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 45 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.
Megan is a suburban mother with a husband, three children and a past she has told nobody about. Ray was a documentary photographer and now works as a paparazzo. Broome is a detective who has never closed the case of a man who vanished seventeen years ago. When another man disappears on the same date, the three of them are drawn back to it.
Humans have been driven off the Earth by aliens known as the Invaders and have settled the Moon and the rest of the Solar System. The Moon is the most heavily populated world left, and it is run for everybody's convenience by the Central Computer, which is government, courts, information source and friend at once.
Sophie Foster has changed the way the fight is being conducted and now has to decide when to move, who to believe and what to let go of. Her friends are scattered, the Black Swan wants her to work on their projects, and her instincts are pointing somewhere else entirely.
A former First Lady dies, and the funeral at St Patrick's Cathedral brings the country's most famous people into one building. During the service armed men seal the doors and take them hostage, demanding a ransom from each captive personally and killing one to show that the terms are serious. The detective sent in as negotiator is Michael Bennett, a widower with ten children at home.
An elderly woman is found dead in the woods near a village close to the American border during hunting season, and the village agrees that an arrow went astray. Armand Gamache, a chief inspector with the Surete du Quebec, is sent out from Montreal, decides the accident does not add up, and begins interviewing people who have known each other their whole lives. It is the first case in the series that bears his name.
Rachel is a graduate student writing about the ways women have traditionally worked magic into sewing, quilting and other cloth work, and she has been hired to help with a collection of vintage clothing. The antique quilts she is given to examine are extraordinary, and one of them is more than she bargained for, because something has travelled inside it.
Jess Goldberg grows up working-class and butch in the second half of the twentieth century, leaves home as a teenager and finds factory work, bar life and a community in Buffalo and New York. The novel follows her through police raids, hormones, violence and the search for a body and a life she can live in.
Oliver Stone is an ex-Green Beret and a former CIA-trained assassin who leads the Camel Club, a small group of civilian misfits in Washington. In the third book about the club, the group is drawn into a case that touches intelligence work, casinos and a murder the authorities have their own reasons for leaving unsolved.
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a poor farming family in Missouri and sent to the state university to study agriculture. In an English course he encounters a Shakespeare sonnet, understands something about his own life that he had never suspected before, changes his course of study without telling his parents, and becomes a teacher of literature.
Wade Magallen lived as a bachelor with no intention of settling down until Storm Roemer changed his mind, and then something he would not explain made him send her away. Years later she comes back to Laramie with no interest in being sent anywhere again, and the two of them have to decide what to do with the reason he gave her up.
Harry Dresden is Chicago's only professional wizard, and for his first case he is called in to consult on a grisly double murder committed with the blackest of magic. At first the less-than-solvent Harry sees only the fee, but where there is black magic there is a black mage, and that mage now knows Harry's name.
Alex Rider is fourteen, and he is told that his uncle died in a car accident. He knows it is a lie, because of the bullet holes in his uncle's windscreen. Nothing prepares him for the next discovery, that the uncle he thought he knew was working for MI6, and that he is being recruited to find the killers and finish the mission. He is then caught in a game of cat and mouse.
Catherine Enderly is sixteen and on her way to boarding school when she is abducted and taken from England to the coast of Ireland, where she becomes the prisoner of Sean Culhane, a young and powerful man who has sworn vengeance against her family. She meets him with a defiance out of proportion to her size, and his determination to have his revenge becomes complicated by what he begins to feel for her.
Brenna Sloan values her independence above most things and does not find it easy to ask anybody for anything. Michael Donovan has spent his life taking what he wants, and what he wants when they meet is her. He talks her past her objections into a sudden marriage, and the two of them then have to learn to live with it.
Gabriel Utterson is a London lawyer whose old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, has made a will leaving everything to a violent stranger called Edward Hyde. Utterson cannot see what the two men have to do with each other or why Jekyll protects Hyde, and he starts asking questions the doctor does not want answered. What he finds is worse than a bad will.
Susan Marlow returns to Greenwood Manor expecting the house and the aunt she grew up loving. Lady Agatha Gordon has taken in a permanent guest instead: Craig Stanton, a handsome stranger she calls a genius, a man who will shed new light on the Gordon family history, and the only person she trusts. Susan distrusts him on sight, and the harder she tries to keep clear of him the deeper she is drawn into his plans for the house.
Valentine Michael Smith is a human being, born on Mars after the first expedition failed and raised by Martians. He comes to Earth as a young man, the heir to a fortune and a legal curiosity, and understands almost nothing about the world he has been brought into, including its money, its churches and its manners.
Lara had been told that her husband was lost at sea, and the marriage he left behind was cold, formal and unloving, so she had made her peace with being a widow. Then a man walks into her life claiming to be Hunter, Earl of Hawksworth, and proving what he says with private details that only a husband could possibly have known.
When Brent Akerman announces that he intends to close down his chain of fashion accessory shops, somebody has to ask him to reconsider, and Crystal is elected to do it. He is open to suggestions and does not soften his answers, and it becomes clear that he likes her, respects her work and wants to hire her for other projects. It is also clear that he would not mind mixing business with pleasure.
A prominent businessman is found in his Park Avenue apartment, tied to the bed and strangled with cords of black velvet, and the manner of his death makes the case a talking point for the whole city. Lieutenant Eve Dallas is less interested in the scandal than in the fact that the physical evidence does not fit the story anybody is telling her.
Guy Haines meets Charles Bruno on a train and tells him more about his life than he meant to: the wife he is divorcing and the plans he has for afterwards. Bruno has an idea. If he disposes of Guy's wife and Guy disposes of Bruno's father, neither man can be tied to the other's killing. Guy refuses, which turns out not to be the same as it being over.
Mack McKinley and his team of GhostWalkers treat urban warfare as a craft, and on the streets of San Francisco he comes face to face with Jaimie Fielding, a woman he was involved with years ago before she disappeared. She has come back as a spy with too many secrets, and a common enemy has brought the two of them together again on ground neither of them controls.
Stuart Little is born to a human family in New York City and is a mouse, which nobody in the household treats as a problem requiring explanation. He is small enough to be lost in a hotel bed, to be posted through a mail slot and to sail a toy boat on the pond in Central Park, and he is polite, well dressed and resourceful in the manner of the era's children's fiction. He lives with his parents and his older brother George, and with Snowbell the family cat, who regards him as a snack and is not shy about saying so. The novel ends with him travelling north to look for a friend.
Georgina Kincaid is a succubus who draws her power from other men's pleasure, and she is dating a mortal writer, Seth Mortensen. If she so much as kisses him she will drain his life out of him, which makes the relationship difficult to sustain. On top of that, a colleague at the bookshop where she works has started behaving strangely.
Konrad Frankenstein is dead, and his father orders the destruction of the Dark Library that Victor once ransacked looking for a cure. Victor saves a book that promises more than conversation with the dead: a way into their realm. Soon he, Elizabeth and Henry are in the spirit world of the chateau.
Simon Dure is as cynical about love as Charity Emerson is innocent of it, and neither of them pretends that the engagement is anything other than a practical arrangement. Charity is confident she can meet his expectations of a wife, and he is amused enough to let her try. Then a murder makes their conspiracy far more dangerous.
Amanda Briars is a successful novelist who has reached her thirtieth birthday without ever having been kissed, and she decides to buy herself an improper present: one night with a stranger. The man who arrives at her house turns out to be Jack Devlin, a businessman of considerable reputation, and he is willing to keep the arrangement private only for a price.
Suite Francaise follows French families of very different kinds through the exodus of June 1940, when the roads out of Paris filled with people fleeing the German advance. The first part covers that flight and the small cowardices and fragile moments of solidarity that came with it; the second moves to the village of Bussy, where a German garrison is billeted and old resentments between neighbours find new encouragement. Nemirovsky wrote it while the events were unfolding, and it was published decades later.
Nel Wright and Sula Peace meet as children in the town of Medallion, Ohio, and their friendship survives the town's opinion of them, a secret they share and the very different lives they choose. Nel marries and stays; Sula leaves and comes back. The novel follows both women and the community around them across four decades.
Susan Hayes grew up on Sullivan's Island off Charleston and returns there in middle age with an unfaithful husband, a resentful teenage daughter and a long store of painful memories. Her sister's house on the beach, the sea and the island's storms give her somewhere to look back at the childhood and the family secrets she has carried with her.
This novel chronicles the life of Richard III of England, beginning in 1459 with him as a young boy and ending in 1485 with his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It is set against the Wars of the Roses, and it argues for a Richard very different from the one tradition has handed down.
A murder inside ThunderClan has split the Clan apart, and the cats who have taken it upon themselves to find out who was responsible are the three young warriors at the centre of the prophecy: Jayfeather, Hollyleaf and Lionblaze. Each of them is looking for something different, and one of them is about to learn something about their own parentage.
It is the morning of the fiftieth Hunger Games, a Quarter Quell, and the districts of Panem are waiting to learn who will be taken from them this time. In District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think about his chances. He cares about getting through the day and about the girl he loves, and then his name is called.
Lydia Bryant joins a wagon train bound for Texas with a secret she does not intend to explain and a determination that no man will ever have power over her again. Ross Coleman is travelling the same road, with a past that has followed him out of the law's reach. They are thrown together by the journey, and by the men pursuing both of them.
Rae Seddon, known to everyone as Sunshine, works in her family's bakery and wants a quiet evening by the lake. The vampires who take her are not interested in quiet. She wakes chained in the ballroom of an abandoned mansion, dressed in a long red gown, with a stranger chained in the same room who is also a vampire and is being left there to starve.
Desperate to escape a loveless marriage and the constraints of society, the heiress Sophia Hathaway abandons her groom, packs her paints and sketchbook and takes on a new identity as a governess in order to secure passage on a ship called the Aphrodite. She wants a life of her own, but facing the libertine who would take both her virtue and her gold is another matter.
The United States and the Soviet Union go to war, and within hours the country has been turned into a wasteland under a sky that will not clear. The novel follows a group of survivors across the years after the exchange: a girl with a glass ring and a talent nobody can explain, a professional wrestler who has been travelling the country, and a former soldier who finds that the end of the world has given him permission to be himself. Meanwhile something older than the bombs is moving through the ruins, hunting for the child.
The six Zeroes have taken on bank robbers, drug dealers and mobsters with their abilities, and now they are trying to keep out of sight while they quietly get their new illegal nightclub off the ground. The quiet does not last: two strangers arrive in town with a very different kind of crowd-based chaos behind them, and something more dangerous and sinister still follows the strangers.
She is beautiful, exasperating and, in the words of the story, a little hellcat with barnyard manners. Marshal Travis Kincaid has decided that if anybody is going to make a lady of her, it will be him, and he takes on the project even with outlaws overrunning his town. The novel is a western romance.
Samantha Elliot's father controlled her life while he was alive, and his will goes on controlling it after his death: to inherit, she has to move to New York and find out what happened to the grandmother who vanished sixty years earlier. She has never made decisions for herself and now has to make a great many.
In Monterey, the day between Lousy Wednesday and Waiting Friday is called Sweet Thursday, and by that point in the week anything can be arranged. Doc has come home from the war to find his laboratory wrecked and his friends in trouble. A woman called Suzy has moved into the brothel next door and does not intend to stay in it, and the people of the Row decide the two of them would be good for each other.
The university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp and is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. A chance meeting by a river becomes an intense affair, and after their camp duties end the two spend a few weeks in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, before returning to a society that forbids what they are.
Griffin Bing finds a vintage 1920 Babe Ruth baseball card in an abandoned house and takes it to a dealer, who buys it from him for a hundred and twenty dollars and sells it on for a great deal more. Griffin's response is not to complain to anyone but to assemble a team and get the card back out of the dealer's shop.
The Age of Ruin is a time that needs heroes, and the candidates are scattered and in poor condition: a former rebel now serving as an unwilling envoy between the powerful, a half-mage in disgrace whose warnings about a coming war are being ignored, and others who would rather not be involved at all. The war arrives anyway.
A newcomer to Sycamore, Arizona, is out hiking on a scorching afternoon when she comes across what appear to be human remains set into the wall of a dry desert ravine. The long-time residents of the town believe the bones belong to Jess Winters, a teenage girl who vanished eighteen years earlier, and whose disappearance has haunted the place ever since.
Brianna Munro escapes into Scotland at night to avoid the marriage her guardian has arranged for her, and travelling alone and fearing for her safety she takes shelter at Castle Glenloch. She intends to stay for a single night, and then she meets Hugh Christie, Laird Glenloch. She tells him she is a lady's maid running from a vengeful employer, and he can see that she is hiding something.
Ursula K. Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea, published in 2001, is a book of stories and short essays that was designed to sit alongside the five Earthsea novels. Several of the pieces revisit the history of that world from the point of view of the women in it, and two of the stories had been published before.
Daystar has grown up at the edge of the Enchanted Forest with his mother Cimorene, who has taught him swordwork and spells but never told him who his father is, though she has raised him on legends of the forest. When the wizard Antorell attacks them, Cimorene melts him with a spell and sends the boy into the forest with a sword, a talking lizard and orders not to come back until he can say why he had to leave.
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.
