Book library

Stories for the midnight shelf

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.

RomanceFantasySci-FiHorrorMystery & ThrillerHistorical FictionLiterary FictionAdventureRomantasy tagContemporary Romance tag3473 booksEdited by Baby Bat

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Cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

The shelf

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 40 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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Showing 48 of 3473 books

Roadwork

Stephen King · 1981

Barton George Dawes works at a laundry, lives in a house he bought with his wife and son, and is about to lose all of it to a road extension. The city has decided to run a new highway through the neighbourhood, the compulsory purchase paperwork has been served, and the deadline for moving is fixed. Dawes does not move. He has already lost his son to a brain tumour and his marriage to the aftermath, and the machinery closing in on his house gives him something to fight, which he does with increasing violence.

Psychological thrillerCrime thriller

Robert Ludlum's The Cassandra Compact

Robert Ludlum · 2001

Yuri Danko, an officer in the medical division of Russia's security service, is shot dead before he can say more than that what is being planned is insane. Covert-One operative Jon Smith and the CIA agent Randi Russell have his classified papers, and what they find in them is a conspiracy to release a plague. A Serbian terrorist has already been sent out of Russia with vials of bacteria.

EspionageConspiracy thriller

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe · 1719

An Englishman sets out on a series of voyages, is shipwrecked and ends up alone on an island off the coast of South America. He stays there for twenty-eight years, building what he can out of what the wreck gives him and meeting other people only rarely and late in the book.

Classic adventureSurvival fiction

Robots and Empire

Isaac Asimov · 1985

Two centuries after the robot novels began, the Spacer worlds are fading and the crowded population of Earth wants somewhere to go. A robot who has outlived his owner sets out to settle an old account with the man who tried to destroy humanity's home world. The story of how robots disappear from the galaxy is told in the gap between this book and the Empire.

Robot and AIClassic science fiction

Rock Paper Scissors

Alice Feeney · 2021

Adam and Amelia Wright have been married for ten years and the marriage has not been going well for most of them. Amelia wins a weekend away in Scotland and decides it is a chance to repair something. Adam is a screenwriter who cannot recognise faces, including his wife's, and the chapel they are staying in is not the comfortable retreat the prize described.

Psychological thrillerDomestic suspense

Role Model

Rachel Reid · 2021

Troy Barrett has been traded to the worst team in his league in the middle of a scandal and a breakup, and what he wants is to be left alone to play. The team's social media manager, Harris Drover, is not the kind of person who leaves anybody alone, and the club has decided that Troy's reputation needs work.

Sports romanceQueer romance

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Mildred D. Taylor · 1976

In rural Mississippi in 1933, nine-year-old Cassie Logan lives with her three brothers on land the family owns, which is unusual for a Black family of the period, since most around them sharecropped. Cassie has grown up protected and strong and has not yet understood that a white person could force her to be untrue to herself. One turbulent year, with night riders and burnings, shows her why the land matters so much.

Historical fictionComing-of-age

Room

Emma Donoghue · 2010

Jack is five and the room he shares with his mother is the only place he has ever been. It has a bed, a wardrobe, a rug, a skylight and a television, and it has a routine that keeps him occupied and safe. He does not yet know that he and his mother are being kept, and the novel is what happens as he begins to find out.

Domestic suspensePsychological thriller

Room Beneath the Stairs

Jennifer Wilde · 1975

Carolyn Dawson spent her childhood holidays on Greycliff, the Cornish island owned by the rich and powerful Brandon family, and never forgot its heir. Years later she returns as his bride and the mistress of Greycliff Manor, and finds that the rest of the household regards her as an intruder who has married above her place.

Gothic horrorHaunted house

Roots

Alex Haley · 1976

Roots begins with Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka youth captured near his village in the Gambia as a teenager and carried to North America, where he is sold into slavery and renamed. From his daughter Kizzy and her son Chicken George, the book follows seven generations of the same family through plantations, the Civil War and freedom, down to the author's own lifetime.

Family sagaHistorical fictionBiographical fiction

Rose Daughter

Robin McKinley · 1997

A merchant loses his fortune with his ships at sea and takes his three daughters to Rose Cottage, a country house that was left to his youngest, Beauty, and so cannot be seized by his creditors. The garden turns out to be full of roses, and a single rose picked at a strange castle brings the anger of its owner down on the family.

Fairytale retellingYoung adult fantasy

Rose Madder

Stephen King · 1995

Rosie Daniels leaves her husband after fourteen years of an abusive marriage. A beating while she was four months pregnant had caused her to miscarry their only child, and the man she is running from is a police officer who specialises in finding missing people. She escapes to a distant city to build a new life and new relationships, while Norman Daniels uses his professional contacts to track her down.

Psychological horrorModern horror

Roses Are Red

James Patterson · 2000

Bank robbers in Washington are laying out precise demands when they enter a building and then killing the employees and their families when the instructions are not followed exactly. Detective Alex Cross takes the case and becomes convinced that a single criminal who calls himself the Mastermind is behind all of it.

Serial killer thrillerPolice procedural

Roses for Mama

Janette Oke · 1991

Instead of the new life her family expected to forge out west, seventeen-year-old Angela is thrust into the role of caring for her three younger siblings after the death of their parents. With her older brother's help, and her trust in God, she is determined to raise the children as her mother would have wanted.

Historical romanceFamily saga

Rosie Carpe

Marie NDiaye · 2001

Rosie Carpe arrives in Guadeloupe with her five-year-old son, pregnant and looking for her brother Lazare, who has been missing for five years. The man who comes to meet her calls himself Lagrand and may or may not be the brother she remembers, and her parents have turned up on the island as well, behaving strangely.

Translated literary fictionFamily novel

Rough Country

John Sandford · 2009

Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is taking part in a fishing tournament in the north of the state when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport, who wants him to look into a murder at a nearby resort. A woman has been shot while she was out in a kayak on the lake, and the guests at the resort are all women who came there to be left alone.

Police proceduralCrime thriller

Roughing It

Mark Twain · 1872

Roughing It is Mark Twain's account of his years in the American West, published in 1872. It covers the overland journey from Missouri to Nevada, an unsuccessful attempt at prospecting, and the newspaper work in Virginia City and San Francisco that turned him into a national figure, and it is one of the books that made his name as a humorist.

Wilderness adventureComing-of-age

Roughing it in the bush

Susanna Moodie · 1852

Roughing It in the Bush, published in London in 1852, is Susanna Moodie's account of settler life in Canada, where she had emigrated with her family in the 1830s. Written at her editor's suggestion as a guide for British readers who were thinking of making the same move, it mixes memoir with something closer to fiction and is arranged as a series of sketches in chronological order.

Colonial fictionBiographical fiction

Royal Holiday

Jasmine Guillory · 2019

When Vivian Forest gets the chance to go along on her daughter Maddie's work trip to England to style a member of the royal family, she cannot refuse. She is looking forward to the holidays and the British sights, and what she does not expect is to be instantly attracted to a private secretary with a charming accent and an unyielding formality.

Romantic comedyHoliday romance

Ruby the Red Fairy

Daisy Meadows · 2003

Fairyland is kept bright by seven sisters, the Rainbow Fairies, until Jack Frost sends them away and the colour starts to go out of the place. Rachel and Kirsty find Ruby the Red Fairy in the pot at the end of a rainbow and set out to help her find the other six.

Fairytale retellingComing-of-age

Ruins

Orson Scott Card · 2012

Rigg, Umbo and Param get through the wall and out of Ramfold, and keep going, through fold after fold and back into the past as well. What they are trying to piece together is the history of the world they live on, because the future they are trying to avoid is one in which an enemy arrives and destroys it.

Time travelYoung adult science fiction

Ruinsong

Julia Ember · 2020

In a world where magic is sung, Cadence is a powerful mage forced by her queen to torture the disgraced nobility of her country. Her voice is both her prison and her weapon, and the arrival of a childhood friend tied to the underground rebellion leaves her choosing between obedience and turning on the crown.

Dark fantasyYoung adult fantasyQueer romance

Rule of Wolves

Leigh Bardugo · 2021

Fjerda's army is preparing to invade, and Nikolai Lantsov will need all of his ingenuity and charm, and the monster he keeps hidden, to win the fight. Zoya Nazyalensky has lost too much to war already: she watched her mentor die and her worst enemy come back, and she will not bury another friend. In Shu Han a blot of darkness resembling the Shadow Fold is spreading past the Unsea, and the final novel of the King of Scars duology follows the five people whose choices decide what happens.

Young adult fantasyEpic fantasy

Rum Punch

Elmore Leonard · 1992

Jackie Burke is a flight attendant who couriers money for a gunrunner named Ordell Robbie. When federal agents catch her and threaten her with prison and the loss of her job, they want her to act as bait in their case against him. Ordell wants her to stall them long enough to collect the rest of his money.

HardboiledCrime thriller

Rumble Fish

S. E. Hinton · 1975

Rusty-James runs into an old friend, Steve Hays, at the beach, five years after they last saw each other. Steve is at college and Rusty has only recently come out of the reformatory, and when Steve recognises the scar on Rusty's side the two of them are pulled back into the story of the summer when Rusty was fourteen and lost his brother.

Coming-of-ageSocial realism

Runaway Fiancee

Sally Wentworth · 1998

It should have been the most glamorous wedding of the year. Instead Milo's fiancee celebrated her engagement to another man, and it takes him a year to find her. Now he has to convince Paige that he is the one she ought to be marrying. What made her leave a week before the wedding is something he still does not understand, and understanding it is the condition of getting her back.

Contemporary romanceSecond chance romance

Runaway Vampire

Lynsay Sands · 2001

Dante Notte has been run over by a motorhome, which is not how he expected to meet the woman he is supposed to spend the rest of his life with. He has a punctured lung, broken ribs, a brother to rescue and pursuers to keep away, and she is a stranger who has just become involved.

Paranormal romanceVampire romance

Running Wild

Michael Morpurgo · 2009

Will Robert is ten years old, grieving for his father, who was killed in Iraq, and on holiday in Indonesia with his mother. He is riding an elephant called Oona along the beach when the animal refuses to go near the water and then bolts inland with him on her back, which is how he comes to be looking down at the sea when the wave arrives.

Survival fictionWilderness adventure

Running with the Demon

Terry Brooks · 1997

Something malevolent has been hiding in a park in a town in Illinois for years, and a man named John Ross is drawn there by nightmares that warn him a great evil is about to be released. A teenager with powers she does not understand is caught up in it, and the two of them have to work together.

Dark fantasyModern horror

Ruthless Vows

Rebecca Ross · 2023

Iris comes home from the front with injuries and no idea where Roman is. Behind enemy lines, Roman has lost his memory and is writing for the other side, piecing together who he used to be by putting words on paper for a government he does not remember choosing. A letter arrives under his door, from an author who is familiar in a way he cannot place. The second Letters of Enchantment book keeps the two of them on opposite sides of the same war, with only the typewriters between them, each one writing towards somebody who may not be there when the fighting stops.

Historical fantasyFantasy romance

Sabriel

Garth Nix · 1995

Sabriel has been raised outside the Old Kingdom, at a school in Ancelstierre, and knows her father only as the Abhorsen who lays the dead to rest. When he disappears she crosses the wall into a country where magic is loose, taking his bells and his sword, and has to take up the work herself.

Witch and magicYoung adult fantasyDark fantasy

Sacred Games

Vikram Chandra · 2006

Inspector Sartaj Singh, one of the few Sikh officers in the Mumbai police, is invited to pursue the city's most legendary crime boss, Ganesh Gaitonde. Gaitonde describes a long criminal career and drops hints about his collaborators before killing himself, and the novel runs on two tracks: his past and the hunt for what his last words meant.

International crimePolice procedural

Sacred Hunger

Barry Unsworth · 1992

The Liverpool Merchant is a slave ship working the triangular trade in the middle of the eighteenth century, and two cousins are bound up with it: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a wealthy Lancashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who sails on the voyage. The novel's subject is greed, and slavery is the medium it uses to examine it.

Historical fictionSea adventure

Sacred Stone

Clive Cussler · 2004

An ancient artifact with catastrophic radioactive power is unearthed in the remote wastes of Greenland, and the find puts the rest of the world at risk. Two militant factions are prepared to slaughter for it, and Juan Cabrillo and his network of spies, known as the Corporation, have to keep them from getting it and stop the outbreak of a world war.

Sea adventureConspiracy thriller

Sad Cypress

Agatha Christie · 1940

Elinor Carlisle and Roddy Welman are engaged and expecting to inherit from a wealthy aunt when an anonymous letter warns that someone is courting the old woman's favour. Elinor's suspicion falls on Mary Gerrard, the lodgekeeper's daughter, and before the summer is out Elinor is in the dock on a charge of murder. Hercule Poirot is asked to find out what happened at Hunterbury.

Golden age mysteryDetective fiction

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

Eleanor Coerr · 1977

Sadako Sasaki was born in Hiroshima and was in the city when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. By the time she is twelve she is ill with leukaemia, and recalling a Japanese legend that a sick person who folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish, she begins to fold.

Historical fictionBiographical fiction

Safe Harbour

Danielle Steel · 2003

Pip Mackenzie is eleven and has already lost most of the people she had, and her mother Ophélie has retreated into a grief she cannot climb out of. Left to herself on the beach below their house, Pip begins talking to a man walking his dog. Matt Bowles is an artist, divorced, and he has his own reason to notice a lonely child. Her mother does not approve at first.

Contemporary romanceFamily novel

Sage

Norah Hess · 1994

Jim LaTour is not the marrying kind, and with a wild past behind him he plans to spend the rest of his days in peace, running his bar and enjoying the company of the local fancy ladies. He does not realise what he has been missing until a songbird threatens his independence and opens his heart.

Historical romanceWestern

Sahara

Clive Cussler · 1992

In 1996 Dirk Pitt is searching for a treasure on the Nile when he prevents an attempt on the life of a United Nations scientist investigating a disease that is driving thousands of North Africans into madness and death. The suspected cause is a vast pollution that threatens to extinguish life in the world's seas.

Treasure huntAdventure fiction

Salammbô

Gustave Flaubert · 1862

Salammbô is a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1862 and set in Carthage in the years around the Mercenary War. Flaubert worked from the ancient sources, above all Polybius, and the book was a great success in France and, in Eleanor Marx's English translation, in Britain and America too.

Classic fantasyTranslated literary fiction

Salt & Stone

Victoria Scott · 2015

Tella is competing in the Brimstone Bleed to win the Cure that could save her brother's life, and the race has reached its final stage. She must face the dangers of the ocean, the cold of a mountain and a set of rules that have been rewritten to make the surviving competitors distrust each other.

DystopianSurvival fictionYoung adult science fiction

salt slow

Julia Armfield · 2019

These stories take place in schools, in sleepy seaside towns and in cities that have stopped behaving normally, and the bodies of the people in them keep changing shape. Teenagers develop appetites that will not be satisfied, a city loses the ability to sleep, and parts of one body are used to build a better one.

Magical realismLiterary fictionWeird fiction

Salt to the Sea

Ruta Sepetys · 2016

Four young people make their way across the winter of 1945 towards the Baltic coast, hoping to board a ship out of the path of the advancing Soviet army. Their separate journeys converge on the liner Wilhelm Gustloff, packed with refugees, and on a disaster that few histories of the war mention and that the novel sets out to recover.

World War II fictionHistorical fictionComing-of-age

Sandworms of Dune

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson · 2007

The passengers of the no-ship Ithaca have been searching for a new home for nearly two decades, carrying among them revivals of figures from the long history of their species while an old enemy hunts them through the darkness. Behind them, in what was the Old Empire, a commander is trying to hold a fracturing human alliance together for one last stand. The machines that were once feared as servants are now the ones doing the hunting.

Space operaRobot and AI

Sapphire Battersea

Jacqueline Wilson · 2011

Hetty is fourteen and has just been discharged from the Foundling Hospital, and she goes into service as a scullery maid. She has also found out that the kitchen maid at the hospital is her mother, and she is trying to find out who her father was. Her mother is the kitchen maid at the hospital where she grew up.

Victorian fictionComing-of-age

Sarah

Orson Scott Card · 2000

Sarai is a princess of Ur in Mesopotamia, and a serious, dutiful one compared with her older sister Qira, who is to marry a desert prince named Lot. Sarai has been promised to the temple as a priestess, until Lot arrives with his uncle Abram, who tells her that he will come back one day and marry her himself.

Biographical fictionAncient world fictionHistorical fiction

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Patricia MacLachlan · 1985

Anna and her younger brother Caleb live on a prairie farm with their father, who advertises in a newspaper for a wife after their mother dies. Sarah Wheaton writes back from Maine and comes to stay for a month, bringing her cat, her seashell collection and her longing for the sea, while the children watch for any sign that she means to stay.

Frontier fictionHistorical fiction

Sarah's Child

Linda Howard · 1985

A road accident took Rome Matthews's wife and their two sons, and it took Sarah Harper's best friend as well. For two years Sarah has stayed away from Rome, guarding a secret she kept from both of them: she was in love with her best friend's husband. Now Rome needs her, and Sarah agrees to marry him knowing that another woman will always hold his heart. Then something unexpected reopens the hope she had buried, that a marriage of convenience might become a marriage of love.

Contemporary romanceFriends to lovers

About the book library

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.

From our books editor

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Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.

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Browse by genre

Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.

Primary genre

Romance

The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.

676 books Primary genre

Fantasy

Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.

685 books Primary genre

Sci-Fi

Generation ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.

536 books Primary genre

Horror

Haunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.

381 books Primary genre

Mystery & Thriller

Detectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.

599 books Primary genre

Historical Fiction

Cathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.

580 books Primary genre

Literary Fiction

Novels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.

575 books Primary genre

Adventure

Shipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.

324 books

One 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.

Browse by tag

Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.

Tag

Romantasy

Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.

70 books Tag

Contemporary Romance

Modern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.

155 books

Romantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.