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 32 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

Midnight

Dean Koontz · 1989

Moonlight Cove is a small town on the California coast where people have started dying and where the streets are not safe after dark. Four people arrive in the middle of it from different directions: a woman who does not believe that her sister killed herself, a federal agent working undercover, a young girl who has run away from her parents, and a veteran who uses a wheelchair and has reasons of his own for being there. What is happening in Moonlight Cove is not supernatural, and the novel's horror comes from what a group of ordinary citizens agreed to have done to themselves.

Modern horrorBody horror

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

John Berendt · 1994

John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, subtitled A Savannah Story, was published in 1994. The book follows the shooting of a young man at the home of the antiques dealer Jim Williams, the trials that came afterwards, and the wide cast of Savannah characters who surrounded both men.

Crime thrillerSouthern gothic

Midnight Sun

Stephenie Meyer · 2020

Edward Cullen has been seventeen for most of a century and has learned to keep away from human beings, whose blood he can smell. Then Bella Swan arrives at his school and he cannot decide whether he wants to save her or kill her. This is the story of Twilight told from his side, including what he can hear inside the heads of everybody in the room except hers.

Young adult fantasyParanormal romance

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 1981

Saleem Sinai tells his own story against the transition of India from British colonial rule to independence and the partition of the subcontinent. Born at the moment of the country's independence, he is one of the children of that hour, and the novel keeps his private account and the national record running alongside each other so that they cannot be separated.

Magical realismModern classics

Mile High

Liz Tomforde · 2023

Zanders is a Chicago hockey player who has built a reputation as the man opposing crowds love to hate, and he has no plans to change it. The team's new flight attendant is unimpressed by him, so he decides to make her season of road trips as difficult as he can. Stevie has been a flight attendant for years and knows how to handle difficult passengers. The two of them spend the season testing each other on flights, in hotels and at home, and the hostility becomes harder to maintain than the truce would have been.

Contemporary romanceSports romanceWorkplace romance

Million Kisses in Your Lifetime

Monica Murphy · 2022

Lancaster Prep is a school where money decides the seating plan, and Wren Beaumont sits at the top of it without seeming to try. She is pleasant to everyone, close to nobody, and as hard to get near as a person can be in a building with shared classes. Crew Lancaster has watched her long enough to decide that the version of Wren everyone else sees is not the whole story, and a class project gives him an excuse to find out.

New adult romanceEnemies to lovers

Minecraft

Max Brooks · 2017

A castaway wakes on the shore of an island with no memory of how they arrived and no idea where they are. The world works by rules that nobody explains, and staying alive means working those rules out one experiment at a time, from what can be eaten to what comes out after dark, while the island keeps its own secrets.

Survival fictionAdventure fictionYoung adult fantasy

Minnow on the Say

Philippa Pearce · 1955

Two boys spend a summer on the River Say in a canoe called the Minnow, looking for treasure that an ancestor of one of them hid along the bank in the years when England was expecting the Spanish Armada. The only clue they have is a short poem, and they have the whole holiday to work out what it means.

Treasure huntComing-of-age

Mirror Dance

Lois McMaster Bujold · 1994

Mark has lived his short life as a copy of Miles Vorkosigan, made to be harvested for the benefit of someone else. He hijacks part of Miles's mercenary fleet and takes it to Jackson's Whole, where the clone creches that raised him are, meaning to destroy them. The raid goes wrong, and Miles has to go after his brother and his troops.

Space operaMilitary science fiction

Misery

Stephen King · 1987

The novelist Paul Sheldon intends to move from writing historical romances about a heroine called Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. After a car accident he is rescued by Annie Wilkes, who describes herself as his number one fan and is a former nurse. When she discovers that he has killed Misery off in his latest book, she becomes furious and keeps him prisoner in her isolated farmhouse until he writes a book that brings her back.

Psychological horrorDomestic horror

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Ransom Riggs · 2011

After his grandfather is killed, Jacob Portman follows the clues he left and finds a Welsh island where an orphanage once stood, and where children with unusual gifts are living inside a day that repeats. The photographs Jacob has been collecting turn out to be records of real residents, and something that hunts them is still looking.

Dark fantasyYoung adult fantasyHistorical fantasy

Mission of Honor

David Weber · 2010

The Star Empire of Manticore has fought the Republic of Haven for a generation, and Honor Harrington has paid for every victory she has won. Now the Solarian League, with its thousands of capital ships and its trillions of citizens, is drifting into the same war. Honor has a plan to end the older conflict before the bigger one begins, and enemies she cannot see are already moving against her home system.

Military science fictionSpace opera

Mistborn: The Final Empire

Brandon Sanderson · 2006

For a thousand years the Lord Ruler has ruled the Final Empire, and the skaa who work the plantations have no reason to expect anything else. Vin works a street gang and thinks she is lucky to be alive until a thief called Kelsier finds her and tells her she is something the nobility has spent centuries hunting: a Mistborn, able to burn the metals that give the nobility their powers. He is planning a robbery at the scale of a revolution, and he needs someone who can move among the houses doing the robbing. His crew includes a scholar who reads the old religions, a smoker who hides them from detection, and a Terrisman who can store memories in metal.

Epic fantasy

Mistress of the Empire

Raymond E. Feist · 1992

Lady Mara of the Acoma clan has been named Servant of the Empire by Ichindar, Emperor of the Tsuranuanni, whom she raised from figurehead to true ruler, and for the first time in her life she feels safe from her enemies. Then an assassination attempt aimed at her kills her young son and heir instead. Convinced that her old enemy Jiro of the House Anasati is responsible, she prepares for war.

Epic fantasyFamily saga

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville · 1851

Ishmael goes to sea because he feels like it, signs aboard the whaling ship Pequod in Nantucket and only discovers once the voyage has begun what the captain intends. Captain Ahab lost a leg to a white whale on a previous trip and has come back to sea for one purpose, which is to kill that whale wherever it leads him. The crew is a working crew of harpooners, boat handlers and a ship's carpenter, they are paid on the profits of the oil they render, and their captain has quietly converted the voyage into a private hunt. Ishmael narrates the whole of it, including the parts he cannot have witnessed.

Naval adventureLiterary historical fiction

Mockingjay

Suzanne Collins · 2010

Katniss Everdeen survived the Games twice, and the second time she was pulled out of the arena by rebels who want her to be the face of their war against the Capitol. She agrees, on conditions she does not really expect to be met, and becomes the Mockingjay in a propaganda campaign. The fighting is real, and so are the people making films about it.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Moi, Tituba, Sorcière…Noire de Salem

Maryse Condé · 1986

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, published in 1986 and winner of that year's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme. It takes the historical figure of the West Indian slave accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, and gives her the life the records never bothered to hold.

Occult and possessionHistorical horror

Mojave Crossing

Louis L'Amour · 1964

William Tell Sackett is carrying thirty pounds of gold from the Arizona goldfields to the booming town of Los Angeles when Dorinda Robiseau asks him for safe passage. Sackett is no ladies' man but he can spot trouble easily, and he agrees reluctantly, which leaves him crossing the most brutal desert on the continent with a companion he does not trust.

WesternFrontier fiction

Monkey Grip

Helen Garner · 1977

Nora is a single mother living in bohemian share houses in Melbourne, and she narrates her increasingly tumultuous relationship with a heroin addict while raising her daughter at the same time. The two parts of her life pull against each other for the whole of the book. The novel is set in Melbourne in the 1970s and stays inside its narrator's own circle.

AutofictionSocial realism

Monster Blood

R. L. Stine · 1992

In an old toy shop near his great-aunt's house, twelve-year-old Evan buys a dusty can of Monster Blood, which he thinks will be fun to play with. The can is not what it appears to be, and the book follows what happens once the contents are out of it, and how far the consequences spread beyond the boy who bought it.

Monster horrorCreature feature

Monsters of Men

Patrick Ness · 2010

War has come to New Prentisstown. An army of Spackle is marching on the city from one direction and the forces of the Answer from the other, and Todd has freed Mayor Prentiss in the hope that he can defend it. Viola is trying to warn the arriving settlers, and both of them have to decide what they are willing to do to stop the fighting.

Young adult science fictionDystopian

Montana

Debbie Macomber · 1997

Molly's grandfather wants her to bring her sons home to the ranch, and she is considering it when a stranger named Sam Dakota tells her that the old man is ill. She drives to Sweetgrass, Montana, with the children and arrives to find Sam already running the place, with nobody willing to explain him.

Small town romanceContemporary romance

Montana Sky

Nora Roberts · 1996

Jack Mercy dies and leaves his Montana ranch to three daughters who have almost nothing in common except the father they each met on their own terms. Willa grew up on the land and knows how to run it; Tess arrives from Hollywood with debts; Lily comes out of a failed marriage and needs somewhere to be. The will requires all three to live at Mercy Ranch together for a year before anyone inherits, and someone with a grudge against the dead man does not intend to let that year pass quietly.

Small town romanceFamily saga

Monument 14

Emmy Laybourne · 2012

Dean misses his bus on the morning a monster hailstorm, and then a chemical spill, wreck the road outside a chain superstore. He and thirteen other young people end up sealed inside the store with no adults, limited supplies and no idea whether anyone is coming for them. Their refuge runs on rations, chores and a chain of command that will not hold forever.

Post-apocalypticSurvival fictionYoung adult science fiction

Moon Rising

Tui T. Sutherland · 2014

The war between the dragon tribes is finished, and the dragonets who ended it have a plan for keeping the peace: a school that will take dragonets from every tribe and teach them to live together. Moonwatcher is not sure how she feels about being sent there. The school is the new setting for the series and she is one of its first students.

Dragon fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Moon Tiger

Penelope Lively · 1987

Claudia Hampton is a seventy-six-year-old historian, terminally ill in a London hospital bed, who decides to write a history of the world and finds herself writing her own instead. The novel moves backwards and forwards through her life, from a childhood competing with her brother for fossils to the war and the people she has loved.

Literary fictionFamily novel

Moonfall

Jack McDevitt · 1998

An interstellar comet is found to be on a collision course with the Moon, and the early analysis says the impact will shatter it. The vice president of the United States happens to be on the Moon that week, opening the first moonbase, and the base is home to about a thousand people with very little time to leave.

Hard science fiction

Moonraker

Ian Fleming · 1955

Hugo Drax came out of nowhere to build England the deadliest weapon any human brain has devised, and the country is grateful to him. Bond first meets him over a game of bridge at his club, where Drax is suspected of cheating, and in the later part of the novel he is seconded to the industrialist's staff as the Moonraker, a prototype missile meant to defend Britain, is finished. Drax's past is not what it appears, and neither is the missile.

EspionageSpy thriller

Moonsong

Lisa Jane Smith · 2012

Elena and her friends are starting at the beautiful campus of Dalcrest College, and Stefan and Damon appear to have reached an understanding at last. Leaving Fell's Church does not mean leaving the past behind, however, and students soon begin to disappear from the campus. Elena uncovers a secret that suggests a tragedy ahead of them cannot be avoided.

Vampire romanceParanormal romance

More Than This

Patrick Ness · 2013

Seth Wearing drowns in the sea off the coast of his home town, and then he wakes up on an empty street in a town that looks like the one he grew up in and has nobody else in it. He is naked, thirsty and starving, and he has no idea whether he is dead, dreaming or somewhere that has been arranged for him.

Young adult science fictionSurvival fiction

Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern

Anne McCaffrey · 1983

Moreta is the senior Weyrwoman of Fort Weyr and her queen dragon Orlith is close to laying, and she is at the Gather at Ruatha Hold when a runner collapses in the middle of the races with liquid in its lungs. Nobody can say what the illness is, and a few days later it has become an epidemic spreading across the whole of Pern, with a quarantine ordered against it and the holds and weyrs shutting their doors.

Dragon fantasyScience fantasy

Morning Star

Pierce Brown · 2016

Born a lowly Red in the mines of Mars, Darrow lost his wife to the Gold overlords and joined a secret revolutionary group, which remade him as a Gold so that he could infiltrate the ruling class and bring it down from within. After years of hiding among the Golds he is ready to declare open revolution, and the final fight is the hardest of them all.

DystopianSpace opera

Morrigan's Cross

Nora Roberts · 2006

Hoyt Mac Cionaoith is a sorcerer who stands on a cliff above a raging sea and rails at the vampire who has taken his twin brother from the family. Her name is Lilith, she has existed for more than a thousand years, and she will not stop until she rules over everything, so Hoyt is enlisted into a battle for humanity.

Paranormal romanceDark fantasy

Mort

Terry Pratchett · 1987

Mort is a gangly, well-meaning boy whose father cannot think of anything to do with him, so he is apprenticed to the first person who turns up at the hiring fair, and the first person who turns up is Death. The job comes with a scythe, a horse, a house full of hourglasses and a boss who is unexpectedly interested in the human customs he is supposed to be harvesting. Mort is left to collect a princess whose hourglass has a limited amount of sand left, and taking an interest in his work is the mistake that sets the plot going. Death, meanwhile, takes a holiday.

Classic fantasy

Mostly Harmless

Douglas Adams · 1992

Mostly Harmless is the fifth Hitchhiker's Guide novel, and the last one Douglas Adams wrote. Its cover called it the fifth book in an increasingly inaccurately named trilogy, and the story it tells follows Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect through another round of mishaps, with the two of them apart for most of the book.

Science fantasyClassic science fiction

Moth Smoke

Mohsin Hamid · 2000

Darashikoh Shezad is a banker in Lahore with a temper. An outburst gets him dismissed, his income disappears, and the distance between him and the wealthy friends he grew up with becomes visible to him for the first time. His best friend's wife, Mumtaz, becomes his lover, and he begins a descent into drugs and crime.

Literary fictionSocial realism

Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut · 1962

Howard W. Campbell Jr, an American who grew up in Germany, became a famous playwright and then a broadcaster of Nazi propaganda. He is also, by his own account, an American agent, and the novel is his memoir, written in an Israeli prison while he waits to be tried for what he said on the radio.

Literary fictionWorld War II fictionModern classics

Mountain Rose

Norah Hess · 1993

Chase Donlin receives a letter from his dying stepsister asking him to take care of her daughter, and he agrees without knowing that the child has grown into a young woman. Raegan arrives expecting a guardian and finds a trapper living in the thinly settled hills of Oregon, and the arrangement they make has to be worked out from the beginning.

Historical romanceWestern

Moving Mars

Greg Bear · 1993

Casseia Majumdar grows up in one of the old Martian family syndicates, in a society that runs its own affairs and resents the influence of Earth. She goes to university, becomes involved in politics, and finds herself in the middle of the argument about whether Mars should unify. Then a scientific discovery gives the planet a weapon it never expected to have.

Hard science fictionSpace opera

Mr. Dickens and His Carol

Samantha Silva · 2017

Charles Dickens is not feeling the Christmas spirit. His latest book has been a flop, the critics have turned against him, and relatives on every side are asking him for money. When his publishers try to blackmail him into writing a Christmas book he refuses, and then meets a mysterious woman on one of his night walks.

Biographical fictionVictorian fiction

Mr. Mercedes

Stephen King · 2014

In the pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of unemployed people are queuing for a place at a job fair when a lone driver ploughs a stolen Mercedes through the crowd, reverses and charges again. Eight are killed and fifteen wounded, and the killer gets away. Months later a retired detective named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved case, until a letter arrives from someone who claims to be the driver and threatens worse.

Crime thrillerSerial killer thriller

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower

C. S. Forester · 1950

In January 1794, on the eve of the wars with France, a seventeen-year-old called Horatio Hornblower joins the Royal Navy as a midshipman. He is seasick, awkward and socially hopeless, and the other midshipmen decide he is a dullard. Then he is sent to board a French merchant ship and take charge of it, and something in him turns out to work properly at sea.

Naval adventureClassic adventure

Mr. Perfect

Linda Howard · 2000

At their favourite restaurant, four professional women start discussing what would make the perfect man. The conversation turns into a joke list that is funny, detailed and deliberately racy, and it spreads through their company and out into the wider world until the four of them are briefly famous for it. Then somebody begins to take the list seriously.

Domestic suspenseCrime thriller

Mr. Standfast

John Buchan · 1919

Brigadier-General Richard Hannay is recalled from the Western Front to hunt a German agent who is at large in Britain, and the work has to be done under cover. He goes about the country disguised as a pacifist, and the trail is not the one he expected to find. The war is still going on all around him.

Spy thrillerWorld War I fiction

Mr. Wrong Number

Lynn Painter · 2022

Olivia Marshall loses her job and discovers that her boyfriend has been unfaithful, and then sets her apartment building on fire while burning his letters. She moves into her brother's flat and finds that his oldest friend Colin Beck lives there too, and then a wrong-number message turns into the best relationship she has.

Romantic comedyContemporary romance

Mrs Hemingway

Naomi Wood · 2014

Ernest Hemingway married four times, and this novel gives each of the four women a turn: Hadley Richardson in Paris, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn in Spain and Cuba, and Mary Welsh. Each of them tells what it was like to be married to a man who turned his own life into material, and each learns in her turn that the role has a successor already in view.

Biographical fictionLiterary historical fiction

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf · 1925

Clarissa Dalloway goes out to buy flowers on a June morning in London and spends the rest of the day preparing for a party she is giving that evening. As she moves through the city, her thoughts run backwards and forwards over her life, and the people she passes, including a shell-shocked veteran, are drawn into the same day in their own minds.

Modern classicsExperimental fiction

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Robert C. O'Brien · 1971

Mrs Frisby is a widowed mouse with four small children, and she has a problem that cannot wait: the family has to move to its summer quarters or face almost certain death, but her youngest son Timothy is ill with pneumonia and cannot be moved. She encounters the rats of NIMH, an extraordinary colony of highly intelligent creatures, who find a solution to her dilemma, and she in turn does them a great service.

Science fantasyAdventure fiction

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.

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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.