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 34 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.
Bella Swan is about to turn eighteen, and being in love with a vampire means that every ordinary accident is dangerous. When a paper cut at her birthday party sets off an attack on her, Edward Cullen decides to leave Forks, and his family leaves with him. Bella gets through the winter with Jacob Black, whose own family has a secret, and then a telephone call changes everything.
Two rises in sea level have left most of New York City permanently under water, and the streets have become canals while the skyscrapers have become islands. The residents have adapted: the upper floors are still lived in, and the flooded city, nicknamed SuperVenice, is as busy as it ever was. Against that backdrop the book follows a group of people who live in one building, the MetLife Tower on 23rd Street, and the changes the water keeps forcing on the city around them.
Frank Burnet's leukaemia treatment led to a discovery about his genes, and his university sold the rights to his cells to a biotechnology company. When he sues, the court decides the cells were waste. His case is one strand in a satirical novel about genetic research, patent law and the people caught between them.
Two years after millions of people vanished in an instant, a new world order has risen from the rubble and the strangely persuasive leader Nicolae Carpathia has consolidated his power over the Global Community. Heads of state, financiers, religious leaders and the media have been reduced to instruments of his regime, and only a small group knows what he really is.
A couple on a Long Island beach are filming each other when an explosion lights up the sky and something appears to rise from the sea towards a plane. Five years later the crash of TWA Flight 800 has been attributed to a mechanical fault. Detective John Corey and his wife, who worked on the original inquiry, go looking for the video.
Rebecca Cullen is twenty-four, holds down a job, raises two teenage brothers and looks after her grandfather on their Georgia farm. When her brother Clay is arrested on a drug charge she knows is wrong, the case is given to a district attorney with a reputation for prosecuting dealers without mercy. Rebecca has no money for a lawyer and nobody to turn to.
A young woman called Ashley Cordova is found dead in New York, and the police treat it as a suicide. Scott McGrath, an investigative journalist, has reasons of his own for looking into it: Ashley's father is Stanislas Cordova, the director of a set of notorious films who has not been seen in public for more than thirty years. The last time McGrath went after the father he lost everything.
Lindy finds a ventriloquist's dummy in a dumpster behind the family's house and teaches herself to work it, which turns out to be something she is good at. Her twin sister, Kris, is annoyed enough by the attention to want a dummy of her own, and the second one comes with a different personality attached. The pranks between the sisters get worse, and the tricks that cannot be explained get worse than that. The novel is the book that introduced Slappy, and it keeps the possibility open for most of its length that the trouble is one of the girls rather than the wood.
Amy's ventriloquist dummy, Dennis, keeps losing his head, so she asks her family for a new one. Her father finds Slappy in a local pawnshop. Slappy is ugly, but Amy has fun practising her new routine, and then horrible things begin to happen, just as they did the first time, because there is something odd about Slappy.
Trina's father used to be a ventriloquist, and his dummies are stored in the attic of the family house. Trina and her brother Dan hear voices coming from up there, and they begin to wonder whether the dummies are alive, and what they would want if they were, and what happens to a family that keeps them in the house.
Tom Ward is apprenticed to the Spook, and he is dismayed when his master announces that they will spend the winter on Anglezarke Moor. The moor is gloomy and forbidding, and the Spook has his reasons for choosing it. There are two dangerous witches to deal with and a dark mage who wants to raise something ancient.
Ami does not trust strangers and finds it hard to trust anyone at all, but she is neither a coward nor a liability in a fight. When she comes across a lone warrior taking on eight deranged vampires at once, she steps in and saves him, which turns out to have consequences she had not considered.
It is 1996 and Jack Reacher is still an army major. He is given a medal in the morning and sent back to school in the afternoon, to a course shared with an FBI agent and a CIA analyst, each of whom is wondering what he is doing there. It is not a school at all.
Sloan Reynolds is a cop who has spent thirty years not needing the father who walked away. When Carter Reynolds invites her to Palm Beach to attempt a reconciliation she refuses, until an FBI agent explains that her father is under suspicion of financial crime and asks her to accept the invitation and report what she sees inside the family.
Isla Crown has won the love of two powerful rulers and broken the curses that had blighted the six realms for centuries. Almost nobody knows where her own powers came from. After a betrayal she would rather be distracted than crowned, and the rulers she beat have not accepted the outcome quietly. Something capable of killing everyone on Lightlark is also on its way.
Sophie Foster is grieving and trying to hold her position together while the Neverseen keep winning. The only route left runs through a place called Nightfall, and Sophie and her friends make a bargain they know is dangerous in order to reach it, only to find that the trouble they are dealing with goes back much further than any of them thought.
Humanity in the far future is divided into guilds, each with its own function, and some of them have been engineered for the work: the Fliers can fly, and the Watchers watch the sky for signs of invasion. One Watcher travels to the old city of Roum with a young Flier girl and a Changeling who belongs to no guild at all.
On Vega III, where the wealthy pass their time in intrigue and pleasure, Lady Nimisha Boynton-Rondymense would rather work in her father's shipyards. Her father makes her his successor at the helm of the Rondymense yards instead of his designated heir, and then a solo test flight of an experimental cruiser goes badly wrong. The relatives she replaced will not wait for her to come home.
Nimona is a shapeshifter who presents herself to Lord Ballister Blackheart as a sidekick, and he is a disgraced knight with a grudge against the Institute that runs the kingdom. The two of them set out to ruin it, with very different ideas about what is allowed. The story concerns a villain, the institution that decides who the heroes are, and a shapeshifter who follows no rules at all.
Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in London, in the province of Oceania, where his job is to correct old newspaper records until they agree with the Party's current account of events. Doing it properly requires holding two contradictory facts in your head at once, which is what the Party calls doublethink. Winston keeps a diary, which is a capital offence, drifts into an affair with a woman from the fiction department, and writes down the reasons he believes the regime cannot last. He also believes he has found somebody willing to say out loud what everyone knows. The Party's control works through rewritten records, invented language and a telescreen in every room, and it has been at this for a long time.
Sterling, New Hampshire, is a small town where very little happens, until a morning when a bomb goes off in a school car park and a student walks into the building with a gun. Nineteen minutes later ten people are dead. The novel follows the shooting, the trial and the years of bullying that came before it, through the eyes of the judge, her daughter and the shooter's mother.
Galaxy Stern is the least likely member of Yale's freshman class: she dropped out of school early in Los Angeles and by the age of twenty was the sole survivor of a multiple homicide. In her hospital bed she is offered a second chance, a place at Yale, and she takes it. She can see ghosts, and she has been recruited into Lethe, the ninth house, to keep watch over the eight secret societies that practise dangerous occult magic.
Lanesha lives in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans with Mama Ya-Ya, the midwife who took her in at birth, and she has the second sight that Mama Ya-Ya recognises as the same gift she has herself. Mama Ya-Ya knows a hurricane is approaching before the radio and television say anything, and she is too old and has no car.
In the desert back country near the Mexican border, a hunter called Llewelyn Moss comes across the aftermath of a drug deal that has gone wrong: trucks, bodies, and a case of money that nobody is left alive to claim. He takes it. What follows him is a killer who answers to nobody, and behind them both a county sheriff who is trying to understand what has happened to the place he has spent his life policing.
Jaime Vegas is a medium who can genuinely speak to the dead, unlike most of the spiritualists she works alongside, and she has spent her career hiding the fact. She joins a television production in which three mediums are shut in a house to raise the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, and discovers something in the garden that will not leave her alone until it has been heard.
Antonio is an Italian immigrant living in Sydney's working-class western suburbs, where he has lived for decades, forced into early retirement after an accident at work and left with too much time to think. Around him the city is convulsed by the Tampa affair, in which more than four hundred refugees were left stranded at sea, and his wife Rose and their drifting children find the family's own unravelling colliding with the crisis.
Suzanne turned down Ross Beckett's plan to go abroad with him because her mother needed her at home, and he left angry and did not come back for six years. He is now in a relationship with somebody else, and Suzanne is engaged to be married to a man called Miles Harringdon.
Sebastian Wroth was turned into a vampire against his will centuries ago, and he has been alone with his hatred of what he has become ever since. A woman comes to kill him, and what she does instead saves him, which is not what either of them had planned. Neither of them expected to meet somebody worth keeping.
Cynthia Bigge is fourteen and has just had a fight with her parents when she goes to bed, and in the morning her mother, her father and her brother are gone. Twenty-five years later the disappearance is still unexplained, and Cynthia agrees to appear on a television programme that re-enacts the case, hoping that it might produce an answer.
Crisostomo Ibarra comes home to San Diego from Spain to mourn his father, and finds that the rich man was ill treated in his final years and in the trial that followed his death. He decides to carry on his father's plan of building a school, to marry his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara, and to hold his ground against the parish priest and the colonial government.
Nona lives with her family, works at a local school, and loves the beach and other people's dogs, and her city is under siege while the dead come back and a monstrous blue sphere hangs above the horizon waiting to tear the planet apart. Six months ago she woke up in somebody else's body, and she is afraid she may have to give it back.
Anwuli Okwudili calls herself AO, for Autobionic Organism, and she has spent her life being told that her body is wrong: born with limbs that needed rebuilding, and rebuilt again with cybernetic prosthetics after a car accident. She works as a mechanic in Abuja, in a Nigeria where everything is streamed and a permanent sandstorm is eating the north. Then a trip to a market goes catastrophically wrong, and AO is a fugitive running north with a herdsman who is also wanted for murder.
Nora Hamilton writes romance films for television and knows exactly how the formula works, which is why she turns her own marriage's collapse into a script. It becomes the best thing she has written and is picked up to be filmed at the hundred-year-old house where she lives with her two children. The production brings Leo Vance, a former Sexiest Man Alive, to play her ex-husband, and it brings a film crew into her kitchen. When shooting ends and the crew leaves, Leo stays, offering a thousand dollars a day to keep his room for another week.
Connell and Marianne attend the same secondary school in County Sligo and pretend in public not to know each other. His mother cleans Marianne's house, which is how they met; in school he is popular and she is an outcast. They begin an affair and then a friendship that continues into Trinity College Dublin, where the balance between them changes. The novel follows them across a few years of misunderstanding, other relationships and the pull that keeps bringing them back to one another.
Catherine Morland is seventeen and entering society for the first time, and she has read enough Gothic novels to see the world through their lens. Two plausible suitors appear, friendships form quickly, and a visit to an ancient abbey gives her imagination everything it needs. Not all of her suspicions turn out to be correct, and her education is both comic and uncomfortable.
Lyra Belacqua is being raised at Jordan College in Oxford, in a world where every person has a daemon, an animal companion that is part of them. When her friend Roger disappears and her uncle Lord Asriel is reported to be in the Arctic, Lyra is taken north by a woman who is not the ally she pretends to be. She travels with a truth-telling device she has not learned to read, a family of armoured bears, and children who have been separated from their daemons. Behind the adventure is a research programme run by the Church, an opening into another world, and a girl who turns out to be a great deal more important than anyone at Oxford told her.
Victoria McQueen is eight years old when she discovers that riding her bicycle through a particular covered bridge can carry her to anything she has lost. Each trip across the bridge costs her more than the last, in body and in mind. The talent also brings her to the attention of a man who collects children, and the novel follows her from childhood into adulthood.
In the South American republic of Costaguana, a long history of tyranny and revolution has been interrupted by a spell of order, and an English-born mine owner is determined to keep his silver concession working. When the country rises again, the question becomes what happens to the silver, and who will be trusted to carry it.
Maddie's father is a Secret Service agent and Logan is the president's son, and they were best friends until the day her family disappeared to a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness with no phone and no internet. Six years later Logan turns up unannounced, and so do the armed men hunting him, which leaves the two of them alone in the frozen bush.
Rue is a food scientist at Kline, a small company that has been her working home, and Eli is one of the founders of the group trying to buy it. The deal could change her job and the life of the mentor who runs the place, and Rue and Eli have to keep talking about it. The attraction goes both ways, and neither of them wants it to. What they do with it happens alongside the argument about the company.
Five friends travel to Japan for a wedding, held in a Heian-era mansion where a bride was buried alive in the foundations and where a girl was walled up in the house every year afterwards. They have come for the atmosphere. The dead are there, and so are the grudges the group brought with them.
Jack Reacher walks into Hope, a small town in Colorado, and discovers that twelve miles of empty road separate it from a second town called Despair. He asks for a cup of coffee and gets a reception he did not expect, from a place that not only wants him gone but would rather he did not leave alive.
It is 3172, and most human beings belong to one of two factions: the Earth-based Draco and the Pleiades Federation. Starship travel depends on Illyrion, a rare and valuable power source. The most important family in the Pleiades is the Von Rays, and the most important family in Draco is the Reds, who own the company that makes the interstellar drives. Lorq Von Ray means to fly his ship through a nova to get hold of it.
Fallon meets Ben, a novelist, on the day before she is due to move across the country, and they spend that last day in Los Angeles together. Her life gives him the material he has been looking for, and instead of starting anything they agree to keep meeting on that date each year and compare what has happened since. The novel follows those annual meetings and the book Ben is writing, which begins to look a great deal like Fallon's life. Years in, she starts to question how much of what he has told her is invention.
In 2055 the Earth is fighting on the side of the Starmen of Lilistar against an enemy called the reegs, and nobody in a position of authority is sure the alliance is a good idea. Eric Sweetscent is an organ-transplant surgeon who keeps the Secretary General of the UN alive. Then he and his wife try a drug that shifts them out of their own time.
Nina Bloom is a successful lawyer and a loving mother who would do anything to protect the life she has built in New York, including lying about her past to everyone, her daughter included. When an innocent man is framed for murder she cannot let him pay for somebody else's crime, which means going back to the identity she abandoned nineteen years earlier.
Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think about life before the war, but it is now 1943 and life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages and Nazi soldiers in the streets. When the Jews of Denmark begin to be relocated, Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be part of the family, and Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous errand.
David Mitchell's second novel, number9dream, was published in 2001. It is set in Japan and narrated in the first person by a nineteen-year-old called Eiji Miyake, who has come to Tokyo to find the father he has never met, and it alternates between what happens to him and what he imagines happening.
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.
