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 31 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.
New York in 1999 holds thirty-five million people, who run their televisions off pedal power, riot for water and live in rooms shared with strangers. Detective Andy Rusch is under pressure to solve the murder of a gangster during a heat wave, and he is also drawn to the dead man's girlfriend, which makes an already crowded life more difficult to manage.
James Adams is fourteen and works for a secret organisation that uses children as agents, because nobody suspects a child of being a spy. His next assignment is to get inside an animal liberation group that has moved from protest to terrorism. The organisation he works for exists because adults are watched and children are not.
Kate has decided that she is finished with love. Her new boss, the features editor Eliot Holman, may have devastating charm and an obvious interest in her, but she could not care less. Everyone, Eliot included, assumes she is grieving for her husband, Toby, and she lets them believe it, keeping a guarded secret about how cruelly Toby treated her and how frightened she now is of trusting any man. Eliot refuses to leave her alone.
Kate Svenson is a success at work and has been engaged three times without getting married, so she decides to approach the problem of finding a husband as a project. She goes to a resort full of exactly the kind of men she is looking for, and they keep going wrong in front of Jake Templeton.
In 2020 Reid Malenfant travels to the outer edge of the solar system and finds an artifact left behind by another civilisation. It is a gateway that works like a quantum transporter, moving cargo and people across interstellar distances almost instantly. Malenfant decides to find out what is on the other side, and the decision costs him everything he has.
Fanny Price is ten years old when her overburdened family in Portsmouth sends her to be raised at Mansfield Park by her wealthy aunt and uncle. Her cousins treat her as a dependant, and only Edmund is kind to her, so she learns to watch and to hold her tongue. The arrival of the fashionable Crawfords some years later gives her plenty to watch.
Many Moons is a picture book by James Thurber, published in 1943 with illustrations by Louis Slobodkin, and it won the Caldecott Medal the following year. A young princess is ill and can only be cured by being given the moon, and the court has to work out how to get her one. The king's experts all explain that the thing is impossible; the person who solves it asks her the right question instead.
A famous novelist who has not been seen in public for years is working on a book that he refuses to finish, and the people around him are not sure he ever will. When a writer is taken hostage in Lebanon, he leaves the house he has been living in and goes to see whether he can do anything about it.
Armed intruders dressed as monks kill the congregation of a cathedral in Cologne and leave with the bones of the Magi, which have been kept there for centuries. A group of soldiers and scientists from an American special unit is sent after them. What the thieves want with the relics turns out to be stranger than a theft.
In London in 1958, a filing assistant at a secret detective agency receives an unsigned letter naming a place and a time. She goes to look and finds nothing, and at midnight she is murdered by someone she cannot see, which means the killer works inside the agency. Marion Lane is a first-year trainee, and she is drawn into the search.
Zoey Redbird is sixteen when she is marked by a tracker and has to leave her family for the House of Night, a boarding school for fledgling vampires. She makes friends, acquires an unusually strong affinity for magic, and finds that the school has its own politics and that its leaders are watching her.
For centuries the Others and human beings have lived side by side in an uneasy peace, and when humankind oversteps its bounds the Others have to decide how much of humanity they are prepared to tolerate. Since they allied themselves with the blood prophets, the arrangement has changed. It is the delicate balance between the two peoples that this book is about.
In the near future, the men and women of Shorn Associates make their money by finding a small war somewhere in the world and backing one side against the other in return for a share of the spoils. Their executives are corporate gladiators who drive armoured cars and follow a samurai code, and Chris Faulkner is very good at the work.
When Sayre Baxendale summons Astra to his executive office, she knows before a word is spoken that her only option is to resign. He seems pleased to receive the resignation. What he has no intention of allowing is her disappearance from his life, and instead of accepting her departure he insists that she spend a weekend with him at his country house. Astra cannot tell whether the invitation is a business proposition or something more personal.
In four days Rena will marry Ford Harlow, and the thought of the ceremony fills her with excitement and dread at once. It is not an ordinary wedding. Their union is a deal: Ford wants her property, and Rena will do anything to keep it. If she is expecting a marriage of convenience in which they share a life but never a bed, she is in for a surprise, because Ford has been intrigued by his shy bride for a long time.
The Weber family lives in a crowded house in Mannheim in 1777, where the father copies music and the four daughters sing and play well enough to be noticed. One of them, Aloysia, takes the attention of a young composer passing through, and the novel follows the sisters over the years in which he marries one of them.
It is a world shrouded in mystery: a planet pocked by meteors, baked by ultraviolet light and covered in deserts the colour of dried blood. To that world travel the twenty-five astronauts of an international mission, who have to come together once the landers are down, the base dome is inflated and the robotic explorers are sent out.
In a near future where life is ruled by what people buy, Zoe Zindleman, numerical ID 009-99-9999, starts work at AllMART, where a smile is part of the uniform. Her mother has moved away and the house is about to be foreclosed, so she has to choose between waiting to be stripped of everything and moving into the Warren, an abandoned shopping centre full of other children left behind.
Martin Eden is a young working-class man in Oakland who educates himself in order to become a writer and to win the woman he loves. What he meets instead is a trade in which manuscripts come back by return post, and a set of people who cannot see what he is worth until he succeeds.
Cyrus Shams has been grappling with his mother's death since he was a baby, when her plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf. Newly sober, he sets out to learn the truth of her life. An encounter with a dying artist leads him towards the mysteries of his own past, including an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields and a painting by an exiled artist.
Mary Barton is set in Manchester among mill workers and mill owners in the hungry forties. Mary, the daughter of a disillusioned trade unionist, turns down the working-class man who loves her in the hope of marrying the mill owner's son, and then finds herself at the centre of a murder case that puts her lover in the dock.
Agnes Nitt leaves Lancre to look for a career at the Opera House in Ankh-Morpork, and the witches follow when Granny Weatherwax realises that Nanny Ogg has not been paid for her very popular cookbook. What they walk into is a story rather like The Phantom of the Opera, and the witches are not sentimental about opera.
Jack Aubrey, a Royal Navy lieutenant newly promoted to master and commander, meets the physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin at a concert in Port Mahon and takes him aboard as surgeon of the sloop Sophie. The two of them sail the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars, chasing prizes under a first lieutenant, James Dillon, whose Irish politics complicate the ship. Their orders run from escort work to a fight against a far larger opponent.
Thane Benedict is the last person Loren Knight would have chosen as her guardian, but he is to have charge of her until she turns twenty, which means two years at Moonrock, his enormous station in the middle of the Australian outback. Loren expects a solitary life far from anywhere. Then her cousin Janet arrives to stay and falls in love with Thane, and something about their relationship does not add up. There is also the other girl, Felicity Bradon.
Cassia lives in a Society that decides what everyone wears, eats and studies, and at seventeen she is matched with her best friend Xander, which is exactly what she wanted. Then a second face appears on the screen, and she has to work out what the mistake means for her and for the boy the Society did not choose.
In the 1950s, in the Victorian town of Cohuna, Betty the nurse lives on the outskirts of town next door to Harry, a dairy farmer whose wife has left him for a man from the local bird fanciers' club. The novel follows the pair of them and Betty's son Michael through a year of small-town life.
Matilda Wormwood teaches herself to read at three and has finished the children's section of her local library by the time she is five, which makes her the strangest person in her own house. Her mother plays bingo, her father sells second-hand cars with the odometer wound back, and neither of them sees anything unusual in their daughter. School turns out to be worse: Crunchem Hall is run by Miss Trunchbull, a former athlete who keeps children in a cupboard as a punishment. Matilda also discovers that she can move objects without touching them.
The Sarl are a feudal people who live on the eighth level of a shellworld, an artificial planet built as nested spheres by a race that is no longer around to explain it. Their king is murdered by the man who served him, and the heir who sees it happen has to run. He goes looking for the sister who left the world years before, and she is very far away.
Maurice Hall is a schoolboy when a teacher explains the facts of life to him, and the explanation leaves him quite unprepared for what he feels for other men. The novel follows him through Cambridge, a failed affair and a period spent trying to cure himself, until a relationship with a gamekeeper's son gives him a way to live.
CHERUB needs to reach an illegal weapons dealer, and the only route open to them is through his son, who is serving a sentence in a maximum security prison in the United States. The plan requires an agent to get inside the prison and make contact, which is more complicated than anyone in the organisation wants to admit.
Louisa Clark takes a job as a carer in the English town where she has spent her whole life, looking after Will Traynor, a former banker and sportsman who was paralysed in a road accident. Will has lost the life he had and has no patience for Louisa's cheerfulness; Louisa needs the wage and has no idea what to do with him. What builds between them begins as a working arrangement and changes both of their plans for the years ahead.
Dr Emory Charbonneau is a paediatrician and a marathon runner, and she disappears on a mountain road in North Carolina. By the time her husband reports her missing, still annoyed by the argument the two of them have just had, fog and ice have closed the search down. Emory, meanwhile, is the captive of a man who will not tell her his name.
On a classified dive into the deepest canyon of the Pacific, Jonas Taylor comes face to face with the largest predator in the history of the animal kingdom. He survives, and is haunted by what he is certain he saw but cannot prove: a megalodon, twenty tons of prehistoric shark. Written off as a casualty of post-traumatic stress, he spends years arguing that it still exists.
A scholar named Melmoth sold his soul for a hundred and fifty extra years of life, and the time he was granted is running out. He travels the world looking for somebody desperate enough to take the bargain off his hands, and the people he visits, prisoners, exiles and the bereaved, each have their own account of the offer he made them.
Dame Lettie Colston, seventy-nine and a pioneer of penal reform, has a great deal in common with the elderly residents of the Maud Long Medical Ward: scorn, resentment, boredom and the humour that masks an awareness of approaching death. Then the anonymous telephone calls begin, with a voice saying simply that the recipient must remember that they will die.
Lestat has been following a mortal woman he cannot explain his interest in, and the Devil has been following Lestat. The novel begins with an offer: the being who calls himself Memnoch wants a companion, and what he proposes is not a bargain over power or money but an argument about the whole arrangement of the world. To make the case he takes Lestat through the history he claims to have been part of. The result is a vampire novel that spends most of its length inside a theological dispute, with heaven, hell and the reader's patience all tested.
Chiyo is nine years old in 1929 when her father sells her and her sister into the entertainment districts of Kyoto: Chiyo to a geisha house in Gion and her sister to a brothel. She is trained in music, dance and the etiquette of the teahouses, takes the name Sayuri, and learns how a geisha's career is financed, negotiated and envied. Her account runs from the fishing village she came from, through the war years and the decades on either side of them.
The war against the Pannion Domin brings a coalition of armies, mages and undead into a campaign across a continent. The novel follows the soldiers and commanders on both sides of it, and the events of this book run alongside the second volume, filling in what was happening elsewhere at the same time and in the same war.
Catherine Douglas wakes in a convent on a Greek island knowing only her own name, and is told that everyone believes she died at the hands of her husband and his mistress. Her benefactor is a shipping magnate who arranges for her to recover, to work and to remember. What she remembers is inconvenient for more than one person.
Helen will not be taken in by Caleb Jones's charm, however much of it he has. Her father thinks the sun rises and sets on him; Helen finds him obnoxious. But Caleb does not behave like the tough, cynical businessman she had imagined, and she has to give him credit for raising his young nephew on his own. Despite the evidence accumulating in his favour, she is determined not to revise her opinion of him. Then she realises she is falling in love with the man.
Miles Vorkosigan has spent years commanding a mercenary fleet for his home world's security service under a rank that exists mostly on paper, and in Memory the medical problem he has been hiding finally catches up with him. The falsified report he files to cover it costs him the career he built. Back on Barrayar, cut off from the only work he was ever good at, he watches his former employer collapse and finds himself the one person able to look into why.
Mendoza is a botanist and an immortal, and she has spent a century and a half cataloguing plants in the hills above Los Angeles with almost nobody for company. In the winter of 1862 she is ordered down to a stagecoach inn at Cahuenga Pass to join a team of operatives from the twenty-fourth century. She resents the posting from the moment she arrives.
Louis de Pointe du Lac is being haunted by the ghost of Claudia, the daughter he made and lost, and he wants to speak to her. He and the vampire David Talbot ask Merrick Mayfair, a witch of a New Orleans family, to call her up. Merrick is also an old colleague of David's, and she has more reasons than either of them to want the dead disturbed.
Matty has come to live in a village that takes in people who have nowhere else to go, and he works as the messenger who carries news between the settlements. He also has a gift that he has been told not to use carelessly, and the community that sheltered him is beginning to close its borders to strangers.
Noemi Taboada's cousin writes from her new marriage asking to be rescued from a doom she cannot explain, and says her English husband means to poison her. Noemi's father sends her to High Place, the family's house in the mountains, where the Doyles are unwelcoming, Catalina is kept from her, and the house itself starts turning up in Noemi's dreams.
Three men are found dead in a locked Honolulu office, their bodies covered in ultra-fine cuts, and the police dismiss it as a bizarre suicide pact. In Massachusetts a group of graduate students are recruited by a microbiology company and flown to Hawaii. What waits for them is not an ordinary research project.
In the provincial town of Middlemarch, in the years around the Reform Act of 1832, Dorothea Brooke marries a scholar she believes will give her a life of useful work, and Tertius Lydgate arrives as a new doctor with plans to reform the medicine of the town. Both of those ambitions meet the expectations of a community in which everyone knows everyone else's business.
Cal Stephanides begins the story of his own life with his grandparents, a brother and sister who left a village in Asia Minor and ended up in Detroit as a married couple. A mutated gene runs through the family into the third generation, where it makes itself known in a child raised as a girl, and the novel is the account that child gives of how it happened.
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.
