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 46 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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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
At a masquerade ball Olivia Jeffries meets a stranger and acts on an attraction she would not have allowed herself in daylight. When she finds out who he is, the problem is not his character but his name: Reginald Westmoreland is the man her father has spent years hating.
Mr Ash is quiet, tall, unfailingly kind and the last survivor of an ancient species called the Taltos, living among humans as he always has and running a great corporate empire. He learns from an old friend that another Taltos has been seen in the Scottish glen where, long before the Romans came, he ruled his clan.
Taran goes looking for the truth about where he came from, because he wants to know whether he has any right to ask Eilonwy to marry him. He travels through the country with Gurgi and meets craftsmen, farmers and thieves, and finds that most of them have a better idea of who he is than he does. There is no war to win in this book.
Marooned on the coast of equatorial Africa, the English couple John and Alice Clayton die within a year of their son's birth, and the baby is adopted by the she-ape Kala. Named Tarzan, he grows up among the apes, teaches himself to read from the books in his parents' cabin, and eventually meets creatures that look like him and speak a language he has never heard.
Susan Blackstone has been a widow for five years when she sees a stranger across a room and then learns his name. He is Cord Blackstone, the family's black sheep, and he has come back to the company that bears his name for one reason, which is revenge. The business is why he returned, and Susan is the complication he did not plan for.
Eight years ago David Beck was knocked unconscious and left for dead, and his wife Elizabeth was kidnapped and murdered. He has relived that day every day since, working as a paediatrician in inner-city clinics. Then he receives an anonymous email telling him to log on to a website at a particular time, using a code only he and Elizabeth knew, and the screen shows him an image of his wife. While he tries to establish whether she is alive, the FBI is trying to pin her murder on him.
Poppy Hathaway loves her unconventional family, though what she longs for herself is an ordinary life. Then she meets Harry Rutledge, the enigmatic owner of a hotel and an inventor with wealth, power and a dangerous hidden side to the way he lives. When their flirtation compromises her reputation and the season's gossip starts, Poppy surprises everybody by accepting his proposal of marriage, and finds that she has married a man who will share his passion but not his trust.
Riley Jenson works for an organisation created to police the supernatural races, and she trusts her superiors about as much as she trusts her enemies. Her latest job is to get inside the heavily guarded palace of a criminal who has been experimenting on the gene pool for decades. There is more than one kind of trap in the building.
Gabrielle LaFarge had resigned herself to life as a nun in a French convent, but she is told that she is to marry Philippe St. Cyr, a wealthy plantation owner from the island of Martinique instead. She resents and fears this handsome, moody man whose icy surface hides depths of passion and violence, and although he awakens her to desire she is certain he is incapable of love.
Dick Diver is a promising young psychiatrist in Europe who marries Nicole, a wealthy patient he has been treating, and builds a life around her money and her needs. Set on the French Riviera in the last years of the Jazz Age, the novel follows the slow unmaking of the marriage and of the man.
One moment Lauri had been a ballet student living quietly with her aunt in Downhollow, and the next a tall, dark ballet master had walked into her life. Carried off by Maxim di Corte to his Venetian palace, she becomes a slave to the dance, and through him she begins to understand the feeling behind real balletic expression.
Liga is fifteen and motherless, and she has been abused by her father for years. When she becomes pregnant for the third time she tries to end her life, and instead finds herself in a gentler world where she can bring up the two daughters she has, safe from the place she came from. The two worlds do not stay apart.
Quillon is a pathologist in Spearpoint, a city of more than thirty million people built on the surface of a vast artificial spire that the locals call the Godscraper. The world around it is divided into zones, regions of space-time that exist at different energy states, and each one supports a different level of technology. When Quillon is forced into exile, the only way to survive outside the zone he was born into is to keep moving, and every step takes him further from the last thing he understands.
Beka Cooper is sixteen, a rookie with the Provost's Guard, and her first posting is the Lower City. She can hear the voices of the dead riding on the wings of pigeons, which the rest of the Guard finds peculiar and the two worst men in the district should find alarming. With the force busy on another killer, Beka sets her mind on finding the one they call the Shadow Snake.
Medieval England is usually remembered as a place of knights on horseback rescuing fainting damsels, of merciless kings and of peasants mired in superstition and ignorance. Terry Jones and Alan Ereira set out to show a livelier and more inventive country, and to explain where some of the best known ideas about the Middle Ages came from, from witch burning to the flat earth.
Tess Durbeyfield is sixteen, the eldest child of a haggler in a poor rural family, when the local parson tells her father that his surname is a corruption of d'Urberville and that he is descended from an ancient Norman family. Her father celebrates by drinking, the family's wagon crashes on the road to market, and the loss of their horse starts everything that follows.
In the medieval kingdom of Goredd, women are expected to be ladies, men are their protectors and dragons may be whoever they choose. Tess is none of those things: she speaks out of turn, has wild ideas and cannot keep away from trouble. When she goes too far her family decides the only path for her is a nunnery, and on the day she is to go she cuts her hair, puts on her boots and leaves instead.
Caramon Majere and Tasslehoff Burrfoot come out of their journey through time two years later than they meant to, into a world where an hourglass constellation fills the sky and nothing is alive. Raistlin Majere is in the Abyss with Crysania, and there is very little left standing between him and what he set out to take.
Mark Studdock has just been made a senior fellow in sociology at Bracton College, in the University of Edgestow, where the fellows are arguing about the sale of a piece of college land to a scientific body called the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments. The land is an ancient wood believed to be the resting place of Merlin, the sale is controversial, and the Institute already employs some of the college's own faculty. Mark's wife Jane has been having a nightmare about a severed head, and the book follows the two of them into what the Institute is really for.
Mark and Bryon have lived as brothers since Mark's parents died when the two of them were children. As they turn sixteen their interests divide, girls and gangs and drugs take up more of their time, and the friendship that has held them together begins to come apart, until Bryon has to decide what he is going to do about Mark.
Kate Welles wants the leading part in her school's Christmas play and has to work alongside Courtney, who keeps getting in the way, because otherwise neither of them will be allowed to take part. Their teacher then decides that rehearsals need a special location, and picks a house with a history. Kate would normally avoid a building of that kind.
Earth has been reduced by four waves of attack from beings who arrived without warning. After the first there was no power, after the second only the lucky escaped, and after the third and fourth the survivors learned a rule: trust nobody. Cassie is alone on a highway when she meets Evan Walker, who may be her only chance of reaching her brother.
A middle-class English family on holiday in a small village in Norfolk is visited by an uninvited guest named Amber, whose arrival has a profound effect on each of them. She is eventually thrown out of the house by the mother, Eve, but the consequences of her appearance continue after the family has returned to London.
To avoid a marriage she does not want, Lily Bainbridge stages her own death and goes to London dressed as a boy. Her plan to live quietly as an independent widow is spoiled by a marquis who is interested in her, and Lily has to work out how much of her invented life she is prepared to give up.
Macon Leary writes travel guides for businessmen who hate travelling, and he dislikes it himself, which is part of why the books work. His son has been killed in a shooting at a fast-food restaurant, his wife has moved out, and his own dog has put him in hospital. He goes back to the family house in Baltimore to be looked after.
Ever since an accident turned her into a knockout vampire, Elvi Black has been catching her sleep in a coffin, staying out of the sun and giving up garlic. She knows there is more to being undead than what she saw in Dracula, but she cannot ask her mortal friends about proper biting etiquette.
It is Natalie's first year of college, her first real time away from home, and she is not sure how to be an adult without anyone showing her the way. Nora is older, a little mysterious and entirely unknown to her. They are drawn to each other for different reasons, and both of them are carrying secrets.
A young woman is about to be married when a blackmailer obtains letters that would ruin her, and Holmes is engaged to get them back. Charles Augustus Milverton has made a profession out of other people's secrets and does not care what publishing them costs. When his price cannot be met, Holmes considers taking the letters rather than buying them.
A young woman asks Holmes for help a few weeks before her wedding, because her sister died in a locked bedroom on the night before her own marriage, and she has begun to hear the same low whistle in the night. Their stepfather, a doctor who once practised in India, keeps a collection of animals and has a violent temper. Holmes and Watson go down to the house.
George and Harold hypnotise their school principal into believing that he is the superhero Captain Underpants, and the result leads them to the lair of the villainous Dr Diaper, where they have to deal with his robot henchmen. The two fourth-graders are the creators of the Captain Underpants comics within the book as well as its protagonists.
The first collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories brings together twelve cases, starting with a scandal involving a king and a photograph and running through a red-headed man's strange employment, a bet about a goose, a locked room in an old house, and a case that introduces Irene Adler. Dr Watson narrates all of them and moves into Baker Street in the second story, which sets the arrangement the rest of the series depends on. The collection established the form the detective story would take for the next century.
Tom Sawyer is a boy growing up along the Mississippi River in the 1830s and 1840s, in the fictional town of St Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain lived as a child. He has a series of adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn, and the novel follows him through predicaments that include running away to an island, pursuing a treasure and being trapped in a cave.
In 1997 a woman is found murdered near an army base in Carter Crossing, Mississippi, and the evidence points to a soldier. Military police officer Jack Reacher is sent undercover to find out what happened and then to disappear, and his instructions are to keep the army out of a scandal rather than to solve the crime.
Newland Archer is charming, tactful and thoroughly a product of the New York society of the 1870s. He accepts its standards and abides by its rules while recognising its limitations, and his engagement to May Welland promises him a safe and conventional future. Then May's cousin Ellen Olenska arrives, independent and separated from her husband, and Archer has to decide where his loyalty lies.
Lee Miller arrives in Paris in the late 1920s intending to work as an artist rather than be looked at as a model, and she becomes the assistant and then the lover of a celebrated photographer. The novel follows her discovery of what she can do with a camera, the cost of living inside a more famous man's life, and the work she went on to do as a correspondent during the war.
Michelangelo Buonarroti is apprenticed to a painter's studio in Florence as a boy, is taken up by the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, and spends the next sixty years working in marble, paint and stone. The novel follows the sculptor from his first carved figure through the quarries, the workshops and the long quarrels with the popes and patrons who wanted him for themselves.
Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer, one of a dynasty of researchers who spend their working lives among the Dwellers, the ancient species that occupies the galaxy's gas giants. Seers slow their own metabolisms to hold conversations with beings who measure their lives in millions of years. Then his system is cut off, he is drafted into a religious and military order, and he is sent back among the Dwellers to find something he once glimpsed in their archives: a list of coordinates that may lead to their private network of wormholes.
Hammond Cross is a special assistant county solicitor in Charleston, from a wealthy family he has spent his career keeping at a distance. A murder case puts him in the middle of a moral problem: the woman he has become involved with is connected to the investigation he is supposed to be conducting.
It is 1896, and a New York Times reporter is called out at night to look at a body with his old friend Laszlo Kreizler, a doctor who studies the minds of criminals and is known as an alienist. The dead boy was a child prostitute, and the way he was killed suggests a mind rather than a quarrel. Theodore Roosevelt, new in the job of police commissioner, asks the pair to work it.
Haven Ambrose, a nautical archaeologist, comes to Positano to look at the shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast, and she is also privately searching for a trove of gemstones her father saw on his last dive. Then maelstroms and misfortunes begin to trouble the town. The water off that coast has swallowed a great deal, and it is still taking things.
In 1939 a nineteen-year-old refugee from Prague arrives in New York and moves in with his seventeen-year-old cousin, who was born in Brooklyn. Between them they invent a superhero, and the two of them become part of the golden age of the comic book. The Escapist is their way of fighting back.
Lewis Lambert Strether is sent to Paris by the woman he intends to marry, with instructions to bring her son home from Europe and back into the family business. What he finds instead is a young man who is happy as he is and a woman of rank with a great deal of influence over him, and a city that begins to change what Strether thinks his own life should have been.
Lyra and Will are in severe danger in the final part of the trilogy. With help from Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear and two tiny Gallivespian spies, they have to journey to a dank, grey-lit world where no living soul has ever gone, while Dr Mary Malone builds the Amber Spyglass and Lord Asriel fights his rebellion with a troop of angels.
In an alternate London where the British Empire runs on magic and magicians govern everybody else, a boy named Nathaniel is apprenticed to a mid-ranking magician. At ten he is humiliated in front of a gathering of his elders, and in response he summons a djinni called Bartimaeus and sends him to steal a powerful object from one of the most dangerous magicians in the city.
Maximum Ride is fourteen and she and the rest of the flock, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman and Angel, look like ordinary children except that they have wings and can fly. When Angel, the youngest of them, is taken back to the laboratory where the group was created, the others set out across Death Valley to get her home again.
A village theatre company is rehearsing when the director's granddaughter is diagnosed with a rare cancer, and the cast starts raising money for an experimental treatment that costs more than any of them has. Not everyone believes the treatment works or that the people collecting for it are honest. By the dress rehearsal the argument has turned into something worse, and the next morning a body is found. The case is pieced together from the messages and notes the people involved left behind.
The warrior cats have lived in peace around the lake for many moons, but a shadow is gathering on the edge of their territories and the clans are not ready for it. One young cat is given a message that points beyond everything the clans have mapped, and following it means leaving behind the only country he has ever known.
At dawn on Easter morning in 1343 a band of French raiders comes by boat to ambush the English coastal village of Hookton, and the only survivor is a young man called Thomas. He vows to avenge the killing of his neighbours and to recover the holy treasure that the raiders stole out of the village church, and to do any of that he first has to find a way to get himself to France.
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.
