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 38 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.
The Potter family owns a newspaper empire, and Mrs Potter writes the romantic novelettes that fill the shop-girls' magazines the firm prints. She has lost the ability to tell her own inventions from fact, and when her son-in-law is murdered she goes to a medium for the truth, with consequences for everybody in the family business.
Philip Jettan is a provincial squire in eighteenth-century England, and his childhood friend Cleone Charteris has come home from finishing school with a taste for polished, aristocratic men. Philip is none of those things. Encouraged by his father, he leaves for Paris to acquire the manners Cleone says she wants, and returns home a different man.
In Ilya the Elites hold the powers the Plague left behind, and the Ordinary are not welcome. Being born without an ability has been a crime since the king ordered the Ordinary out, which makes Paedyn Gray a criminal by accident and a thief by necessity. She survives by passing as a Psychic, reading people carefully enough that nobody asks the obvious question. Then she saves a prince without knowing who he is, and he pulls her into the Purging Trials, a competition designed to show off the powers she does not have. The first Powerless novel is a contest she cannot survive honestly, next to a prince she cannot afford to want.
Rusty Sabich is the chief deputy prosecutor in a Midwestern city, and three weeks before his boss faces re-election a colleague from his own office is found murdered. He is given the investigation. Then his boss loses the election, and Rusty finds himself charged with the murder he was appointed to solve.
Tally Youngblood has been through the operation that turns sixteen-year-olds into Pretties, and she now spends her days at parties with a brain that has been arranged to keep her happy. Underneath that she keeps catching fragments of her old life in the Smoke, and somebody from it has come looking for her.
Five girls are close until the summer when their leader, Alison, disappears, and then the group comes apart. Three years later, Spencer, Hanna, Aria and Emily each receive a message signed with Alison's nickname, and each of them is keeping something that the messages refer to. The stranger communicating with them knows about the family secrets, the stolen boyfriends and the night nobody discusses, and will trade silence for obedience. The first book in the series establishes the four girls and the question of who is sending the messages.
Jack Forman loses his job in software and takes the only work he can get, which is judging whether a company's new technology is real by trying to defeat it. The technology is a swarm of microscopic machines built to work together like a living thing, and the company's founders are not telling him how much of it has escaped. Then people start disappearing, and the swarm is learning.
Mrs Bennet has five daughters and no son, which in the England of the novel means that the family estate is entailed away from the women and that all five will need to marry well or live on very little. When a wealthy young man rents a house nearby, the neighbourhood's mothers go to work on him. His friend, Mr Darcy, is richer still and worse at being liked. Elizabeth Bennet, the second daughter, is quick, stubborn and prepared to think badly of him, and he is prepared to think badly of everybody.
In an effort to bring peace to a troubled Narnia, Prince Caspian blows his magic horn to summon Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund to help him with the task. The four children return to a country that has changed almost beyond recognition since their last visit, and the book is the only one in the series in which human beings dominate Narnia and the talking animals and mythical creatures have been oppressed.
The vampire world is in crisis. Vampires have been proliferating out of control, and burnings have begun around the world, massacres on the scale of those carried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned. Old vampires, roused from their sleep in the earth, are doing the bidding of a Voice that commands them to burn the mavericks of their own kind in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto and San Francisco.
Miri has spent her whole life on Mount Eskel, in the quarry village where her family cuts the stone that the lowlanders buy from them. When the priests announce that the prince will marry a girl from the mountain, the village girls are sent to an academy the lowlanders have set up to make them fit to be royal, and the test turns out not to be only about manners.
Princess Rose and her eleven sisters are bound by a curse that carries them out of the palace every third night to dance in the kingdom of the King Under Stone, and forbids them to speak of it. Twelve princes have tried to learn the secret, and none has survived. Galen, a soldier's son home from the war, takes work in the king's gardens and is warned by an old woman that he will need the cloak and yarn she gives him.
Anya Hamilton takes Ravel Duralde prisoner to prevent a duel she is certain will kill her sister's fiance. In a small room on her Louisiana plantation the situation reverses and she becomes the one who cannot stay away from him, whatever her own mind tells her about the arrangement. The rest of the plot belongs to the men who wanted the duel.
Rowena Belleme has been ordered to produce an heir, and if she does not the stepbrother who controls her family's lands will destroy what is left of her inheritance. Her answer is to take a prisoner: Warrick deChaville, a knight, is seized and held so that he can father the child that will save her, and he is not the sort of man to accept such an arrangement for long.
Hannah Shapiro is an American student whose life was saved eight years ago in Los Angeles by the head of a detective agency called Private. She has left her country but her past has followed her to London, and the agency's London office takes her case. At the same time, young women are being taken off the streets of central London and found days later, mutilated in ways the police cannot explain.
Thomas Peaceful is a soldier in France, looking back over his life from a village childhood in Devon to the farm he worked on and the girl he grew up with. His brother Charlie is somewhere nearby, and Tommo has a single night in which to remember how the two of them came to be where they are now.
Maya Killgore is twenty-three and has not worked out what she wants from her life when she meets Conor Harkness, a man twelve years older with a way of doing things that gets on her nerves. The novel follows the two of them through a summer in Italy and the problem of wanting something that looks like a mistake.
Capac Raimi arrives in the City with no memory of anything before he stepped off the train. He is quick and confident and intends to make his fortune there, and the City rewards that kind of ambition, being a place of assassins, blind priests and a kingpin who runs his business with puppets, all of it under the eye of a man known as the Cardinal.
Ryland Grace wakes on a spacecraft with two dead crewmates, a memory that will not come back and no idea why he is there. What he does have is a classroom's worth of knowledge about biology and a ship full of instruments that will not tell him anything until he works out what he was sent to do. Bit by bit he reconstructs the mission: a dimming sun, a project that gambled humanity's future on one flight, and a task he has to complete alone if the planet is going to have a future at all. As his memories return, Grace must connect what he knows about the threat to the work he can carry out aboard the ship.
At a quarter past two in the morning the telephone rings beside Myron Bolitar's bed, and the frightened teenager at the other end is Aimee Biel, calling the one adult who promised to help her if she ever got into trouble. He gets up and drives into Manhattan to collect her from a cold street corner, and on the way home she asks him for one more thing.
Mary is the daughter of the King of Scotland and a prisoner of the Norman invaders, and she refuses to tell them who she is, even when it would make her captivity easier. Stephen de Warenne is the soldier who holds her, and the war between the two of them turns into something neither of them planned.
Harry Arno is a Miami bookmaker who has been skimming from his boss for years and wants to retire to Italy with his girlfriend. The Justice Department decides to leak word of the skimming in the hope that Harry will ask for witness protection, and Harry, who knows what is coming, leaves the country instead. A U.S. Marshal in a cowboy hat is sent after him.
Holly and Gerry are a married couple in Dublin who fight about ordinary things and are entirely at ease together, and then Gerry dies of a brain tumour. Holly stops leaving the house. Her mother telephones to say that a package has arrived addressed to her, and inside it is a letter from her husband, with nine more to come.
Norman Bates runs a small motel on a back road, and his mother lives with him in the house on the hill behind it. A woman who has taken money from her employer and left town stops for the night, and the motel's register gets its first guest in a long time. What follows is the novel that introduced one of the most recognisable figures in American horror, and it does its work in fewer than two hundred pages, with a plot that turns on what the reader has been told about a family rather than on what they have seen.
Ptolemy's Gate is the third and last of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus novels, published in 2005. It returns to the alternate London where magicians govern by summoning spirits, and it also goes back through a series of flashbacks to the Egyptian magician Ptolemy and the djinni he called up in 126 BC.
Nick Belane is a private detective in Los Angeles, and the cases that come to him include the search for a writer who is supposed to be dead and a woman convinced that she is being followed by somebody who claims to come from another planet. Belane works his way through the bars and the racetrack and the people who owe him money, in a story that sends up the private-eye genre it is written in. It was Bukowski's last completed novel.
Misha and Ryen were paired as pen pals in the fifth grade, and they have written to each other ever since, on paper, with three rules that kept the letters honest: no social media, no phone numbers, no photographs. Seven years on, they are the closest thing each of them has to a person who knows the truth, and neither knows the other's face. Then Misha transfers to Ryen's high school and decides not to say who he is, because the girl who writes to him is nothing like the girl who runs the corridors with the popular crowd. Keeping that secret becomes the whole plot.
Kambili Achike is fifteen and lives in a large house in Nigeria, in a family whose standing rests on her father's success as a businessman and on his reputation for generosity and Catholic devotion. At home he rules his wife and children with violence, and it takes a visit to her aunt's house for Kambili to see that another kind of life exists.
Claireece Precious Jones is an illiterate sixteen-year-old in Harlem who has so far been invisible: to the father who rapes her, to the mother who beats her, and to the authorities who treat her as one more casualty. She is pregnant with a second child by her father when her school discovers the pregnancy and she is sent to an alternative school, where she meets a teacher who takes her seriously.
Teppic is the crown prince of Djelibeybi, a small desert kingdom on the Discworld, and he has been educated at the assassins' guild in Ankh-Morpork. Called home when his father dies, he finds a country run by a priest who has managed it for seven thousand years and a pyramid-building habit that is about to cause serious trouble.
In the Judean desert, about two thousand years ago, five travellers are strung out along the road that a caravan took earlier that morning: three men, a woman, and someone too far behind for anyone to guess at, walking barefoot with no staff, no water and no food. They are all going into the wilderness for their own reasons, and the heat is the least of what they will find there.
Verity grows up on an isolated farm in a world that plagues of engineered organisms have emptied out, after an earlier age of utopian nanotech cities. Her life changes when Blaze, the only other young person in the community and her closest friend, is shot; his body is wrapped in a nanotech cocoon and she sets out for the Enlivened City of Cincinnati, the legendary place where he might be brought back from the edge of death.
Celaena Sardothien has been separated from everyone she loves and returns to the empire to take her revenge, recover her kingdom and confront the shadows she has been avoiding. The novel follows her in the capital while her friends work elsewhere, and the pieces of the old court begin to come back together.
Elsie Kettle lives with her grandmother and is looking forward to going to London for the coronation of Elizabeth II, and then the two of them are taken into hospital with tuberculosis. What she finds on the ward is a set of other children and a hospital cat called Queenie. The ward is full of children in the same position.
Saeris Fane has two secrets: powers she does not advertise, and a sideline stealing from the Undying Queen's reservoirs. In the middle of a job she meets Death and reopens a gateway between realms, which lands her in a country of ice and snow where the fae turn out to be real. The first human to set foot there in a thousand years, she accidentally binds herself to Kingfisher, a warrior with his own plans for the alchemy she carries. He needs her magic to protect his people and is not especially concerned about what it costs her. The first Fae and Alchemy novel is a mortal thief, an immortal soldier and a bargain neither of them can walk away from.
Harry Angstrom is twenty-six, a former high school basketball star who now sells a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeeler, and he is married to Janice, who is pregnant. They live in a small town near Brewer, Pennsylvania, with a two-year-old son, and one evening Harry gets into his car and drives away from all of it.
Charlie Decker is a high school senior in a small Maine town who has been suspended once already and is called in to account for it. The meeting ends with him expelled and with a decision he makes in the corridor afterwards. By mid-morning he is back in his classroom with a pistol and a room full of students who cannot leave, while the police and the press gather outside.
Maggie Turner takes her child to her godmother's ranch near Abilene, hoping to get away from her ex-husband's threats for a while. The plan would have worked if Gabe Coleman were not there: ten years on, he is as blunt, as rude and as unsettling as he was when she knew him before. She had thought her marriage cured her of wanting anybody, and Gabe's presence tests that.
John Clark, the ex-Navy SEAL known to readers of Tom Clancy's novels as the dark side of Jack Ryan, is a man who handles the secret operational work Ryan cannot be associated with. He has hunted warlords in Japan, drug lords in Colombia and nuclear terrorists in the United States, and he has ghosts of his own to settle.
Robert Gu was a celebrated poet with a mean temper, and then Alzheimer's took twenty years from him. He wakes in San Diego in 2025 with his mind restored and his body looking decades younger, in a world where almost every object is networked and much of what people see is added by their clothes and contact lenses. He has to learn to live there, and then somebody recruits him.
A Pentagon research programme needs an element so rare that the only known supply went to the bottom of the Atlantic with the Titanic. When satellite data and a captured agent's clues point to the wreck, Dirk Pitt is drawn into a plan to reach the liner where she lies and bring her, and her cargo, back to the surface.
The book opens on board the enormous alien vessel that is carrying a group of humans out of the solar system, with one of them, Nicole Wakefield, escaping from the imprisonment she was left in at the end of the previous volume. The travellers have already met two other species, and the purpose of their journey has not been explained to them.
Gillian lost her sister as a child and watched her father killed by a baron who wanted a jewelled box belonging to King John. Years later, while she is searching the border country for her sister, she is taken by a Scottish laird who has his own reasons for holding on to her and for keeping her alive.
Jacky Faber is on her way home to marry the man she has loved for years when British Naval Intelligence takes her off the ship and hands her another assignment. She is to lead an expedition after a Spanish treasure ship that went down with millions in gold, and she is promised a share of it and a pardon for her past.
Raven's husband is a two-bit gambler, and when he orders her to entertain a handsome cowboy at dinner she does not dare refuse, even when she learns that he has promised the stranger a night in her bed for a thousand dollars. What follows changes what she is able to imagine for herself.
Mary Jo Summerhill has always been in love with Evan, and three years ago the difference between his blue-blooded family and her blue-collar background sent her out of his life. It broke his heart as thoroughly as it broke hers, and she has not stopped thinking about him. Now she needs his help, and what she wants beyond that is another chance.
Wade Watts lives in a stacked trailer in Oklahoma City and spends nearly all of his time in the OASIS, the virtual world that most people use for school, work and everything else. Its creator died leaving his fortune and control of the OASIS to whoever finds an easter egg hidden behind three challenges, and the clues are all about the eighties culture he grew up on. Wade is good at that, and he is one of thousands hunting it, including a corporation that has moved in with an army of employees and a legal department. The hunt is public and the scoreboard is visible to everyone, and the first person to find the egg wins the whole thing.
Days after the contest that made him the owner of the OASIS, Wade Watts finds a second challenge hidden in the archives of its founder. What is waiting there points towards technology that could change what the virtual world is for, and towards a rival who wants the same thing and has more money than he does.
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.
