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.
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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
The generation ship Peerless was launched in The Clockwork Rocket and travelled into the void in The Eternal Flame, and this novel describes its return journey, the construction of a device that can receive messages from its own future, and the arrival at a world where time runs in reverse.
Henry Skrimshander is a shortstop at a small college on the shore of Lake Michigan who seems certain to play professionally, until a routine throw goes off course and the lives of five people around him change. The college president, the team captain, Henry's roommate and the president's daughter all have something at stake in what happens next.
Maggie Graham is the alpha of a werewolf pack living in a hidden valley near the small town of Grundy, Alaska. When a researcher arrives to investigate reports of lycanthropy in the area, her plan is to frighten him off, and the plan runs into difficulty because Nick Thatcher turns out to be considerably more attractive than she had allowed for.
The Kejari is over and almost nothing Oraya trusted survived it. She is a prisoner in the kingdom she was raised to inherit, grieving the only parent she had, and no longer certain what her own blood means. Raihn has the throne and a court that will not accept a Turned king who was once a slave. With the House of Blood pressing in from outside, his offer of a private alliance is the only route Oraya has to take her kingdom back and settle the betrayal she cannot forgive. Taking it means using an old and ruinous power tied to her father's secrets. The second Crowns of Nyaxia book is about what a person will trade for a crown, and who pays for it.
Kyle McAvoy comes out of Yale Law School with three years of public service ahead of him and a job waiting at the end of it. Then two men who say they are federal agents introduce him to a man called Bennie Wright, who owns a videotape from a party in Kyle's undergraduate apartment and wants something in return for keeping it hidden: a place inside a large New York firm, and information only an insider can reach.
The Alexandrian Society looks after the lost knowledge of the great civilisations of antiquity, and it is the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. A place in it brings wealth, power and prestige, and once a decade the six most uniquely talented magicians alive are selected as candidates. The newest six include two rivals who between them control the physical world, a naturalist who can read the language of life, a telepath and an empath.
Theodora Goodman is a lonely middle-aged woman who travels to France after her mother's death and then goes on to America, where she experiences what may be either a gradual mental breakdown or an epiphanic revelation. The novel is her story from beginning to end. It follows her from Australia to France and then to America, and it never explains what she is looking for.
The Baudelaire orphans are taken to a boarding school whose motto is Remember You Will Die and whose building looks like a cemetery, where the teachers are unpleasant, the rules are arbitrary and nobody is prepared to sign the permission slips that would let the children sleep anywhere decent. They also make friends for the first time, which is a novelty.
Frank Pollard wakes each night with no memory of where he has been or what he has done, and finds himself injured or carrying objects he does not recognise. Two private investigators, Bobby and Julie Dakota, are hired to find out what is happening to him, and their work leads into a web of experiments and family secrets.
Tommy Tester lives in 1920s Harlem, plays guitar where he can and runs occult errands on the side. A delivery to a sorceress and a party at a rich man's house put him in the way of powers that should have no interest in him at all. The novella reworks a Lovecraft story and gives the tale to a Black man to tell.
Evangeline Fox is back in a partnership she had every reason to walk away from, because a curse has been set loose and the only way to break it runs through the Prince of Hearts. Their road goes through magic, lost stories and worse company, and neither of them is honest about why they keep going. The second Once Upon a Broken Heart novel takes the bargain out of the first book's wedding and turns it into a journey, where the question is not whether the curse can be lifted but whether either of them can be trusted with the answer. It ends on a choice that the third book has to live with.
Coriolanus Snow is eighteen and preparing for the tenth Hunger Games, at which tributes will be paired with student mentors for the first time. He is given the girl from District 12, and the two of them work out what will keep her alive, beginning the process that turns Snow into the man he becomes.
The Ballad of the White Horse is a long poem by G. K. Chesterton about the wars of Alfred the Great against the Danes, published in 1911. It is written in the form of a traditional ballad, and it tells how Alfred came back from defeat to win at Ethandun, with help, in the poem's account, from the Virgin Mary.
Philippe Charboneau is the illegitimate son of James Amberly, the sixth Duke of Kent, and in November 1770 he travels with his mother Marie from Auvergne to England to stake his claim to his inheritance. The Duke's family refuses to recognise him, an altercation leaves the Duke's legitimate son crippled, and mother and son flee to London.
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is a collection of short fiction by Stephen King, published in November 2015. It was his sixth collection of short stories, and it brought him awards both for the book as a whole and for one of the individual stories inside it, with a later paperback adding one more.
Taylor Greer leaves her home in Kentucky and heads west to see something of the country. In Oklahoma, near Cherokee territory, a stranger puts a baby girl into her car and disappears, and Taylor decides to keep the child, drives on until the car breaks down in Tucson, Arizona, and starts a life there with the help of people she meets by accident.
A family is camping on a remote island when a black bear attacks their campsite in the night, leaving the two children alone. Five-year-old Anna gets her little brother into the family's canoe and paddles away, and the two of them are left to find food and shelter at the edge of the woods, with nothing in Anna's world seeming safe any more.
SVR director Sergey Golovko survives an attempt on his life in Moscow, when a car identical to his own is destroyed with a rocket-propelled grenade. The investigation points towards Chinese intelligence, and President Jack Ryan finds himself dealing with a war between Russia and China as well as the politics of his own government.
Vasya grows up in a village at the edge of the northern forests, where the household spirits are given bread and the winter lasts most of the year. Her mother died giving birth to her, her father is often away, and the wife he brings home from Moscow forbids the family from honouring the spirits that keep the house. Vasya can see them, which is a useful talent in a year when the crops fail, the winter keeps getting worse and an old enemy of the village is looking for a door back in. The old beliefs and the new religion are pulling the village in different directions, and Vasya is caught between an offer of marriage, a convent and the wild places she is drawn to.
The slayers of the Lessening Society have more money, more weapons and more power than they have had in years, and the Brotherhood is preparing for a full attack. One of their number, Rhage, is fighting a battle inside himself: he cannot control the panic that has taken hold of him, and after a serious injury he has to work out what he actually wants.
Anthony Comstock Patch is a Harvard-educated young man with artistic ambitions and a substantial inheritance he has not yet received, and Gloria Gilbert is a celebrated beauty of the New York social scene. They marry into a life of parties, hotels and borrowed money, and spend the years of the Jazz Age waiting for the money that is supposed to make it all permanent.
Nobody is admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden in the Quebec wilderness, where two dozen cloistered monks grow vegetables, keep chickens and make chocolate. They have taken a vow of silence, and they have become famous anyway for the chant they sing, until their choir director is murdered and the door is opened to the police.
In 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly occupied with the study of honeybees in Sussex when a young woman stumbles onto him on the Downs. Fifteen years old, awkward and recently orphaned, Mary Russell has an intellect that impresses even him, and under his reluctant teaching she proves a capable partner. They are soon called to Wales to help find a kidnapped American senator's daughter.
In the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood wins a month-long internship at a New York fashion magazine and finds that the life she was supposed to want leaves her cold. She comes home to Massachusetts, and the distance between what she can feel and what everyone expects of her widens until she cannot work, sleep or read. The novel follows her through the doctors and hospitals that follow.
Five young women work at a New York publishing house in the 1950s, sharing flats, salaries, ambitions and the men who come with the city. Caroline wants to move from the typing pool to an editor's desk, April arrives from the country and quickly learns to be what other people want, and Gregg is an actress who would rather be married.
In the spring of 1984, two high school students in the small town of Oriental, North Carolina, fall in love. Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole come from opposite sides of the town and the difference between their families is not something either of them can ignore, and the years that follow take the two of them into separate lives far from where they began.
A man collapses in Poirot's rooms and, before he dies, manages to describe an organisation: four criminals, each of them outstanding in his or her own line, operating internationally. Number One is a Chinese criminal mastermind, Number Two an American millionaire, Number Three a Frenchwoman scientist and Number Four the killer who removes anyone who interferes. Poirot takes the threat personally.
Philip Marlowe is a private investigator in Los Angeles, and his first case comes from a dying general who is being blackmailed. Marlowe is meant to deal with the blackmailer quietly, and instead finds himself among the general's daughters, a missing person and a growing number of bodies. Everybody in the book lies to somebody, and the secrets come out in the wrong order.
Two factions called the Spiders and the Snakes are fighting a war across all of history, recruiting their soldiers at the moment of death and sending them to change the outcomes of battles that other people have already fought. One of their rest stations, staffed by entertainers and medics drawn from many centuries, is the setting for a single night of that war.
Omakayas is seven years old in 1847 and lives with her Ojibwe family in a birchbark house on an island in Lake Superior. The book follows the household through four seasons of hunting, fishing, gathering and storytelling, and into the winter when smallpox reaches the island and takes one of her brothers. She takes her share of the work and resents a good deal of it.
A young woman who has been dancing in nightclubs since she was sixteen to keep herself and her brother afloat learns that he has been found guilty of murdering a singer and is going to be executed. She sets out to prove that he did not do it, and she has very little time. There is nobody else to do it for him.
Richard Shelton is a young man in the England of the Wars of the Roses, and the guardian who is supposed to protect him and his inheritance is not to be trusted. When a black arrow carries a threat of vengeance into the forest, Richard has to work out who killed his father and which side of the war he belongs to.
A man who has always loved animals describes the change in himself that drink brought on, and the black cat he loved best before he began to hurt it. He tells the story from the day before his death, and he does not ask the reader to forgive him. What he wants is for the whole thing to be understood exactly as it happened.
Taran is an assistant pig-keeper in the land of Prydain, and men have been disappearing while the undead warriors of Arawn Death-Lord grow more numerous. A council of princes and allies decides that the only answer is to take the Black Cauldron itself, the thing that makes the dead soldiers, and destroy it. Taran insists on going.
Some believe that the Lady, newly risen from centuries of imprisonment, stands between humankind and evil; others believe that she is evil itself. The hard-bitten men of the Black Company take her pay and do what they are told, burying their doubts along with their dead. Then comes a prophecy: the White Rose has been born again somewhere, to embody good once more, and the company is set to find her.
In 1947 the body of a young woman called Elizabeth Short is found in an empty lot in Los Angeles, badly mutilated, and the case becomes the most notorious unsolved murder in the city's history. Two policemen are assigned to it, and the investigation they conduct carries them into the corruption of the department that employs them and out the other side.
Ranulf is the English conqueror known as the Black Lyon, darkly handsome and rich beyond imagining, and a man no woman has been able to win. Then he meets Lyonene, a tawny-haired beauty whose temper matches his own, and the two of them are married after a whirlwind courtship. A web of lies spread by a jealous rival drives Lyonene away from her home and across the Irish Sea, and only Ranulf can undo the plot against their marriage.
Alec Ramsay is travelling home by ship when a black stallion is loaded aboard. A wreck in a storm leaves the boy and the horse the only survivors, and they wash up on a deserted island where each of them has to trust the other to stay alive until a passing ship takes them off. Back in America the stallion is still wild.
Ben Holiday bought a magic kingdom the way other men buy a farm, and in the second Landover novel the man who sold it to him comes back for it. Meeks returns with a glamour that makes him look exactly like Ben, so that Ben's own friends turn him out of his castle as an impostor. Winning it back means crossing a kingdom where nobody recognises him, while a black unicorn and a golden bridle draw everyone else into the same hunt.
The Union is in trouble and mostly does not know it yet. Logen Ninefingers is a barbarian warrior who has run out of luck and friends; Sand dan Glokta is a torturer for the Inquisition who was a celebrated swordsman before he was captured and broken; Jezal dan Luthar is a young officer training for a fencing contest he expects to win. A wizard gathering what he needs for a job nobody has explained brings all three into the same scheme. Bayaz could be the First of the Magi or a fraud with a temper, and by the time they reach the frozen North the politics of the Union have caught up with all of them.
A light aircraft bound for the Galapagos Islands ditches into the sea, and the zoologist on board, Daniel Kennedy, has to decide whether to save himself or the woman he is with. In a second story set in 1917, his great-grandfather Andrew is preparing to go over the top at Passchendaele and will be tested in the same way.
Iris Chase is an old woman looking back at the death of her sister Laura more than fifty years earlier, and she tells the story of two sisters raised in a small Ontario town who grew up into very different lives. Inside her account there is another book, a novel about a secret affair and a writer of pulp science fiction, and nobody agrees about who wrote it.
The seven demigods of the prophecy set out on their final journey to defeat Gaea, while Nico di Angelo, Reyna and Coach Hedge attempt to carry the Athena Parthenos to Camp Half-Blood before war breaks out between the Roman and Greek demigods. Nico has warned that passing through the House of Hades will stir the demigods' worst memories, and their ghosts will not stay quiet.
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, published in 1979, is a collection whose ten pieces are all built on fairy tales and folk tales, from Bluebeard to Little Red Riding Hood. Carter said that her aim was not to write new versions or adult fairy tales but to draw out what had been latent in the old stories all along.
Berta grows up hearing everybody exclaim over her little sister Glenna, and somewhere along the way she decides that whatever Glenna is, she will not be. The two sisters become opposites, and the distance between them grows until it has to be faced. The novel is about what caused the rift and what it cost them both.
Pecola Breedlove is eleven and prays every night for blue eyes, because she has decided that they would change how her family, her classmates and her town treat her. The novel follows her across a year in Lorain, Ohio, and her wish is answered in the worst way the book can imagine.
Eleven-year-old Emily Steiner left a North Carolina church meeting one October afternoon and walked along a lakeside path towards her house two miles away. She was taken from her bedroom and her body was found by the lake days later. The case looks like the work of a serial killer who has evaded the FBI for years, and Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist and chief medical examiner, is called in to help, with the help of a clandestine research facility in Tennessee where human remains are studied as they decay.
A body is found on the hearth rug in the library at Gossington Hall, the home of Colonel Arthur and Dolly Bantry. The woman is heavily made up, with platinum-blonde hair and a silver-spangled dress, and nobody in the house has any idea at all who she is. The colonel calls the police, and Dolly calls her friend Miss Marple.
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.
