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 37 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.
Emmy Harlow is a witch of modest power who left the magical town of Thistle Grove years ago and has avoided going back. The spellcasting tournament her family has always arbitrated is approaching, and tradition, or her parents, brings her home. On her first night in town she runs into Talia Avramov, and the two of them discover a shared grievance against the heir of the most powerful family in Thistle Grove.
A train called the Lucky Day is carrying a small party of passengers through a country that is not quite the one they boarded in. The narrator and his partner are along for a holiday they did not plan in detail, and the journey they get is stranger than the one they thought they had booked.
Peak Marcello is fourteen and already known in climbing circles for getting to the top of skyscrapers and bridges in New York, which is how he ends up in court. His father, who left years ago, turns up with a way out of the charges and a proposition: come to Nepal and take a run at the highest mountain in the world.
Ruby has been a Dumas for a year and still cannot quite believe the New Orleans mansion she lives in or the father she has only recently met. Her stepmother despises where she came from, her twin sister answers every attempt at friendship with hostility, and boarding school turns out not to be the escape she hoped for.
The Jinx Inc. treasure-hunting company has a new job, which is to find the cave pearls that are supposed to exist in the lowest chamber of an ancient cave. Its leader, an ex-Navy SEAL named Caleb Peach, first has to persuade an archaeologist to come along, and she is not easy to pin down. The pearls are not the only thing hidden down there.
Joseph Schwartz, a retired tailor in the twentieth century, is caught in an experiment and wakes in a future Earth that has been poisoned by radiation and is ruled from elsewhere in the galaxy. Taken for a harmless old man, he is drawn into a conspiracy that will decide whether the planet's population is ever free.
Cal Thompson is nineteen and has been infected by a parasite that turns its carriers into cannibals and makes them sickened by everything they once loved. He is one of the rare people who stays himself, and he spends the novel tracking down the women he infected before he knew what he was carrying.
Peter Reidinger is the telepath and telekinetic first met in Pegasus in Flight, and his ability to draw on energy from outside himself could make him the most powerful psychic that human beings have produced. That possibility attracts enemies, and they are enemies of all Talents rather than of him alone.
On the day her husband is buried, a woman receives a letter from a state penitentiary containing one sentence, signed by a man she has never met. She writes back to ask what he is waiting for, and the answer is her. The letters continue for months and then they stop.
Mark Castallack is a proud and difficult man who brings his bride Janna home to Penmarric, the great house on the Cornish coast that gives the family its name and its standing. What follows is a feud inside one family, carried on by children and grandchildren, with the house and the land it stands on as the prize.
Poppy and Alex have almost nothing in common. She is restless and ready to go anywhere; he wears khakis and would rather stay at home with a book. They became friends at college anyway, and for ten summers they took one week of holiday together while living in different cities. Two years ago they ruined it and stopped speaking. Poppy is stuck in a rut, and the last time she remembers being genuinely happy was on that final trip with Alex. So she asks him for one more holiday, and plans to use it to put things right. He agrees.
Kara and Steve Marshall are selling their house on Long Island so that they can move into Manhattan, and their teenage daughter Lindsay does not want to go. She tells her mother that somebody came into her room during an open house. When her parents are in the city looking at apartments, Lindsay disappears from her bed.
Darcy Phillips runs an anonymous relationship advice service out of locker 89, charging a fee and mostly using her powers for good. When the new Australian jock at school catches her collecting the letters, he blackmails her into becoming his personal dating coach so that he can win his ex-girlfriend back. The arrangement has consequences for both of them, which Darcy did not plan for at all.
Peril at End House is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, published in the United States in February 1932 and in Britain the following month. It is the sixth novel to feature Hercule Poirot, and it begins with him on holiday in Cornwall, being told by a young woman that somebody is trying to kill her.
Paul Durham has worked out how to copy a human mind into a computer and keep it running, and he needs paying customers. Maria Deluca scans herself to pay for her mother's treatment. The copies live in a virtual city that can be edited, duplicated and switched off, and the question the novel keeps asking is whether the difference between a copy and a person matters.
Persephone Station is a backwater planet that the United Republic of Worlds has ignored for a long time, and the Serrao-Orlov Corporation has begun taking an interest in it because of what it holds. Rosie runs a bar there, and she and the people around her are asked to help somebody who has arrived at a bad moment.
An old enemy returns home with more power and technology than anyone thought possible, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante try to rally forces against the new invasion. In the thousand-sun network of humanity's expansion, new colony worlds are struggling, and in the space between Earth and Jupiter the inner planets and the belt have formed a tentative and uncertain alliance.
Jack Reacher is an elite ex-military policeman who left the service years ago and has moved from place to place without family, possessions or commitments. Trouble finds him wherever he goes, and unfinished business has now found him: ten years ago a key investigation went wrong and someone got away with murder, and a chance encounter brings it all back.
Anne Elliot is twenty-seven and unmarried, and her father is renting out the family estate to reduce his debts. When she was nineteen she was engaged to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, and her friends and family persuaded her to break it off because he had no fortune. The new tenants are his sister and her husband, so he will be visiting, and nobody in the family has thought about what that will mean for Anne.
Louis Creed takes a job as a doctor at the university in Maine and moves his family into a house beside a road where trucks run all night. Behind the house, down a path through the woods, the local children keep a pet cemetery for animals killed on that road. Their neighbour, an old man called Jud Crandall, shows Louis something further on, past a deadfall of branches, and explains what the ground there is for. When the family's cat is killed, Jud takes Louis up the path and the novel stops being about grief and starts being about what Louis does with it.
The second Dollanganger novel picks up where Flowers in the Attic leaves off, with the four children out of the attic and on a bus heading south. Cathy narrates what follows: a decade of trying to build ordinary lives while the inheritance, the family that imprisoned them and the brother she loves all remain unresolved. The book runs from their escape in November 1960 to 1975, and it moves through a ballet career, a marriage and a plan for revenge that takes years to carry out.
Three months after Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the other boys have settled on their island and the pirates marooned with them have built a fort. Then a scarred captain arrives in search of what he believes is hidden there, bringing with him an entity of shadow that can take hold of a person's mind. Far away, Peter's friend Molly is on her way home.
In nineteenth-century London five orphaned boys are put aboard the decrepit ship Never Land and sent away. One of them, Peter, finds a locked trunk on board and the girl guarding it, Molly Aster, and learns that the chest holds a dust of extraordinary power that other people are hunting. A pirate called Black Stache is already after a ship carrying a decoy of it.
Ophelia's sister is gone, and the only way to bring her back is to win a wish. That means entering Phantasma, a contest staged inside a mansion that rearranges itself, where nine challenges get worse as the house gets to know you and only one contestant walks out with the prize. Ophelia is not equipped for it. What she has is an offer of help from Blackwell, a stranger who is charming, evasive and extremely good at reading her, and who wants ten years of her life in exchange for guiding her through. The first Phantasma book is a haunted-house tournament where the rules are clear and the man explaining them is not.
The day after his twenty-first birthday, a young man finds a fairy woman hidden in a desk he has inherited, and wakes to find himself inside another world. He spends the rest of the book travelling through it, drawn on by his search for an ideal of beauty he calls the Marble Lady.
Willard Phule is the son of a wealthy arms manufacturer, and he buys his way into the Space Legion and then into command of the unit nobody wants. The unit is a collection of misfits and rejects, and his plan is to make it into an effective force, largely by ignoring the way the Legion is supposed to do things.
Seventy-year-old John Sidney Howard is on a fishing holiday in France when the German army overruns the country. Asked by an English couple at his hotel to take their two children home to safety, he agrees, and every delay on the road adds another child to his charge until he is leading six of them through occupied France towards the sea, with the Nazis close behind.
Taylor Greer is raising the Cherokee child who was given to her years ago, and the two of them are getting by in Tucson. When Turtle appears on television and a lawyer starts asking questions, a tribal authority in Oklahoma disputes the adoption. Taylor takes her daughter to the Cherokee Nation to find out what the law and the family have to say.
Ethan Burke arrives in the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, to find two federal agents who disappeared there a month ago. Within minutes of arriving he is in a violent accident, and he wakes in the local hospital with no identification, no telephone and no explanation of what happened to him, in a town where the welcome is not quite right.
Piranesi lives in the House, an endless building of halls and statues with tides that sweep through the lower levels, and he keeps a careful journal of the rooms, the birds and the bones. He believes he is one of only two living people, along with the man he calls the Other, who asks him for help with research and does not like the questions Piranesi asks. He is content, mostly. Then the Other mentions a new person in the House, the journal notes things that do not match, and Piranesi begins to sort what he can verify from what he has been told.
In 1665 a privateer named Charles Hunter is hired by the governor of Jamaica to take a Spanish galleon and the treasure she carries, at a time when the English colony at Port Royal is holding on against the power of Spain. What he plans is a raid on a Spanish fortress, and he has to assemble the men to carry it out.
Kennedy is the only woman on the medical staff of a professional baseball team and is trying to keep her reputation intact for one more season. A night in Las Vegas leaves her with a ring on her hand and a husband she barely knows, and the two of them have to pretend it was planned.
Thirty-one-year-old Maria Wyeth's story begins while she is recovering from an implied mental breakdown in a psychiatric hospital in the Los Angeles area. Her journey moves between the dizzying and the domestic as her acting career slows and her personal life collapses, and her history is revealed through fragments rather than in sequence. The story is told in short, dislocated scenes rather than in sequence, so the reader assembles Maria's situation from what she is willing to look at.
In a near-future America that has been almost completely mechanised, there is no more need for human labour, and the people whose skills machines have replaced have nothing to do. An engineer named Paul Proteus begins to think about getting out of it. The engineers are not happy either.
Serena MacGregor has been avoiding her family's expectations by working as a blackjack dealer on a cruise ship, and her father decides to do something about it. He arranges for Justin Blade, a gambler with Comanche ancestry, to be on the same ship and waits to see what happens. Neither of them knows that they were brought together on purpose.
John Corey is a New York homicide detective recovering from gunshot wounds at his uncle's house on the North Fork of Long Island. The local police chief asks him to look at the murder of two biologists who worked on Plum Island, a research site suspected of germ warfare work. Corey knew both of the victims.
Robert A. Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, published in 1963 after being serialised the year before, takes the form of a diary kept by Podkayne Fries, a fifteen-year-old girl on Mars. She talks her way onto a luxury liner bound for Earth, travelling with her younger brother and their great-uncle, a senator, and the voyage turns out to be more than a holiday.
Investigations into the accidental deaths of two of the world's most powerful men reveal a single link: both had sons attending Point Blanc Academy, an exclusive school for rebellious rich children run by a sinister man named Dr Grief and sited high on an isolated peak in the French Alps. Alex Rider is sent in as a pupil, with a false identity and a set of disguised gadgets, to establish what is really happening there.
Poirot's Early Cases gathers short detective stories by Agatha Christie that follow Hercule Poirot through the years before he was known beyond the cases he was working on. The stories had all appeared in magazines between 1923 and 1935, and the collection itself was first published in Britain in September 1974, with an American edition following later the same year under a slightly different title.
Sixty years ago an eccentric Hungarian genius worked out how to trigger a shift of the polar ice caps artificially, with eruptions, earthquakes and climate changes to follow, and then his work disappeared. Now the leader of an anti-globalisation group intends to use it on the industrialised nations, and the process cannot be reversed once it has begun.
Pollyanna Whittier is eleven and newly orphaned when she is sent to live with her aunt in the town of Beldingsville. Aunt Polly is wealthy, strict and has no idea what to do with a niece, while Pollyanna arrives with a game her father taught her: finding something to be glad about in whatever happens.
Marcus Attilius Primus comes from Rome to take up the post of aquarius on the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that waters the towns around the Bay of Naples, and finds its springs failing and the man he replaced missing. Working along the line from Pompeii towards Misenum, he is drawn into the affairs of the towns it serves, including a wealthy former slave, the engineers who answer to Rome and the officials with their own arrangements. Nobody yet knows what the mountain above the bay is about to do.
Philippa Ingram is told that she may inherit a woollen mill in Cumbria, and takes the news calmly. What unsettles her is a Frenchman she meets while on holiday in Avignon, a man everyone describes as a heartbreaker, who turns out to have marriage on his mind. He is not the sort of man she imagined marrying, and the question of what he wants from her will not go away.
The Black Company has become the Lady's favoured soldiers, which is not a comfortable place to be. When the Company's historian and physician, Croaker, is asked to work with a powerful new member called Mischievous Rain to break a rebel army, he has excellent reasons to distrust the court of sorcerers paying them. The work takes the Company into country where nothing is quite what it appears and help is never free.
Humanity has spread to other stars and met the Watchkeepers, a species of machines that nobody understands. A colony expedition sets out for a distant solar system that appears to hold something ancient and dangerous, and the voyage has to be made with the knowledge that the travellers will not come back to the world they left.
Henry Chinaski becomes a substitute mail carrier in Los Angeles, quits for a while to live on what he wins at the race track, and comes back as a mail clerk. The novel follows years of that work, and the drinking and the women that go with it. The job is not the only thing in it, and nobody in the book is going anywhere.
A young man leaves his family's hard-working farm in Vermont after killing his girlfriend by accident, and the only communication between him and the family he has left behind is the postcards he sends. He moves across the American West, and the family he left gets on with its life without him. He never tells them where he is, and he never hears back.
Richmond, Virginia, has a killer working through the city, and the chief medical examiner is called out to the latest strangling. The scene has been cleaned of evidence with a substance that only shows up under laser light, and Dr Kay Scarpetta has to work out what that says about the person doing it before the body count grows again and the case is taken out of her hands.
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.
