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 43 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
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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Sarah came from Maine to the prairie to marry Papa, and she has never stopped missing what she knew first. In a summer of drought, fires and thirsty coyotes she takes Anna and Caleb back east where they will be safe, leaving Papa behind with the farm he will not abandon. Anna wonders whether the family will ever be together again.
Spensa has wanted to be a pilot since she was a child, and on the ruined world where what is left of humanity has taken shelter, pilots are the only heroes there are. The trouble is her father, who flew before her and who broke formation in the battle that made the survivors what they are, and nobody intends to let his daughter forget it.
Down an alley beside a pub, through a small iron door in a brick wall, there is a house that is not always there. Those who find it see what they most want to see, including people and places that cannot be real, and the brother and sister who live in it have been waiting a long time for guests.
After her father dies unexpectedly, eighteen-year-old Layken has to hold her family together for her mother and younger brother, and she looks capable on the outside while losing hope on the inside. The family moves across the country, she meets a twenty-one-year-old neighbour with a passion for poetry slams, and what begins between them is complicated by a discovery.
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. An American soldier in the Second World War, he is captured during the Battle of the Bulge and taken to Dresden, where he survives the firebombing in a meat locker under a slaughterhouse. After the war he becomes an optometrist in Ilium, New York, and is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, aliens who see every moment of a life as existing at once and who teach him to think about death the way their books do. The novel moves between his life, the war and the planet Tralfamadore without warning and without apology.
Hal and the Herons have returned home to Skandia after defeating the pirate captain Zavac and recovering the Andomal, and with their honour restored they take on a new mission: tracking down an old rival, Tursgud, who has grown from a bully into a pirate and a slave trader. When Tursgud seizes villagers from Araluen to sell, the crew sails after him.
Grubbs Grady goes with his uncle to the set of a horror film being made in the middle of nowhere, which is not a holiday anybody involved would have chosen. Grubbs has fought the demon master Lord Loss once already, so he is alert to the possibility that the production is a way of summoning him again.
Sleep Has His House combines autobiography with surrealist experiment, setting an account of a life against sections of subconscious wandering. It was first published in New York in 1947 as The House of Sleep, and it is a dark coming-of-age narrative rather than a conventional memoir. It mixes a semi-autobiographical account of a life with sections of subconscious wandering.
In Connecticut in 1666 an ancient spirit wakes in the woods, and the settlers who live near it have a name for him and a use for it. To Abitha, a young widow who is being squeezed out of the land her husband left her, he is the one thing in the colony that is not pretending to be respectable.
Wulfric Bedwyn, the Duke of Bewcastle, is the eldest of the six Bedwyn brothers and sisters, and he is cool, arrogant and mysterious, the head of a family of passion and privilege. All of London is waiting for his arrival at the most glittering social event of the season, and the only woman in the room who is not trying to capture his attention is the one who interests him. Then he invites Christine Derrick to become his mistress.
Aidan Bedwyn keeps his distance from marriage, its complications and its obligations, and he is the second of six remarkable brothers and sisters. What he is not prepared for is a promise made to a dying soldier, which obliges him to marry the man's sister and gives both of them an arrangement they did not ask for.
Lady Freyja Bedwyn has been raised with four unruly brothers and has no patience for the conventions that are supposed to govern a woman of her rank. In Bath a stranger bursts into her room and asks her to hide him, and the stranger turns out to be the Marquess of Hallmere, whose reputation is as bad as hers.
Lord Alleyne Bedwyn is a diplomat who is thrown from his horse during a war and left for dead, and he wakes up in a bedroom of a house he does not recognise with no memory of who he is. The women who took him in have their own troubles, and the man without a past turns out to be useful to them.
Lady Morgan Bedwyn is young, independent and not looking for a husband. Gervase Ashford, Earl of Rosthorn, has other ideas: he wants her as an instrument of revenge against her family, and marriage is not part of the plan. One scandalous night leaves them both with reputations to salvage and an attraction that neither of them wanted or expected.
Slough House is the office where MI5 keeps the officers who have disgraced themselves: a lost file, a blown surveillance, a reputation for drink. River Cartwright, bitterest of them all, spends his days transcribing phone conversations until a British-Pakistani student is kidnapped and held hostage, and the slow horses find a way into a real case.
Nobody has tried to kill Harry Dresden for almost a year, and his life has finally begun to settle down; for once the future looks reasonably bright. But the past casts a long shadow, and an old bargain has left him in debt to Mab, the monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe and the Queen of Air and Darkness, who has come to call in her marker. It is a small favour he cannot refuse.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was an interruption. For Brutha the novice, who is the Chosen One, that means wanting peace and justice and brotherly love while also wanting the Inquisition to stop torturing him. The novel tells the origin of the god Om and his relations with Brutha, and it satirises philosophy, religious institutions and the role of religion in political life.
In London in 1948, Hortense arrives from Jamaica to join a husband she has barely met, expecting the country she was raised to think of as home. Gilbert has served in the Royal Air Force and is living in a single room in a house owned by Queenie and Bernard, a white English couple whose war has left its own damage. The novel is told in four voices and moves between Jamaica and England, and between the war years and what came after them.
Ollie has been reading a book of ghost stories since her mother died, and the story she keeps returning to is about a girl called Beth, two brothers who loved her, and a bargain with something called the smiling man. Then her school bus breaks down beside a farm, and the story stops being something she is reading.
In 1897 the explorer Robert Peary brings six Inuit from Greenland to New York, where they are put on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Among them are a father and son, and when the father dies the museum keeps his bones. The novel tells the story of Minik, the boy who was left behind.
George Smiley is called out of retirement when one of his old agents, a former Soviet general, is found dead. What the general had discovered before he died leads back to Karla, the Soviet spymaster who has been Smiley's opposite number for years. The book is the last of the three about that confrontation, and it settles the question between them.
Britt Shelley wakes up in a hotel bed next to a detective called Jay Burgess with no memory of the night, and then discovers that he is dead beside her. Five years earlier Jay was one of four officials celebrated for leading people out of a fire that destroyed the Charleston police headquarters. The firefighter who investigated that blaze has never accepted the story.
Alex Rider is fourteen and has just come back from space, and when he crash lands off the coast of Australia the Australian Secret Service recruits him to infiltrate one of the criminal gangs operating across South East Asia. The gangs are known as snakeheads, and they smuggle drugs, weapons and people through the region for a living.
After exposing a suitor's dishonourable intentions toward the daughter of a client, Harry Cartwright is hired by a wealthy marquis to solve a murder that takes place at a house party. The case is complicated by the host's wish to keep the matter discreet, which limits what can be asked and of whom.
Lissa and Jarret have agreed to a marriage that lasts five years and no longer. He pays off her father's debts, she looks after his daughter Emma, and both of them stay out of each other's way. Then Emma disappears, and the arrangement they have both been keeping to stops being workable.
America has been carved into franchised city-states, and Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia between sword fights and shifts in the Metaverse, the shared virtual world where he is somebody. When a friend views a file called Snow Crash his computer dies and his mind goes with it, and the same drug is turning up in the real world. Hiro and a fifteen-year-old skateboard courier named Y.T. follow it back through a hired biker with a nuclear warhead in his sidecar, a religious media baron, and a very old idea about language itself. The file, the drug and the biker all trace back to the same place.
On an island in Puget Sound, where the people make their living from salmon fishing and strawberry farming, a Japanese American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a fellow fisherman. It is 1954, the war is recent, and the internment of Japanese Americans during it hangs over the courtroom. The case turns on what the islanders remember and what they would rather not.
Lily is the daughter of a farmer in nineteenth-century China, and at six years old she is told by the local matchmaker that her feet, if bound properly, will be flawless. Since a woman's prospects are judged by the size and shape of her feet, that is very good news for her family and years of pain for her. She learns the secret women's script called nu shu, and she is matched with an 'old-same', Snow Flower, from a more refined household; the two of them carry that bond through their marriages and their households.
In the winter of 1940 German troops arrive in a small Norwegian village and take it over, and nobody there expects to be able to do anything about it. Then Peter Lindstrom's uncle explains what the children can do with their sleds, and a plan begins that puts the country's gold bullion and their own lives on the same sled run down the hill.
Selina Peake Dejong marries into a Dutch farming community outside Chicago, is widowed young and has to make a living from the land. She becomes a truck farmer, raises her son Dirk and sends him to the city, and the novel follows both her success and what her son does with the chances she bought him.
The fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequence, which its own publisher describes as a trilogy of four, follows Arthur Dent after his return to a version of Earth. Its title is the message the dolphins left when they departed the planet shortly before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and the book treats that joke as the starting point for a much quieter story.
On Kacie Peters's first day in a new job, her boss suggests that she has a reputation with men and then instructs her not to make a play for him, since he has no intention of changing his bachelor status. She would have quit on the spot, except that something in Elliot Quantrell draws her to him and makes her want his good opinion. The difficulty is getting it without confirming his worst suspicions.
Maxim Seymour, Marquess of Bradbury, has been stripped of his title and lands and branded a traitor, and he wants revenge on the men responsible. His plan to take a hostage goes wrong, and he carries off Elise Radborne instead, an innocent who proves to be his equal in an argument. The Elizabethan court makes a dangerous place for two people with so much to hide.
Drizzt Do'Urden has spent more than forty years in the Underdark and comes to the conclusion that neither he nor anyone near him will be safe while he stays there. He goes up to the surface, where what he is makes him an enemy before he has said anything, and where he finds what he actually is.
Solaris is a planet with a single ocean that covers it and, by every measurement the scientists can take, thinks. Kelvin arrives at the research station above it to find the crew evasive and the station in disrepair. Then visitors start appearing: figures out of each researcher's past, solid enough to touch, impossible to keep out of the airlock. Kelvin's is a woman he loved and lost. The station's library holds a century of theories about the ocean, and none of them predicts the visitors. What the planet wants, whether it is trying to communicate, and what the visitors are made of are questions the book leaves open.
Lakshmi is thirteen and lives with her family in a hut in the mountains of Nepal. When the monsoon washes away what is left of their crops, her stepfather says she must leave home to earn, and a charming stranger arranges work for her that turns out to be a brothel in India.
The Black Company has reached the end of a long campaign. Croaker is an annalist again rather than a captain, Sleepy leads the company, and no member has died in battle for four years. Then old adversaries set out to bring about the Year of the Skulls, and the company is pushed to the edge of destruction.
Kyr has spent her whole life training to avenge the destruction of Earth. She was raised inside Gaea Station with the last scraps of humanity, taught to expect the day when she would face the Wisdom, the reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory in the Majo War, and she has become one of the best warriors of her generation. When Command assigns her brother to a posting that amounts to certain death, and refuses to explain why, she starts asking questions the station would rather she left alone.
Merit is a graduate student in Chicago until a rogue vampire attacks her and only gets a sip before another vampire drives him off and saves her life by turning her. Her rescuer is the master of Cadogan House, and her new existence at a Hyde Park mansion full of vampires means serving a house whose lord expects her gratitude, while someone is still trying to kill her.
Rachel is a Manhattan attorney who has always done the sensible thing, until her thirtieth birthday party, which her best friend Darcy throws for her. That night Rachel sleeps with Darcy's fiance, and has to live with what that means, because she likes him and Darcy's wedding in September is still going ahead. Rachel is also the person Darcy relies on for everything connected to the wedding, which leaves her managing a friendship and her own feelings at the same time. The novel follows the months between the party and the ceremony.
Blandings Castle has acquired a valuable scarab, and Lord Emsworth is not entirely clear how it came into his pocket. The American collector who owns it wants it back, and sends his son to England to steal it. Two impostors are soon in residence, each with an eye on the same prize and no idea about the other.
Two thirteen-year-old friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, see a carnival arrive in their town in October, run by a man named Dark and offering a carousel that can make its riders older or younger. The boys are drawn to it, and the attraction turns out to trade in the one thing everyone wants and nobody should have.
Alexandra Lawrence is a country girl with no interest in the rules of fashionable society, and she marries Jordan Townsende, the Duke of Hawthorne, a man whose wealth and position have never obliged him to explain himself to anyone at all. Their marriage takes her into London society, where the two of them have to work out what they actually owe each other.
Amber wakes up in a hospital. She cannot move, she cannot speak and she cannot open her eyes, but she can hear everyone around her, and none of them know it. She does not remember what happened, and she suspects her husband had something to do with it. The book moves between her paralysis, the week before the accident and a diary written twenty years ago.
An insurance agent named Robert Smith jumps from the roof of a hospital trying to fly, and the crowd that gathers to watch includes a pregnant woman who goes into labour. Her son becomes the first African American child born in that hospital, and the novel follows him from childhood into a search for the family history his parents have never explained.
Susannah, now pregnant, has another personality taking control of her. The demon-mother Mia uses her and Black Thirteen to travel to New York City in 1999, and Jake, Oy and Pere Callahan have to rescue her while Eddie and Roland travel to Maine in 1977. A vacant lot in New York becomes the object that has to be saved.
Paul Morel grows up in a mining family in the English Midlands, the son of a woman who married beneath the class she was raised in and a father who drinks and works underground. His mother turns her hopes and her possessiveness towards her sons, and Paul's attempts to love two very different women are made impossible by the bond he cannot break.
Darren faces a final confrontation with his archenemy Steve Leopard, and he looks for a way to trick destiny and avoid the requirement that one of them must die and the other become the Lord of the Shadows, fated to destroy the world. The oath that binds them is the problem rather than the fight.
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.
