knows almost nothing about, and Reacher decides to stay and help. Curiosity turns into a rare thing in his life, which is a job.
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.
