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 42 of the list. The search box and the filter chips read the whole catalogue, not just this page, and the page links below walk the shelf in order.
Showing 48 of 3473 books
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Elena Gilbert's love, the vampire Stefan Salvatore, has been captured and imprisoned by demonic spirits who are causing havoc in the town of Fell's Church. To find him she entrusts her life to Stefan's brother Damon, a deadly vampire who wants Elena body and soul, and the two of them set out for the slums of the Dark Dimension, where Stefan is being held.
Connor O'Dwyer is a falconer in County Mayo who takes visitors on hawk walks across the countryside, and Meara Quinn, his sister's best friend, guides the same visitors on horseback. They have known each other their whole lives, and Connor has never thought about her any differently until a brush with death changes the arrangement. Meara does not want to lose the friendship, or herself, to something more.
The Black Company's latest employer is the Lady, who once helped her husband the Dominator build an empire of legendary evil and was imprisoned with him in the Barrowlands before a foolish wizard was tricked into setting her free. The company is ordered to march thousands of miles across her empire to the Barrowland. In the city it passes through, a small detachment of the company discovers that the mute girl it has rescued and sheltered is the White Rose, and decides to protect her from the mercenaries who are out to destroy her.
Maximilian Ophuls, once the United States ambassador to India, is murdered in Los Angeles by the man who used to drive his car. The novel goes back from that killing to the village in Kashmir where the killer grew up, to the tightrope walker he once was, and to the American daughter whose life was bound up with both of them.
It is 1889 in Wyoming, where homesteaders have claimed land that a cattleman named Luke Fletcher used to run his herds across. The Starrett family are among the settlers, and a stranger rides into their lives: a quiet man with a past who takes work on their farm, says nothing about where he came from and is plainly more than a hired hand.
Camille Preaker has just come out of a psychiatric hospital and gone back to her job at a small paper, where her first assignment sends her to the town she grew up in. Two girls have been murdered there, and the case puts her back in the house ruled by her mother and next to a thirteen-year-old half-sister she barely knows. Camille has spent her adult life not thinking about her childhood.
Sharpe's Eagle is a historical novel by Bernard Cornwell, published in 1981, and it was the first of the Richard Sharpe books to appear. It is set in Spain in July 1809, during the campaign that ended at Talavera, and it puts its hero and his riflemen under a commander who has no business leading them.
Sharpe's Fury is the eleventh of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, published in 2006 and set in 1811 during Wellington's campaign in the Iberian peninsula. It places Sharpe in the middle of the politics as well as the fighting, with Cadiz the last Spanish city still holding out. Sharpe is caught between the French in front of him and the politics of his own side behind him.
Sharpe's Gold is the second of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels to be published, though ninth in the series' internal order, and it is set in August 1810. Sharpe is sent behind enemy lines after a hoard of Spanish gold, and the story ends with the destruction of the fortress at Almeida. It belongs to the early part of the series, when its hero is still proving himself to the people above him.
Sharpe's Rifles is the sixth of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels in the series' internal order, though the ninth to be published, and it came out in 1988. It follows Sharpe and his riflemen through the French invasion of Galicia in January 1809, during the retreat to Corunna, and it is the book in which he first meets the soldier who becomes his closest companion.
It is 1799 and Richard Sharpe is a private in the 33rd Regiment of Foot, serving in southern India, with a talent for trouble and no prospect of promotion. Sent into the enemy camp in disguise, he finds himself in a siege that will make a hero out of a soldier the army would rather forget.
Sharpe's Trafalgar is the fourth of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, published in 2000, and the first of them to take its hero into the wars against Napoleon. Sharpe is on his way home from India as a passenger, and the voyage takes him to the fleet that fought at Trafalgar. He is aboard as a traveller with no business in the fighting at all, which is part of the joke.
Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Waterloo appeared in 1990 under the title Waterloo, and it was the eleventh novel in the series. It puts its hero back in uniform for the campaign that ended the Napoleonic Wars, with his old friend Patrick Harper at his side, and it follows the days before the battle in close detail.
Juliette Ferrars has been locked in a cell for two hundred and sixty-four days, and she has not touched another person in that time. Her skin kills: the one time it happened, the government body that now runs everything called it murder and shut her away, and nobody has explained what she is. Around her institution the world is failing, with plagues, shortages and clouds the wrong colour, and the Reestablishment has declared that its method is the only way to repair any of it. A boy is put into her cell, and the book follows what he was sent to find out.
An expedition travels into the interior of Africa in search of a lost civilisation, and finds one: a kingdom ruled by a queen who has not aged in centuries and who is not pleased to be found. The explorers are confronted with a power they cannot reason with and a history that includes one of their own family.
Much of Bingtown has been destroyed since the night the Satrap disappeared, and the factions inside it are fighting one another even while they hold off an invasion from Chalced. Ronica Vestrit has concluded that the town must change if it is to survive at all, and that it has to bring the Old Traders, the New Traders, the Three Ships folk and the freed tattooed slaves together into one people.
Six children are thrown together against their will on a small boat that is to make a month-long journey across the Pacific Ocean. They were sent for different reasons by different families, and none of them chose the trip. What begins as a voyage becomes something else when the boat is wrecked and they are left to survive.
In a Yorkshire mill town during the Napoleonic wars, the machinery that keeps the local economy going is being destroyed by men who have no work, and the mill owners are waiting for the army to arrive. Two young women in the neighbourhood are deciding what to do with their lives while the men around them argue about trade and wages.
For years Grace has watched the wolves that live in the woods behind the house, and she has been drawn to one of them in particular: a yellow-eyed wolf who watches her back with an attention of his own. Then a local boy is killed by wolves and the town's hunters go into the woods after the pack.
John Blackthorne, an English navigator, is wrecked on the coast of Japan and wakes in a country closed to most of the world. He has to learn the language and the rules of a society in which the line between life and death is thin, and he becomes a piece in the struggle between two warlords, the Portuguese and Spanish missionary presence, and the Japanese lords who want his knowledge of ships and guns. The novel is set in feudal Japan at the start of the seventeenth century.
Shuggie Bain grows up in public housing in Glasgow in the 1980s, the youngest of three children and devoted to a mother who cannot stop drinking. As the pits and the docks close around them and the household shrinks to the two of them, Shuggie tries to hold his mother together and to work out who he is.
Two United States Marshals travel to an island in Boston Harbor where a hospital for the criminally insane occupies an old fortress, because a patient has disappeared from inside it. The patient is a woman who drowned her children, the island is cut off by weather, and the longer the two men stay the less the staff's account of anything holds together.
Siddhartha sets out on a spiritual journey of self-discovery during the lifetime of the Gautama Buddha, and the novel follows his search rather than his arrival. It is written in a simple, lyrical style, and it is a compact work that reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom rather than a biography of its subject.
Alina and Mal have crossed the sea to get away from Ravka and are trying to live quietly in a country where nobody knows her, because Alina is the Sun Summoner and half the world is looking for her. The Darkling has not finished with either of them. It is the second book of the trilogy, and it moves between the sea and the capital Alina left behind.
Silas Marner is a linen weaver living near the village of Raveloe, and before that he belonged to a small congregation in a town where he was falsely accused of stealing its funds. The lots were drawn against him, the woman he was going to marry married his accuser, and he left. What he does with the rest of his life is what the novel is about.
A young Portuguese Jesuit is smuggled into seventeenth-century Japan, where the government is determined to stamp out Christianity and foreign influence, and finds the Christian communities driven underground. He is a fugitive in a country he does not know, dependent on villagers who risk their lives to shelter him, and he begins to doubt his mission as he waits for an answer that does not come. The novel is told partly through his letters and partly through the record of the persecution around him.
Lady Kathryn Grayson has a privileged future ahead of her until her uncle decides that he wants her fortune, and the simplest way to take it is to have her committed to an asylum. Her escape is to hide in the carriage of a stranger, Lucien Montaine, the Marquess of Litchfield, who is travelling away from the city with no wish for company.
Mercy Thompson, a mechanic and shapeshifter, tries to return a powerful Fae book she borrowed in desperation and finds the bookshop locked and closed. The book contains knowledge the Fae will do a great deal to keep hidden, and at the same time her friend Samuel is struggling with his wolf side, leaving Mercy to cover for him.
Sixteen-year-old Simon Spier is not openly gay and prefers to keep his drama for the school musical. When an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of becoming public, and he finds himself being blackmailed: if he does not act as wingman for the class clown, Martin, his identity will become everyone's business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the boy he has been emailing, would be compromised too.
Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are former Secret Service agents working as private investigators, and their lives have come apart. Maxwell is lying unconscious in a hospital bed after a night of suicidal violence, and King, short of money, is forced to take an assignment from an old girlfriend: a scientist has been murdered just inside the razor wire of a CIA training camp near Williamsburg, Virginia, and nobody wants the case solved quickly.
Eleanor Griffin has three older brothers with strong opinions about which men are suitable for her, and she has decided to enjoy herself before the arranged marriage she expects finally arrives. Her brother, the Duke of Melbourne, asks his closest friend to keep an eye on her, which is how the Marquis of Deverill becomes her chaperone.
Maggie West has wanted a family of her own for as long as she can remember, and her new neighbour, a single father named Kellen Ashby, is not the man she had in mind to provide one. His daughters are exactly the sort of children she used to imagine having, and he has just inherited the inn she manages.
Kate C. Leever is an editor at Roundhouse Publishing, and her first letter to a new author is meant to impress on him how much demand there is for vampire romances. His reply about attending a convention is one word long, but he is an author waiting to be broken out, and Kate is determined that he will meet his fans.
A repressive interstellar state sends a warship to punish one of its colony worlds for an invasion that never happened. What did happen is that the Festival arrived and began paying the colonists for being entertaining, which has broken the colony's economy, its politics and the rules it was kept under. Two people on the flagship have reasons of their own for wanting the mission to fail.
Sebastian Griffin, the Duke of Melbourne, has raised his younger siblings, arranged their matches and kept everyone in line, and he has a reputation for propriety and a life without scandal. Then Josefina Katarina Embry arrives, and she is beautiful and claims to be the princess of a faraway country. Her account of herself is the one thing in London he cannot verify.
Caroline Meeber, known at home as Sister Carrie, is eighteen and unhappy with life in rural Wisconsin, and she takes the train to Chicago to live with her sister and brother-in-law. On the way she meets Charles Drouet, a travelling salesman. She discourages him from calling at her sister's flat, but he is not finished with her, and she is not finished with the city.
Makeda and Abby were born conjoined, daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, and were separated by surgery when they were small. Abby has the family's magic and Makeda does not, and the two sisters, now adults, are growing apart, which is why Makeda decides to move out and try to live as an ordinary person.
Candy is a supermodel, Tammy a television producer, Sabrina a lawyer and Annie an artist, and they are four sisters living very separate lives until their mother is killed in a car accident and Annie loses her sight. All four leave what they were doing to look after one another and their father, and they move into a brownstone together to rebuild.
Kaz Brekker runs the Dregs in Ketterdam, a city where everything is for sale, and he has a reputation for doing the jobs nobody else will at a price nobody else can. A merchant offers him a fortune to break a scientist out of the most secure prison in the world, which is why Kaz takes it. He picks a crew of six that includes a spy, a sharpshooter, a convict with a grudge, a Grisha healer and a runaway, and none of them trusts any of the others. The target is held in the Ice Court, on an island that no thief has ever robbed, and the plan requires them to pass as people they are not for the length of the trip.
Six years ago Jake Sanders watched Natalie, the woman he loved, marry another man, and he promised to leave her alone. When he sees that her husband has died he goes to the funeral. The widow is not Natalie, and she has been married to the dead man for far longer than six years.
This collection holds twenty-two pieces: eighteen short stories, two novellas and two poems. Among them is The Mist, in which a supermarket becomes the last place available to the people trapped inside it when something from outside the world comes through, and the volume is framed by the author's own introduction and closing notes.
Alex Rider is sent to a small island off the coast of Cuba to find out what a Russian general is doing at a decommissioned facility. The assignment is meant to be a rest after his last operation, and it turns into a countdown involving a nuclear weapon and a launch that has to be stopped.
Skeletons on the Zahara is Dean King's account of the loss of an American merchant brig on the coast of North Africa and of what became of the men on board, who were captured by tribesmen and forced into slavery. King builds the story from two journals written by survivors, checking one account against the other, and he travelled the same desert himself to see the ground they crossed nearly two centuries earlier.
Harry Dresden is living on an island in Lake Michigan with a spirit growing inside his head and a headache that keeps getting worse, which is when Queen Mab informs him that he has a job to do. The job is to help Nicodemus Archleone, one of the people Harry would least like to help, break into a vault belonging to Hades. Harry agrees because of what Mab offers in return, and then spends the rest of the book waiting for the betrayal he knows is coming.
A vampire serial killer sends Anita Blake a grisly souvenir from Las Vegas, and she has to warn the local authorities what they are dealing with. The situation turns out to be worse than she thought: ten police officers and an executioner have already been killed, and Anita travels to Nevada with three other federal marshals to work the case.
An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations. It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it is the axis the novel turns on: a philosophising bean can, a mystifying dessert spoon, a young waitress entering the New York art world and a welder who discovers a lost god all revolve around it.
Luther and Nora Krank do the arithmetic on Christmas and do not like the answer, so they decide to skip it. No tree, no rooftop snowman, no Christmas Eve party, and a Caribbean cruise instead. Their neighbours, and the street's annual competition for decorations, have opinions about this, and the Kranks find that opting out is more work than joining in.
Stephanie's uncle Gordon wrote horror fiction, and when he dies and leaves her his estate she discovers that what he wrote was not invented. Pursued by people who want a key he left behind, she is helped by Skulduggery Pleasant, who is a detective, a magician and, technically, dead. The book is the first of the series and brings the two of them together.
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.
