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 33 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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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Katherine Mary O'Fallon is sixteen when she travels from Boston to Calgary in 1907 to visit her uncle and recover from pleurisy, and there she meets Sergeant Mike Flannigan of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They marry and go north into the Canadian wilderness, where the two of them live among the hardships and the landscape of the early twentieth-century North. The novel is based on the stories of the real Katherine Mary O'Fallon Knox.
Laura Evans has settled into running the cafe in the General Store of the Vermont town of Silver Springs, a long way from the high-pressure restaurant career she left in Boston. When an apple farmer called Vernon Reed is found murdered in his garage with a cider-making hammer, the weapon turns up carrying the fingerprints of a young man she has befriended.
Murder in Mesopotamia is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in July 1936 and in the United States later the same year. It sets Hercule Poirot down among the archaeologists at an excavation in Iraq, a world Christie knew at first hand. Much of it is told by a nurse hired to look after the archaeologist's wife, which gives the reader an outsider's view of the whole expedition.
Sir Charles Cartwright should have known better than to allow thirteen guests to sit down to dinner, because by the end of the evening one of them is dead, choked by a cocktail that contained no trace of poison. Hercule Poirot calls the death predictable, and then finds that he can discover no motive for a murder at all.
Regan Madison is a hotel heiress who helps run a charitable foundation, and an anonymous email arrives with a photograph of a crime scene attached. The detective assigned to look after her, Alec Buchanan, would rather be getting on with his career and is not pleased about the assignment. The list the photograph belongs to keeps growing.
Snow brings the train to a halt between Syria and Paris, and by morning a rich American passenger is found dead in his own compartment, stabbed, with the door locked from the inside. Nobody has left the train, so whoever killed him is still aboard. The last free berth went to Hercule Poirot, and the job of working out which passenger did it falls to him.
Jim Burden arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as a family of Bohemian immigrants, the Shimerdas, having been sent to live with his grandparents after the deaths of his parents. He is ten years old, and the eldest daughter of the new family, Antonia Shimerda, is a child like him. The novel is his account of the years that follow and of what the two of them make of the country they have been brought to.
Tim Meeker's older brother Sam joins the rebel army at the start of the American Revolution while the family's store and tavern in Redding, Connecticut, are caught between the two sides. Tim has to decide where he stands, and the war takes the family's trade, its neutrality and finally its members, leaving him to work out what the argument was worth.
Philip Ashley was raised on a Cornish estate by his older cousin Ambrose, and the two of them lived contentedly without women until Ambrose travelled to Florence for his health. There he married, and there he died, writing letters home that blamed his wife. Philip inherits the estate and the letters, and then Rachel herself arrives in Cornwall.
Julianna Hawthorne goes to a London financier to clear a debt her brother owes him, and comes away having agreed to terms she did not expect: six months as Rafe Pendragon's mistress. He is known for being ruthless in business, and she has reasons of her own for not walking away from the arrangement.
Samantha Prendregast arrives at a remote English estate to take charge of six badly behaved girls, and finds the master of the house a harder problem than the children. He is a widowed colonel who likes his life in order, and she is the opposite of orderly, which is what makes the arrangement work and what makes it dangerous.
Michael Monroe is learning a few new lessons this week. Never trust a teacher who believes in monsters. Do not think about entering her house. And stay well away from the giant egg in her attic, especially if it is about to hatch. Michael is not the sort of boy to take advice of that kind.
Elsa is seven, she corrects other people's grammar, and she is bullied at school. Her grandmother is seventy-seven, drives the neighbours mad and tells her the stories of a kingdom called Miamas. When her grandmother dies, she leaves Elsa a series of apologetic letters to deliver, and each one introduces a neighbour whose real life turns out to be part of the fairy tales.
Jade Daniels knows more about slasher films than anyone else in Proofrock, Idaho, which is why she recognises the shape of what is happening when the town starts losing people. The place has the right ingredients: a lake, an old summer camp where a massacre took place fifty years ago, and a new luxury development cutting into the national forest. Nobody else is treating any of it as a pattern.
In a world where most people develop a superpower at the age of four, Izuku Midoriya has none. He wants to be a hero anyway, which means getting into a school that takes only the most powerful students, and an encounter with the greatest hero alive gives him a chance he had given up on.
Lady Chastity Ware needs to get her widowed sister and her baby away from a deadly pursuer, so she dresses as a highwayman and stops the first coach on the road. The occupant is an arrogant aristocrat named Cyn Malloren, and instead of robbing him she orders him to drive her to a remote cottage.
Jane is twelve and lives by the sea with her mother and her younger brothers and sisters. She wants the summer to be an adventure, and it obliges: a ride in a hot-air balloon, a string of men who might be her father, and a friendship with a preacher who claims to see the future.
Olivia Devonshire's passionate nature and secretive past have made her one of the most notorious women in England, and Miles Warwick is a disreputable rogue and the black sheep of his family. He marries her for money, and does not expect to lose his heart to her. Their union begins with vows that mean nothing and develops into something no force can undo.
Keighly Barrow is seven when she looks into an antique mirror in her grandmother's ballroom in Redemption, Nevada, and sees a boy her own age looking back. He is standing in an old western saloon among women in gaudy dresses, and she learns that his name is Darby Elder and that he lived a hundred years earlier. Twenty years later she inherits the house, and she is engaged to somebody else.
Sam Gribley is twelve and dislikes living in his parents' cramped New York apartment with his eight brothers and sisters, so he runs away to his great-grandfather's abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains to live in the wilderness. The novel opens in the middle of the story, with Sam sheltering in a treehouse during a blizzard, and then returns to explain how he came to be there and what he learned.
Korede is a nurse in Lagos, sensible and used to cleaning up after her younger sister Ayoola, who is the favourite child, the beautiful one, and in the habit of killing her boyfriends. Three of them have died now, and it is Korede who arrives with the bleach and the large car boot while Ayoola goes about her ordinary business.
Anna Fitzgerald is thirteen, and she was conceived so that her blood could be used to treat her older sister's leukaemia. When she is told that she will now have to give Kate one of her kidneys, Anna goes looking for a lawyer and sues her own parents for the right to decide what may and may not be done with her body.
Audrina Adare believes she is seven years old when the novel begins, and her memory is not to be trusted. She lives at Whitefern, a Victorian-era mansion near the river, with her father, her mother, her aunt and her cousin, and her father is convinced that she walks in her own time. Before she was born, her elder sister, who had the same name, was murdered in the woods.
New York, 2000. A young woman from a wealthy family, two years out of art school and recently orphaned, decides that the best thing she can do for herself is to sleep for a year. She finds a psychiatrist willing to prescribe almost anything, stops answering her doorbell, and begins. Her only regular visitor is a friend she does not much like.
Mystery Walk is a horror novel by Robert McCammon, first published in 1983. Its central figure is Billy Creekmore, a boy who can see the dead and help troubled spirits move on, and the book follows him as he learns what his gift is for. Billy grows up in rural Alabama with a mother who shares the gift and a devoutly Christian father who cannot bear it.
Three boys were friends in the same Boston neighbourhood until a car stopped and one of them got in. A quarter of a century on, Sean works homicides, Jimmy runs a corner store and has done time, and Dave is trying to hold a marriage together against the things he cannot put down. When Jimmy's daughter is found dead, Sean catches the case.
Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are brought back into intelligence work during the Second World War and sent to a seaside hotel, where they are to find a pair of enemy agents living under other names among the guests. The guests are a mixed company, and two of them are not what they seem to be.
Charles Hillenbrand is a Cambridge academic looking back on his marriage and on the daughter he lost, when he took four-year-old Naomi to London on Christmas Eve and she disappeared in a shop. He spent the years afterwards continuing the search, through the police, the press and his own household, and what he eventually found was not what he had been looking for.
A wave takes Mau's island village and everyone in it, and it leaves him and a girl from the other side of the world as the only people left on the island. She is called Daphne, she was on a ship when the wave came, and between them they have to work out how to live somewhere that has lost every adult who knew how anything was done.
Bigger Thomas is twenty years old, black, and living with his mother and his brother and sister in one room on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. A relief agency finds him work as a driver for a wealthy white family, an opportunity that frightens him more than it reassures him. Within a day of taking the job he kills the daughter of the house, and the novel follows what comes next.
Set nearly a century after the events of Dune: The Battle of Corrin, this is the third book of the Great Schools of Dune trilogy, which follows the founding years of the organisations that will matter in Frank Herbert's Dune. The Bene Gesserit, the Mentat schools and the Spacing Guild are all still being formed, and all of them are threatened by the anti-technology forces that have been gaining power since the Butlerian Jihad. The volume closes the sequence and accounts for the origins of the Navigators.
Paul Formain is a mining engineer in the late twenty-first century, and over a short period he survives several accidents that should have killed him, losing an arm in one of them. The pattern draws the attention of a guild that believes the human species has become a dead end and that the only way forward is to clear space for what comes next. Formain wants to know why he is still alive.
Harry Keogh can talk to the dead, which is how he learns what is buried in the mountains of Romania: a master vampire called Thibor Ferenczy, held between death and life, who is plotting an unearthly revenge. The vampire's instrument is Boris Dragosani, an agent of a secret Russian service who wants to learn the vampire's skills for himself.
A party of wealthy and engaged English travellers sets out on a world voyage aboard an ocean liner, and after several weeks at sea the ship is wrecked in the Pacific. Two survivors reach an island whose inhabitants call it Nedra, and being alone together on it, far from the marriages waiting at home, is a problem of its own.
A new shop opens in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine, and its proprietor, Leland Gaunt, always seems to have exactly the object any customer wants, at a price that looks like a bargain. The price is not only money. Each customer is asked to play a prank on somebody else in town, and as the pranks accumulate the townspeople turn on one another with increasing aggression. The escalation is deliberate and cumulative, and the town's own long-running grudges supply the material the shopkeeper works with.
A reclusive station colony called Rotor has left the crowded Earth and taken up orbit around a newly discovered red dwarf, above a semi-habitable moon named for the red light that falls on it. Its people cannot agree on where to go next, and the moon's bacterial life turns out to be far more than bacteria. Behind them, Earth is perfecting a kind of flight that makes distance small.
The crew of the Rocinante has time on its hands while the ship sits in dock, and each of them goes off to deal with something personal. Meanwhile a radical faction has been stealing stealth technology from Martian shipyards, which turns out to be the first sign of a plan aimed at the whole of humanity.
Persephone Dimitriou has spent years being useful to the Thirteen Houses that run the city of Olympus, and one evening her mother announces that she is to marry Zeus. Instead of accepting it, Persephone crosses the river into the undercity and makes a bargain with a man she had always assumed was a myth. Hades has kept out of Olympus politics for years and has his own reasons to want the city's order disturbed; Persephone is exactly the leverage he needs, and the arrangement suits them both until it stops being an arrangement. The first Dark Olympus novel is a modern Hades and Persephone retelling where the power struggle is the setting and the romance is the point.
Tambu is a Shona girl in Rhodesia in the 1960s whose older brother has just died, and whose ambition is to go to school. Her brother's death gives her the chance, because the family's money for education is now free for her to use. She goes to live with her uncle's household at a mission school, where she learns exactly what her education will cost.
A banker from the Netherlands finds himself living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York after his English wife takes their son back to London, and he is at loose ends in a city he had come to think of as home. Then he comes across a game of cricket, and through it a friendship that changes things. Cricket, it turns out, is one way of belonging to the city.
Marra is the third daughter of a royal house, raised in a convent while her eldest sister was married to a prince and died, and her second sister was married to the same man in her place. When Marra learns what is happening to her sister, she leaves the convent, and the dust-wife who can help her sets three impossible tasks as the price of that help.
Murderbot is a security unit that hacked its own governor module years ago and has been quietly doing as it pleases ever since, most of which involves watching soap operas. In the first full-length novel of the series, it is escorting a research expedition when a hostile ship attacks, and Murderbot and one of its humans are taken aboard by force. The transport turns out to be one it has travelled on before, and the artificial intelligence running it has plans.
Case was one of the best console cowboys in the Sprawl until his employers burned his nervous system and cut him off from cyberspace, which is worse than dying. He is drinking his way through Chiba City when a woman with surgically inset mirrorshades offers him a repair job with strings attached: a mysterious employer, a run nobody explains, and a partner who handles the parts of the work that require a body. The target is an artificial intelligence with plans of its own, and the people paying for the run are not the only ones with an interest in what it becomes. Case's repair depends on completing the job, and the artificial intelligence has been waiting for someone like him.
Ruby has spent years hiding what she can do, and the epidemic that killed so many American children has left the survivors divided into categories their government treats as threats. In the second Darkest Minds novel she joins the revolutionary Children's League, trading her cooperation for information about the disease that tore her life apart.
Jack Reacher travels from South Dakota to the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th MP, to finally meet its commander, Major Susan Turner, whose voice he has been talking to for months. When he arrives he is told that Turner has been relieved of command, and that two cases have been opened against him: a suspected homicide from sixteen years earlier, and a lawsuit from a woman who says that she and Reacher had an affair that produced her teenage son. Two men in a motel car park give him until the next morning to leave town.
Newlyweds Tricia and Ethan are looking for their dream house when they visit a remote manor that once belonged to Dr Adrienne Hale, a psychiatrist who vanished without trace four years earlier. A violent winter storm traps them there with no way out, and while Tricia is looking for something to read she finds a secret room full of transcripts of every interview Dr Hale ever conducted.
Sophie Foster has left the lost cities and joined the Black Swan with her closest friends, none of whom entirely trusts the organisation they are now working for. Their enemies have released a plague that threatens an entire species, and every choice they make from here costs something. Sophie has to work out whether the group she has joined is worth what she has given up for it.
Richard Mayhew is a young Scottish man with a flat in London, a job in an office and a fiancee with firm opinions about both, and none of that survives the night he stops to help a girl bleeding on a pavement. Her name is Door, her family has been murdered, and the people who did it are looking for her; helping her also means becoming invisible to the city above, which closes over the space where Richard used to live. He has no way back except through Door's world, where the geography of the Underground has been turned into a place people live in.
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.
