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 35 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
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
A vigilante serial killer is loose in New York City, tracking down and murdering people whose crimes have gone unpunished, and the number of victims keeps growing while many of the city's residents quietly approve. When a woman of great wealth and even greater connections disappears, two detectives are put on the case. The task force they belong to exists to take the cases the rest of the department cannot.
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are pursued by murderous strangers through the bazaars of Jerusalem in 1918. In Palestine they meet Mahmoud and Ali Hazr, two apparently Bedouin guides, and set out to counter a plot against the British administration under General Edmund Allenby, with Russell dressed as a young Bedouin man and learning Arabic as she goes.
Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm on the Nebraska Divide when her father dies, and makes it succeed while her brothers doubt her judgement. The novel follows the family for more than a decade, and then turns to the next generation and to the people Alexandra has loved, among them the man she has waited for since she was young.
Naomi Nakane is a schoolteacher in her thirties when the news of her uncle's death sends her back to the aunt who raised her and to the years she has spent not thinking about. Her family were Japanese Canadians, and the war took their houses, their work, their freedom and, for a long time afterwards, any way of speaking about what had happened to them.
Tennal, a rich socialite with telepathic powers he uses illegally, is caught and conscripted. To hold him in line the army binds his mind to Lieutenant Surit, whose coercive ability is strong enough to control him. Tennal wants out, Surit wants his family's pension restored, and both are posted to a frontier where the army's plans matter more than either of them.
Odd Thomas is twenty years old and works as a short-order cook in a small desert town, and he can see the dead. They come to him when they want something, and they cannot speak, so what he has to do is work out what it is they are after. The novel opens with the ghost of a young girl leading him to the man who killed her.
George Milton and Lennie Small travel together from ranch to ranch in California during the Great Depression, looking for work and carrying one plan between them. Lennie is very strong and does not understand his own strength, and George has spent years keeping him out of the trouble he keeps finding. They take jobs on a farm where the other workers are paid a dollar a day, and they plan to save enough to buy a smallholding of their own. The dream is the part they keep repeating to each other, and the novel is short enough to read in one sitting.
In the twenty-fourth century, eight million people escape the destruction of human civilisation by a genocidal alien enemy and settle a world they name Safehold, hoping to stay hidden. To keep the colony invisible from space, its leaders decide that it has to give up advanced technology altogether and live as a pre-industrial society. Administrator Eric Langhorne goes considerably further than the plan allows, and the first of the Safehold novels follows what his version of it does to the people who have to live inside.
On the Thames at Battersea Reach, a small community of people live aboard barges moored to the mud at low tide. Nenna is waiting for her husband to come back to her while her two daughters run along the foreshore. Maurice next door is sympathetic and makes his living in a way the others do not discuss. An elderly painter called Willis wants to sell his boat.
Smash knew all about ogres, having a human mother and being one himself: they are huge and horribly ugly, and they are also generally agreed to be so stupid that there is very little they can be trusted with. Smash is not quite either. He is an ogre with a human mother.
It is 1928, and Matilda Simpkin, once a militant in the suffrage campaign who was jailed five times, now lives on lectures and small routines. Finding an old wooden club in a cupboard brings the past back, and a meeting with an old comrade who has joined the Fascists convinces her that a new cause has arrived. She starts a club for girls.
John Perry turns seventy-five, buries his wife, and joins the Colonial Defense Forces, which is what a lot of old people do, because the CDF only recruits people with decades of experience and nobody knows what its soldiers actually look like. The answer arrives after he leaves Earth and stops being seventy-five. Humanity holds a handful of inhabited worlds in a galaxy that is crowded, and the colonies are won and kept by a force that fights for land, water and settlers with technology nobody back home is told about. Perry's first year in the CDF is boot camp, first contact, and a long look at what the war is actually for.
Travis Coates is fourteen and in charge of the family farm in Texas with his mother and small brother while his father is away driving cattle, when a stray dog comes to the house and steals meat. Travis wants the dog gone, but the animal turns out to be useful, and the two of them become partners in the work of the farm.
Oliver Twist is raised in a workhouse and escapes to London, where he falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin. He discovers the secrets of his parentage and reconnects with the family he has left. The novel portrays the lives of criminals without romance and exposes the treatment of the many orphans in England in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Commander Honor Harrington has embarrassed a powerful officer, and the reward is command of a light cruiser posted to Basilisk Station, a picket assignment nobody wants, on a ship whose weapons do not work. Her crew blames her for the posting and the local interests resent any authority at all. Then she starts looking into what the smuggling is for.
Howard Belsey teaches art history in a New England college town, and after thirty years of marriage he is trying to find his way back to his wife Kiki. Their three grown children are each working out what they believe, and the family's arguments keep running into those of a conservative scholar who has just arrived in the same town with a family of his own.
It is July 1962, and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting have been married since the morning. He is a history graduate who wants to be a writer; she is a violinist in a string quartet and the daughter of parents with firm ideas about the world. They have dinner in their hotel room on the Dorset coast, and both of them are thinking about the same thing.
Firuzeh and her brother Nour are children of a country at war, and when their parents decide to leave Afghanistan the two of them are told stories about the country they are going to. What follows is a long journey through Pakistan, Indonesia and Nauru towards Australia. The country they are promised is not the country they find.
James Bond has been hunting Ernst Stavro Blofeld since the business in the Bahamas, and the trail has gone cold. Then he meets Teresa di Vicenzo, the daughter of a Corsican crime boss, whose own difficulties give him a way in. Bond is closer to a settled life than he has been in any of the earlier books, and he is about to be sent to Switzerland.
The Ingalls family travels from Kansas to Minnesota and settles in a dugout cut into the bank of Plum Creek, near the town of Walnut Grove. Laura and Mary make friends and start school, their father plants a wheat crop on credit at the store, and a season of grasshoppers followed by a hard winter tests what the family has put into the farm.
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty cross and re-cross the United States in search of experience, jazz and whatever else they find on the way. The novel is based on the author's own travels, and the characters stand in for himself and for his friend Neal Cassady. The road itself is the subject, and the book is still widely read in the United States.
Two hundred years after Blue Remembered Earth, humanity is sending hundreds of huge generation ships, carrying millions of people, towards planets outside the Solar System. The engines can get the ships up to speed, but there may not be enough fuel to slow them down again. One woman, cloned centuries earlier so that she could live three lives, is on all three of those paths at once.
Felix has been in a Catholic orphanage in Poland for more than three years, and he believes his parents are coming back for him. When he sees the nuns burning the library's books, he decides to go and find them, and the journey takes him through a country where the danger in the streets is not the sort of thing he has been told about.
Brianne Martin first sees Pierce Hutton in Paris, tall, handsome and utterly dangerous, and she pulls him back from despair without intending to. He is grateful for the rest of his life, but he draws the line at seducing a woman half his age. She falls in love with him anyway, and refuses to consider giving her innocence to anyone else, least of all the corrupt associate of her stepfather, who is obsessed with her and would stop at nothing to have her.
January Wayne is twenty-one when she comes back to New York after nearly three years in a hospital in Switzerland, and the city she left has moved on without her. Her father is a film producer she adores, the people around him are not what they say they are, and she has to find out what she wants now that she is well.
Evangeline Fox has believed in true love and happy endings for as long as she can remember, right up until the person she loves announces he is marrying someone else. To stop the wedding she strikes a bargain with the Prince of Hearts, an immortal with a reputation for cruelty and a smile that does most of the work. The price he names is three kisses, to be given when and where he chooses. After the first one, Evangeline understands that she has badly miscalculated, and that the Prince of Hearts intends to take far more from her than she agreed to. The first Once Upon a Broken Heart novel is a fairytale bargain set in a north that punishes people for hoping.
Lee Scoresby lands his balloon at Novy Odense, a cold port in the north where a businessman and a politician between them intend to decide how the place is run. Lee takes the side of a sea captain who has been robbed of his cargo, and the help he gets comes from an unexpected direction: an armoured bear.
One Corpse Too Many is a medieval mystery by Ellis Peters, published in 1979 and the second of the Cadfael Chronicles. It takes place during the civil war of King Stephen's reign, when a castle is taken, its defenders are hanged, and a monk of the abbey below finds one body among the dead that does not belong there.
Chief Bromden, a huge half-Native American man who has been in an Oregon psychiatric hospital for years, pretends to be deaf and dumb and watches everything that happens on the ward. Then Randle McMurphy arrives, having faked insanity to serve his sentence in hospital rather than on a work farm, and starts testing the authority of Nurse Ratched. The ward becomes a contest between the two of them.
Stephanie Plum has lost her job as a lingerie buyer in Trenton, New Jersey, sold most of her furniture and is two months behind on the rent. Her cousin gives her work as a bail bondsman's file clerk, and the reward for bringing in a fugitive turns out to be the only money she can see. The fugitive is a local cop accused of murder, a man she went to school with and has a history with, and he does not want to be found. Stephanie has no experience, no weapon and no idea what she is doing.
A woman known as the duchess of Magnus is wagered and lost in a card game, and the man who won her expects to marry her. What arrives instead is her quiet cousin Eleanor, who has agreed to exchange identities and now has to keep the pretence up with a man who is determined to go through with the marriage.
August Landry moves to New York expecting to be proved right about the world, and instead falls for a woman she keeps meeting on the subway. Jane is a punk from the 1970s who has been displaced in time and cannot leave the train, and August decides to find out why.
Nicole Phillips hires a housekeeper and gets a tall, dark and very good looking man named Jake Colson instead. He turns out to be indispensable in the kitchen and everywhere else, and he also turns out not to be mortal, which is a complication neither of them planned on. Nobody in the story is quite what they appear to be.
Neville Wyatt, Earl of Kilbourne, is waiting at the altar for his bride when a ragged woman runs down the aisle instead. He stares at her, and then announces to the assembled company that she is his wife: Lily, the woman he married, loved and lost on a battlefield in Portugal, whom he had believed to be dead. He says he will honour his commitment to her, and then Lily speaks, and what she asks for changes what he had planned.
Five students walk into detention at Bayview High, and each of them insists the phone found in their bag was planted there. One of the five is Simon, who runs an app that publishes other students' secrets. Before the hour is up Simon is dead, and the four who are left are the only suspects.
The year after Simon Kelleher's death, Bayview High has dozens of imitations of the gossip app that made him notorious, and none of them matter until an anonymous texter starts a game instead of an app: truth or dare, sent by message, with twenty-four hours to answer. Three students, Maeve Rojas, Knox Myers and Phoebe Lawton, are the ones it chooses.
Six shots are fired in a city in the middle of the country and five people are killed, and within hours the police have a suspect who fits every detail of the case and a confession that appears to close it. The arrested man says they have the wrong person, and then he asks for Jack Reacher by name, which is how a retired military investigator ends up taking the case apart.
In 1875 a group of American women travels west under a government programme that will marry them into the Cheyenne nation, in exchange for horses sent to Washington. The scheme was proposed by a Cheyenne chief and taken up by the administration as a way of assimilating the tribes. The novel is the journal of one of the women who volunteered.
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in November 1940 and in the United States in February 1941 under the title The Patriotic Murders. Poirot investigates the death of his own dentist, and it is the last of the novels to feature Chief Inspector Japp.
Sixteen-year-old Joan is sent to stay with her late mother's eccentric family in London for the summer, and it begins well: she likes her job at a historic house and her co-worker Nick has asked her out. Then she learns that her family are monsters with hidden powers, and that Nick is a monster slayer.
Wolfe Lonetree is the bastard son of a viscount and a Cheyenne shaman's daughter, and he agrees to rescue the pampered Lady Jessica Charteris from an unwanted wedding on one condition: that she become his wife. Jessica tricked a handsome stranger into a marriage in name only in order to escape a union with a British lord.
Will was the perfect summer fling, and then the holiday ended and he stopped answering Ollie's messages. A family emergency uproots Ollie and enrols him in a school on the other side of the country, which turns out to be Will's school. The Will who goes there is not the one from the summer, and Ollie has no intention of waiting for him to change back.
The novel moves back and forth through American history and follows Hailey and Sam, two wayward teenagers who crash parties in New Orleans, barrel up the Mississippi and make their way through the Badlands towards other adventures. The story alternates between two narratives, both involving the same pair of teenagers.
Harry Clifton grows up in Bristol expecting to work on the docks like his father and uncle, and he has one thing they did not: a voice good enough to be noticed. A choir mistress, a schoolteacher and an old soldier all take an interest in him, and the question of who his father really was follows him from the docks to a scholarship and a war.
Onyx Storm picks up the Empyrean series with Navarre, Poromiel and the newly freed province of Tyrrendor forced into an alliance against the venin, the magic-wielders whose advance nobody has been able to stop. Violet and Xaden leave the continent behind to search the southern isles for answers: more dragons of Andarna's kind, a possible cure for what Xaden is becoming, and any ally willing to stand with them. The journey turns up family history neither of them expected and costs the group more than they can afford. The third book of the Empyrean series trades the classroom for a wider war, and the choices made away from home are the ones that follow them back.
On New Year's Eve in 1982 Oona Lockhart is about to turn nineteen and has to choose between going to London to study economics and staying in Brooklyn for her music and her boyfriend. At midnight she faints and wakes up thirty-two years later, in her fifty-one-year-old body, and learns that she will live the rest of her life out of order.
On her thirty-fourth birthday, Daisy Minor decides to remake her entire life: she is tired of her boring clothes, her ordinary looks and nearly a decade without a date. The small-town librarian turns herself into a party girl who dances and flirts at clubs, and then she witnesses a murder and becomes the target of a killer.
Operation Chaos is a science fantasy novel by Poul Anderson, published in 1971 and made up of stories that had appeared separately before. It belongs to an alternate world in which the existence of God has been proved and magic is a working technology, and it follows a werewolf and a witch who meet during a war and stay together afterwards.
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.
