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 36 of the list. The search box and the filter chips read the whole catalogue, not just this page, and the page links below walk the shelf in order.
Showing 48 of 3473 books
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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
A man who is recovering from an emotional collapse caused by a sleeping pill travels to Israel to interview a writer, and learns while he is there that somebody with his own face and his own name has been passing himself off as him. What follows is partly an intelligence operation and partly a story about identity.
The Oppenheimer Alternative follows J. Robert Oppenheimer through the Manhattan Project and the security hearings of the mid-1950s, and then adds a fictional discovery that the core of the Sun is unstable and will shed its outer layer in the late 2020s. The novel asks what the scientists who built the bomb would do with such knowledge.
Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, travels to Bilbao for an evening hosted by his former student Edmond Kirsch, a technology billionaire who has promised to announce a discovery that will overturn the way people understand human existence. Kirsch is a famous atheist with enemies among the religious leaders he has told in advance. The presentation does not go as planned.
Orlando begins as a young nobleman in Elizabethan England with money, position and a talent for poetry, and does not stop there: the book follows the same person across three centuries and a change of sex, through the households and literary circles of English history. It is written as though it were a biography, and it stays with one person rather than a family.
Snowman, once called Jimmy, lives alone on a shore after a plague has destroyed almost everyone, and the only people left with him are the Children of Crake, a gentle species engineered by his friend. To explain how the world ended he works backwards through his friendship with Crake and his feelings for the woman they both wanted.
Oscar Hopkins is an Anglican priest from Devon and Lucinda Leplastrier is a young heiress from Parramatta who owns a glass factory in Sydney, and they meet on a ship from England to Australia. Both of them gamble, one obsessively and one compulsively, and Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot carry a glass church to a remote settlement four hundred kilometres up the coast.
Zoey comes to an island off the coast of South Carolina to claim her dead mother's apartment in an old cobblestone building called the Dellawisp. What she finds there is a group of secretive neighbours and a set of stories that are still being written. The little birds of the island are as much at home as the people.
A vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana has a daughter of an expensive age, so when a mysterious Englishman offers him money to run a network of agents he accepts. The reports he files are invented, the trouble is that they keep coming true, and his inventions are taken a great deal more seriously than he is himself.
Addie Moore and Louis Waters are neighbours in a small town on the Colorado plains, and both of them are widowed and living alone. Addie asks Louis whether he would come and sleep in her bed at night, for the company rather than anything else, and the arrangement they make changes the last part of both their lives.
Miri thinks she has her wife back when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe, but it becomes clear that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in the vessel, and whatever the crew were meant to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto land and into their home.
Four women work the night shift at a bento factory, all of them dealing with lives that have gone badly wrong outside it. Masako, the one the others look to, has nothing left in common with the husband she lives with. The novel won Japan's leading crime prize and was the first of the author's books to be published in English.
A boy has fled his home in a drought-stricken country ruled by violence and is walking across an infinite, arid plain to escape the people pursuing him. One night he meets an old goatherd who lives simply and decently, and their paths become entwined as the boy decides whether to choose hope or the cycle of violence he has grown up in.
Alien scientists from an alliance of races called the Galactic Hegemony study footage of the Battle of Agincourt and decide that humanity belongs in the same category as the Shongairi, a carnivorous species the Hegemony has recently admitted. On the strength of that verdict a Shongairi fleet is sent to bring Earth under Hegemony control. What the fleet does not expect, arriving in the Solar System centuries after the images were taken, is how far the technology on the ground has moved since.
Dr Elwin Ransom, a philologist on a walking holiday in the English countryside, is kidnapped by two men and carried in a spacecraft to Mars, which its inhabitants call Malacandra. He escapes into the planet's interior and is sheltered by three different species, and learns what their history has to do with the isolation of Earth.
A prophecy has named three cats, kin to the leader of ThunderClan, as the ones who will hold the power of the stars, and only one of them knows it. Jaypaw believes the answer is buried in the past, with the ancestors who walk through his dreams, and his search takes him and his littermates towards the mountains.
Claire Randall, who served as a nurse in the war, is travelling in the Scottish Highlands in 1945 when a standing stone takes her to 1743, into a country of raiding clans and a Jacobite rising not yet begun. A clan that does not know what to make of an Englishwoman in strange clothes takes her in, and the safest arrangement available is marriage to Jamie Fraser, a young Highlander with a price on his head.
In the 1950s Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate killed a series of people across Nebraska and Wyoming, and the case has been told over and over since. This novel comes at it from three directions: Caril Ann looking back on the beginning of the relationship, a collector in Manhattan haunted by the crimes, and the man's wife.
Colby Lane has left his years as a mercenary behind and taken a job running security for an oil company, and then a drug trafficker brings him back into the world he left. His ex-wife is part of the case, which he was not expecting, and so is the six-year-old daughter she has.
Doby Kernohan and his father have travelled a long way looking for a new start, and the abandoned cabin they find seems like a good place to settle until they see the dead man in the front yard. The killing turns out to be an omen of darker events, for a cycle of violence that began long ago is about to reach its end.
Sunja is the daughter of a fisherman in Korea in the early 1900s, and she falls for a wealthy stranger who turns out to be married. She refuses his offer to buy her out of the consequences and instead accepts a proposal from a sickly minister on his way to Japan, which takes her away from her home and sets the family on a different course. The novel follows four generations through the markets, churches, universities and pachinko parlours of Japan, in a country that treats Koreans as outsiders.
The nuclear submarine Starbuck sailed into the calm Pacific for sea trials, fully armed and with all hands aboard, and vanished: no wreckage, no signals and no survivors. Dirk Pitt, a maritime troubleshooter, finds the only clue in the shark-torn surf off Hawaii, in the form of the submarine's own log, which ends with a warning that searching for the crew can only end in vain. The trail leads towards a whirlpool in the deep.
Paddy Clarke is ten years old and lives in Barrytown, in north Dublin, at the end of the 1960s. He spends his days roaming the streets with his friends, tormenting his younger brother Sinbad and getting into trouble at school, while at home his parents' marriage comes slowly apart and he has no way of naming what is happening to his family.
Nina married the Pakhan of the Russian Bratva because it was part of a deal, and now she is performing a happy marriage while trembling with fear and counting the days until she is out of the reach of a ruthless man. Roman gets what he wants, and what he wants is her, the perfectly imperfect manipulator who can convince anyone she is wildly in love with him. She does not yet know that the deal is cancelled.
On the face of it Grace Wilde has everything: youth, beauty, wealth and a title. Everything that makes up the life of a society queen is hers, and happiness is the one thing missing. The social round was never her choice; she was coerced into a loveless and meaningless marriage with an uncaring, unfaithful man. Then, on an expedition into the Persian desert, she falls into the hands of Kharim Khan, who is unlike anyone she has met.
Ista, the dowager royina of Chalion, was blamed by everyone including herself for the destruction her family suffered, and she has spent years being watched by guardians who believe she is not entirely sane. Restless and bored, she slips away on a pilgrimage with a small escort, and finds that a god has taken an interest in where she is going.
The book is presented as a nine hundred and ninety-nine line poem called Pale Fire, written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, a lengthy commentary and an index supplied by his neighbour and academic colleague Charles Kinbote. Together the parts make a narrative in which both fictional authors are characters.
Almeyda grows up as a slave on a plantation in Brazil in the 1670s, with a mother who is stern and a grandmother who is not like anybody else. She hears about Palmares, a city governed by freed and escaped slaves, and her life becomes a long journey through the country. She is looking for her husband, and the country is very large.
David Talbot meets Pandora in a Paris cafe and is given the account of her two thousand years of life. Born in the Roman Republic, she was made a vampire by Marius, the ancient who becomes the centre of her existence, and her story is one of love, betrayal and the long survival of the Children of the Millennia.
It is the year 2380, and the Intersolar Commonwealth is a sphere of stars four hundred light-years across with more than six hundred worlds in it, all joined by a web of wormhole transport tunnels. At the far edge of it, an astronomer watches a star more than a thousand light-years away simply disappear. It does not explode and it does not collapse. It vanishes.
Quentin Jacobsen has lived across the street from Margo Roth Spiegelman for most of his life and has spent most of it watching her from a distance. One night, a month before graduation, she climbs through his window and takes him on a campaign of revenge against the people who have wronged her. The next morning she is gone, and the clues she has left behind are addressed to him. Quentin and his friends spend the rest of the novel working out where she went and what they were supposed to understand from it.
Hannah's best friend Lillian has been dead for months, and Lillian's ghost has not left her alone since. The town is filling up with paper hearts and messages, because it is nearly Valentine's Day. Young girls are also being murdered, and Hannah is the only person who can see the friend who follows her.
Lauren Olamina lives in a walled street outside Los Angeles, in a country where public services are unreliable, work is scarce and clean water is expensive. She has hyperempathy, a condition that makes her feel other people's pain as her own, which is dangerous in a world where nobody can afford it. She also has a religion, worked out in notebooks since she was twelve, based on the idea that God is change and that the point is not to worship it but to shape it. When the wall finally fails she walks north with what she can carry, gathering people as she goes, and the novel follows the community she assembles on the road.
Ruby, Oklahoma, is a town founded by freed slaves who wanted a place that was entirely their own, and for most of a century it has kept outsiders out. Seventeen miles away, in a mansion that once housed a school for Native American girls, a small group of women live in a way the town cannot tolerate. One morning in July 1976, nine men from Ruby walk into the Convent with guns.
Satan and the rebel angels, defeated and cast out of heaven, plot their revenge on God, and the struggle they begin ranges across heaven, hell and earth. Its victims are Adam and Eve, who are tempted and fall, and the poem is the story of the Fall of Man told on an epic scale. Milton wrote it in blank verse, and it is divided into twelve books.
Corinne is the scandalous darling of Boston society, and she sails halfway around the world to Hawaii to ruin the man who ruined her: Jared Burkett, who took her, humiliated her, and left her with feelings she did not want to have. She hates him as much as she wants him, and he wants to possess her as well, whatever the cost to both of them.
On the week of her wedding, a bride is visited by a bird that she recognises as her dead grandmother, and the bird tells her not to get married and to go and find her brother. What follows takes her away from the altar and into a journey that keeps turning strange. The bird stays with her.
A collection made up of the novella Paris for One and eight other stories. In the title piece, Nell is twenty-six, has never been abroad on a romantic weekend and is waiting in Paris for a boyfriend who does not arrive, which leaves her with a city, a hotel room and nobody to share either with.
In a small town in Georgia in the 1950s, a store owner named Paris Trout kills the younger sister of a man he has been doing business with and wounds the man's mother. The killing follows a car deal that went wrong, and the town has to decide what it is prepared to do about a man everybody knows.
Alexis Montgomery is an emergency doctor from a family of celebrated surgeons, and she is content with a career that does not impress them. A chance meeting introduces her to Daniel Grant, a carpenter ten years younger who lives in a small town and takes life as it comes, which is close to the opposite of the world she was raised in. Their time together is meant to be brief and is not. The longer it lasts, the clearer it becomes that choosing him would mean turning down the plan her parents have in mind for her.
Irene Redfield lives comfortably in Harlem with her physician husband and two sons, arranging charity events for the city's black elite. On a hot afternoon she runs into Clare Kendry, a childhood friend who has been passing as white and is married to a man who does not know she is black. Clare wants Irene's world back, and Irene cannot decide whether to admire her or fear her.
Pastwatch is the story of Christopher Columbus and of the future scientists who study him. One of those researchers comes to believe that the history she can see is a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality rather than an inevitable one, and that her machines might make it possible to reach back through time and alter it.
Barnaby Gaitlin is nearly thirty, divorced, and works for a company called Rent-a-Back, doing heavy chores for elderly clients. When he was seventeen he was caught burgling the neighbours' houses, and nobody in his philanthropic family has forgotten it. He is waiting for the family's guardian angel to appear to him, as it appeared to his great-grandfather.
The forest cats have settled into five camps, following the spirit cats' instruction to spread out like the petals of a flower. Then the rogue Slash takes Star Flower prisoner and demands prey the cats cannot spare. Clear Sky needs the other four leaders to help him, and none of them trusts him enough to agree.
Rigg can see the path of any living being, however long ago it passed, and he has grown up hunting in the mountains with his father. When his father dies, his last instruction sends Rigg looking for a sister he had never been told that he had. Then a boy drowns at the falls near their home, Rigg is blamed for it, and the town turns on him.
George Mallory is a Cambridge graduate and a climber with a reputation for going on where other men turn back, and his ambition is the summit of Everest. The novel follows his expeditions and his marriage, and it takes seriously the old question of whether he and Sandy Irvine reached the top of the mountain in 1924, twenty-nine years before anyone else.
Jack Ryan is in London when a splinter group of the Irish republican movement tries to kidnap the Prince and Princess of Wales, and he intervenes. Foiling the attempt makes him a target, and his family with him. The group behind it is a splinter of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and he is not the kind of man to stand by.
Cayce Pollard is a marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols, and her work takes her to London, Tokyo and Moscow to judge proposed logos. She is also addicted to fragments of film footage being posted anonymously on the internet, and she is hired to find whoever is making them.
Garion grows up on a quiet farm with his Aunt Pol and does not believe in magic or in the prophecies the storytellers bring with them. He has been watched for years by a man without a shadow, and when the story begins he is taken from the farm by people he has known all his life and told almost nothing about where he is going.
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.
