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.
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Discworld's Death has developed a personality, which the Auditors of Reality regard as a defect in the machinery, so they arrange for him to retire and hand him a timer with a fixed amount of sand in it. What nobody has allowed for is the effect on the world of taking away the person whose job it is to be there when it is somebody's time.
A young woman marries a widower after a courtship of a few weeks and goes to live at his house on the Cornish coast, where nothing has been changed since his first wife died. The housekeeper keeps the dead woman's rooms exactly as she left them and makes sure the new wife knows she is not her equal. The story is told by the second wife looking back at what happened there.
Paedyn survived the Purging Trials, killed the king and set the country alight. Now she is running, and the person chasing her is Kai Azer, the young king's new Enforcer and the one she would rather not be running from. His orders are straightforward: find her, bring her back, do what the crown requires. The trail takes them across the Scorches and into Dor, a city with no Elites left and no reason to respect either of them. The second Powerless novel keeps the hunter and the hunted moving in the same direction and lets the distance between duty and what they want shrink to nothing.
Centuries after the last people left Earth, the ships of the Exodus Fleet are still flying, kept alive by the descendants of the crews who built them. Humanity has been accepted into the wider galactic community, and many of the fleet's young people are leaving for alien cities, which leaves the people who stay wondering what their way of life is still for.
New York City detective Barry Sutton investigates a phenomenon the media call False Memory Syndrome, an affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. The neuroscientist Helena Smith has dedicated her career to a technology that would let people preserve their most precious memories. When the two of them confront what is causing it, they find a force that attacks the past itself.
Will Graham was an FBI profiler until one of the cases went badly and put him in hospital, and he has been living quietly since. The Bureau asks him to come back for a killer who has murdered two families, and Graham's method is the thing that makes him valuable and also the thing that broke him: he works out where a murderer lives by thinking the way the murderer thinks. To catch this one he needs help from a man he already caught, a psychiatrist and a cannibal who knows exactly what Graham is doing and enjoys it.
The first novel of the Mars trilogy follows the beginnings of the colonisation of Mars, from the arrival of the group known as the First Hundred to the first Martian revolution. The book covers the early decades of settlement and the political consequences of the settlers' decisions about how the planet should be changed.
Twenty-five years after China established a permanent colony on the Moon, an American technician called Fred Fredericks arrives to install a communications system for a Chinese research foundation. Hours after landing he witnesses a killing and cannot remember what he saw. A travel reporter and a dissident leader on her way to giving birth become part of the same escape.
Robert A. Heinlein's Red Planet, published in 1949, is about two boys at a boarding school on Mars and the Martian creature one of them keeps as a pet. It is the first of his books to show the wise and ancient Martians that appear in his later work, and it also has a publishing history of its own, because the first edition was altered against his wishes and was later restored.
Alex Lomax is the only private investigator working the mean streets of New Klondike, the Martian frontier town that grew up after two prospectors found fossils on the Red Planet. On Earth almost anything can be synthesised, so the remains of alien life are the most valuable collectibles there are, and shiploads of treasure hunters came to Mars in the Great Martian Fossil Rush. Lomax works a lawless town where everything is cheap and life is cheaper.
Mare Barrow's world is divided by blood, into those with red blood and those with silver. Mare's family are Reds, conscripted into service for the Silver elite, whose supernatural abilities make them close to gods. When her best friend is conscripted into the army she gambles everything to win his freedom, and a twist of fate takes her to the royal palace, where she discovers she has a power of her own.
A KGB communications officer learns that the chairman of the Committee for State Security has decided to have the Pope killed, and the knowledge makes him a target himself. The CIA analyst Jack Ryan is drawn into the defection that follows, and to the officer's family, in a book set early in his career and built around the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981.
Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the colour-coded society of the future, and like his fellow Reds he works all day believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars habitable for future generations. Then he learns that humanity reached the surface generations ago, and that he and the other Reds are slaves to a decadent ruling class.
A raid on a Soviet oil refinery leaves the country facing a collapse it cannot hide, and the Politburo decides that the quickest way to recover is to take the oil of the Persian Gulf. NATO and the Warsaw Pact are drawn into a conventional war fought across Europe and the Atlantic, with neither side willing to be the first to reach for nuclear weapons.
Alex Claremont-Diaz is the son of the American president, Henry is a British prince, and the two of them have disliked each other for years. When a confrontation at a royal wedding becomes an international embarrassment, their handlers decide the remedy is to be seen together often and behaving impeccably. The public arrangement turns into a private one, conducted across an ocean and between two families with strong opinions about appearances. Alex is also working on his mother's re-election campaign, which gives both of them something else to lose.
In the gold country of California in 1850, Angel has been sold into prostitution as a child and expects nothing from men but betrayal. Michael Hosea, a farmer who believes he has been directed to marry her, does so and sets about loving her without conditions, and the novel follows her resistance and the flight that answers it.
Skade is sent to inspect a Conjoiner ship that has come home after decades away and finds its founder, Galiana, aboard and no longer alone inside her own head. The agents that took the ship also killed its crew, and they are still with her. Ten years later, Nevil Clavain is trying to find out what became of her, and he is not the only one.
Ensign Andrew Dahl is assigned to the Universal Union capital ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since 2456, a prestigious posting with the chance to serve on away missions alongside the ship's famous senior officers. Then he notices three things about those missions, and then he finds out something that changes what the crew understands the ship to be.
Redwall Abbey is a peaceful place of mice and other woodland creatures until the rat Cluny the Scourge arrives with an army. Matthias is a young mouse who wants to be a warrior like the abbey's legends, and the siege forces him to search the abbey's records for a sword and a founder he can follow.
Triton leaves his father's house as a boy to work for Mr. Salgado, a marine biologist whose interests run to swamps, sea currents and a reef that is slowly disappearing off the Sri Lankan coast. Triton's answer to his master's obsessions is to cook: he learns to make curries and delicacies that will hold a distracted man at the table, and builds a life out of a kitchen. Neither of them pays much attention to the political violence gathering around them, and that is the novel's quiet danger.
David Rice can teleport, short distances and long ones, and he has been careful about who knows it. He takes occasional work for the National Security Agency, only the jobs he can live with. Then his handler is shot in front of him, David is drugged and taken, and he wakes up in a windowless room chained to a wall with people who intend to make him work for them.
Three children, three journeys. Josef is a Jewish boy leaving Nazi Germany by ship in 1939, Isabel is a Cuban girl sailing for Florida on a raft in 1994, and Mahmoud is a Syrian boy walking towards Europe in 2015. The stories are separated by decades and continents, and the book links them through the families and the objects they carry.
At Craiglockhart hospital in Scotland, officers who have broken down in the trenches are sent to be treated and returned to the front. Among the patients are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the doctor who has to decide what recovery is supposed to mean in a war like this one.
Val Darrant was four years old on the snowy night his mother abandoned him, and instead of meeting a lonely death he met Will Reilly, a gentleman, a gambler and a worldly, self-taught scholar. For ten years each of them was all the family the other had. Those years take them from the boomtowns of the American West to the cities of Europe.
Zarah's reason for travelling to the little Norwegian village of Dalvik is entirely innocent: she wants to find out who her parents were. What she gets is an icy reception. Stein, the stepson of her late aunt, is convinced that only the scent of money has brought her to his door, and the inheritance he refers to is one Zarah had not even known about before she arrived. She tells herself that one man's opinion should not matter, and finds that it does.
Shari Cooper wakes up dead. The last thing she remembers is falling from a balcony at a party her friends were giving, and her death has been recorded as a suicide, though Shari knows she did not jump. From where she is now she sets out to find out which of the people closest to her was responsible.
In the middle of the 1840s a thirteen-year-old English boy named Gemmy Fairley is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by a group of Aboriginal people. Sixteen years later, when white settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans and is given shelter by the McIvors, but fear and mistrust are already at work in the settlement.
For forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia's home, the place where she married, raised her surviving child, kept a garden and grew old. Then the company that owns the colony decides to abandon it and ship the residents away in cryogenic sleep, and Ofelia, who doubts she would survive the freezing and does not want to leave the graves of her family, stays behind. She hides in the woods until the others are gone, and lives alone in the village until the planet's own inhabitants make contact.
In 2130 an object crosses the solar system on a course that is clearly not natural. It is a cylinder fifty kilometres long, spinning enough to hold a gravity rim inside, and the ship sent to meet it has weeks to look before it falls past the sun. Commander Norton and his crew dock, cut in, and find a world with its own weather, stairways, a sea and a sealed city at the far end. Nothing aboard answers them, the ship is not slowing down, and its course will take it past the sun and out again. The crew's job is to measure and record everything they can before they have to leave.
Nova was raised by the Anarchists after her parents were murdered, and now she is expected to work her way inside the Renegades, the syndicate of people with extraordinary abilities who have kept order in the city since the civil conflict that first brought them to power. The Renegades believe they are protecting everyone from people like her, and Nova has no intention of failing the family that took her in.
Juliette Ferrars thought the fighting was over. She has taken control of Sector 45, been named the new Supreme Commander of North America, and has Warner at her side, which is more than she had ever expected to have. Then a death in her circle forces her to deal with what she has become as well as what surrounds her.
Three women come to a summerhouse in Maine where Madame Zoya grants her visitors their innermost wishes. Amy hides a loss behind a perfect marriage, Faith is a widow still grieving a man from long ago, and Zoe is an artist shunned by her town after a night she cannot remember. Zoya and her sister intend to send them back to eighteenth-century England, to alter Amy's ancestry.
Walter Pettibone arrives home to a surprise party and a house full of friends, and a woman with red hair and green eyes hands him a glass of champagne. One sip and he is dead. Nobody at the party knows who she is, but Lieutenant Eve Dallas does: Julie Dockport, whose imprisonment was Dallas's doing nearly ten years earlier.
Dan Sylveste is an archaeologist on the planet Resurgam, digging up the remains of the Amarantin, a species whose world was destroyed when their own sun turned on them nearly a million years ago. Elsewhere in the same system, a vast ship called the Nostalgia for Infinity is looking for him, because its crew believe he is the only person who can help their captain.
Shuos Jedao wakes up with nothing as he remembers it: he is a teenager and a cadet, he is in the body of an old man, and he is in command of an elite military force, carrying the orders of a hexarch he would not have chosen to serve. He is also the most feared figure in the galaxy.
Adrana and Arafura Ness are sisters with a rare talent for bone reading, the art by which ships in this far-future system speak to one another. The skill gets them taken on as apprentices aboard Monetta's Mourn, a vessel whose captain, Pol Rackamore, makes his living cracking open the hidden, booby-trapped worlds that hold the relics of older civilisations. While the crew is hunting one of those baubles, the notorious pirate Bosa Sennen attacks them and separates the sisters.
In a small Maine town, a Methodist minister arrives with his wife and son and makes himself loved, and a boy named Jamie Morton watches him use electricity to do something that should not have been possible. Years later, the two meet again, and the older man's interest in the current has become an obsession.
Frank and April Wheeler live in a new house in suburban Connecticut with their two children, and both of them are certain that they were meant for something better. Frank commutes to a job in the city that bores him, April has given up acting, and the neighbours are watching. Their plan to leave for Europe is the thing that keeps them going.
The Jordache family lives in a small American town, and the novel follows three of the children from the end of the Second World War into the 1960s. Each of them pursues success on his own terms and pays for it differently, and the book is about what the country they grew up in promised them and what it took.
Lauren Carlyle is a schoolteacher who meets a tall stranger across a crowded ballroom and is swept into a dance, and then into an evening neither of them intends to repeat. Afterwards they go their separate ways, until she finds out that the man she danced with is going to be living under the same roof.
Echo Sackett has never been far from her Tennessee home until the day she sets out for Philadelphia to collect an inheritance left to her family. She is sixteen, she can handle herself as well as any of the Sackett men, and the city lawyer who means to take the money from her has no idea what he has taken on.
Ryan Shay has just been made captain of a professional basketball team, and the man who appointed him has already told him he is an unapproachable loner with no life outside the game. When his sister's best friend moves into his apartment, pretending to be a couple looks like an answer to that.
Kazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter, looks into the deaths of his niece and three other teenagers, four young people who died together in a manner nobody can explain. Following their last movements takes him to a resort, where he finds an unmarked videotape whose warning tells him he has a week left to live. The part of the tape that is supposed to explain how to survive has been taped over.
In 1915, after The Birth of a Nation casts its spell over the country, the Ku Klux Klan grows in number and something else comes with it: the Klansmen are not entirely human. Maryse Boudreaux hunts them with a sword, and she and her companions follow the trail back to the source of the power.
The novel is part of Larry Niven's Known Space setting, and its backdrop is the Ringworld, a giant artifact six hundred million miles in circumference built around a sun. The story follows an expedition to the structure, and the book is the original award-winning title in a sequence of four novels. The remaining volumes followed in 1980, 1996 and 2004.
Ragged Island, six miles off the coast of Maine, has a pit in it that has killed everyone who has ever gone down, and the eighteenth-century pirate Red Ned Ockham is supposed to have buried close to two billion dollars of treasure at the bottom of it. A team arrives with modern equipment to try the pit again, and one of them has been on the island before.
Tigerclaw has been driven out of ThunderClan, but Fireheart cannot shake the sense that he is still out there in the forest waiting for a chance to strike. As the new deputy he has to hold the Clan together through a hot summer, with the leader still shattered and an apprentice carrying a secret.
There is a road that runs through time, with an exit at every year and at every history that might have been, and only a small number of people can find it. Red Dorakeen has been travelling it for a long time, supplying weapons to the Athenians at Marathon and trying to restore a version of the past he half remembers, because somewhere off the road is a place he can no longer reach. He is also being hunted by a series of assassins, each of them with reasons of their own.
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.
