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 48 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.
Three people live in different kinds of isolation on the coast of New Zealand's South Island: a reclusive artist, a mute boy, and the boy's foster father. Over the course of the novel they form a tentative relationship, are driven apart by violence, and come back together, with Māori and Pākehā language and myth woven through the book.
Tea is thirteen when she accidentally raises her older brother from the dead, which tells her family two things: that she is a bone witch, and that they cannot keep her. She is sent away to train as an asha, and the training is long, expensive and political. Somewhere far ahead of that beginning, in a different narrative, an older Tea has been exiled for what she did with the power she learned.
LuLing Young is in her eighties and beginning to lose her memory, so she writes down what she can remember of her life as a girl in China. Her daughter Ruth, who makes a living writing other people's books, arranges for the Chinese manuscript to be translated, and learns a version of her mother's history that she had never been given.
Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a family of book eaters, people who feed on books and keep everything they have read. Devon, a daughter of the clan, is raised on fairy tales and cautionary stories while her brothers are given tales of valour, and she has to decide how far she will go to feed her son, who was born hungry for human minds.
Paul and Rochelle Isaacson are tried and executed for passing secrets to a foreign power, and their children Daniel and Susan are left to grow up in the glare of the case. The novel is Daniel's attempt to write the story of his family, and he is unable to keep it in order or to settle what actually happened.
Diana Bishop, a historian and a witch, and Matthew Clairmont, a vampire and a scientist, return from the sixteenth century to find that a member of their family has been murdered. They need the missing pages of an old manuscript, and they need the rules that forbid marriage between witches and vampires to be broken. Both are dangerous.
Twelve-year-old David is grieving for his mother in an attic bedroom when the books on his shelf begin to whisper to him in the dark. His family is coming apart around him, and his refuge in stories takes him into another world, a distorted version of his own ruled by a king who keeps his secrets in a book called The Book of Lost Things.
Taran works as Assistant Pig-Keeper at Caer Dallben and would rather be doing something heroic. His charge is Hen Wen, the only oracular pig in Prydain, and when she runs off he follows her, which takes him further from home than he has ever been and into the middle of a war. The series was inspired by Welsh mythology and by the castles and language of a country the author had seen during the war.
Liesel Meminger is nine when she arrives in a small German town to live with foster parents, having buried her brother on the way and lost her mother. She learns to read with her foster father, steals books where she can find them, and lives through the Nazi years among her neighbours, the Jewish man hidden in the basement and the war that eventually reaches the town. The novel is narrated by Death, who takes an interest in the girl and her use of words.
A man is found on a shoreline with a head wound and no memory of his life. The doctor who treats him finds a numbered bank account under his skin, and following that number to Switzerland starts the process of finding out who he is. The name he turns out to be carrying is Jason Bourne's, and the man who used it was a deep-cover agent.
A killing staged as a message tells David Webb, who has spent years living as Jason Bourne, that his oldest enemy has come back. Carlos the Jackal is old, his reputation is fading, and before he dies he intends to do two things: kill Bourne and destroy the facility where he was trained. Bourne sends his family into hiding and starts hunting first.
Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny are orphans, and they are determined not to be separated. Rather than be sent to a grandfather they have been told is cruel, they run away and make a home in an abandoned railway boxcar in the woods, where the eldest two find work, the youngest two keep the place running and all four learn to live on very little. A doctor in the nearby town notices them, and the question of what to do about the grandfather resolves in a way none of them expected. The first book established a series that ran for generations.
Bruno is a German boy whose father becomes the commandant of a concentration camp, and the novel follows his friendship with a Jewish detainee named Shmuel. Bruno's understanding of what is happening around him is deliberately limited by his age, and the book's plot develops from that gap rather than from adult comprehension of the situation.
Yakov Liebermann runs a centre in Vienna documenting Nazi crimes, and his funding is failing as the world loses interest in the work. Then a stranger telephones from Brazil with a recording of a meeting held by Josef Mengele, who is organising a strange operation: ninety-four harmless civil servants in different countries are to be killed on particular dates spread across several years.
Mickey Haller is a Los Angeles defence attorney who has spent a year recovering from his wounds and from the painkillers he took while they healed, and he is ready to return to court. When the defence lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his caseload, including the trial of the studio executive Walter Elliott, who is accused of killing his wife and her lover. The trial is due to begin in nine days, and the detective working Vincent's murder believes the killer may come after Haller next.
Parvana is eleven and lives in a one-room flat in Kabul with her family, and since the Taliban took the city she has rarely been outside. Her father, the person who could go out, is arrested, and the family has no man to send to the market. To feed them Parvana has to become something the authorities will allow in the street.
Alan Duncan comes home to his parents' sheep station in Australia after the war, a lawyer who lost both feet in an air crash, and finds that the housekeeper has killed herself. Searching the house for the papers she hid, he discovers that she was not who the household believed her to be, and her letters and diaries lead him back to the war and to his own family.
Khai Diep believes something is missing in him. He feels irritation when people move his belongings and satisfaction when a ledger balances, but not grief, and not love. His family reads it differently, and when he refuses relationships altogether his mother travels to Vietnam to find him a wife. Esme Tran has grown up poor in Ho Chi Minh City and cannot turn down the chance to meet a possible husband in America. She arrives to persuade a man who does not want persuading.
Lara is a princess raised in secret and trained for one job: marry into the Bridge Kingdom and open it up from inside. The bridge is the only safe crossing in a storm-damaged world, and whoever holds it gets rich while everyone else goes without, including Lara's own people. She arrives as a bride and a spy, and King Aren turns out to be nothing like the enemy she was briefed on. As she learns how the bridge actually works and who it starves, the story she was raised on stops making sense. The first Bridge Kingdom novel is a slow-burn political romance about an assassin who has to decide which kingdom deserves to survive her.
Oscar de León is a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey who is overweight, loves science fiction and fantasy, and keeps falling hopelessly in love. His family is also carrying a curse, and the novel follows them back to the Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo. It is a family history as much as it is the story of one boy.
Sunny has always taken the prophecy about the five dragonets seriously, and if the tribes of Pyrrhia need her to end the war she is willing to try. Then news from Morrowseer shakes her confidence in the whole idea that their destiny was ever fixed. It is the fifth book of the sequence and the last of the first arc.
Joe Cashin was a homicide detective in the city until a case nearly killed him, and he has been posted back to the South Australian coastal town where he grew up to recover and to be out of the way. When a wealthy local is beaten and left to die in his own house, the case lands on him. The evidence points at three boys from the Aboriginal community nearby, which suits almost everyone.
Joel Backman was one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington until a deal involving a hacked spy satellite collapsed and sent him to prison. Six years later a disgraced president grants him a full pardon, and he is taken out of his cell in the middle of the night, given a new name, put on a military aircraft and flown to Italy to be tucked away in a small city.
Gavin Scott is a professional baseball player with a good career and a marriage that has gone wrong: his wife, Thea, has asked for a divorce, and he is only now working out how much of it he has caused. His friends offer an unusual kind of help - an invitation to a private club in Nashville where athletes read and study romance novels for instruction - and Gavin starts applying what he reads to his own household. Thea, meanwhile, has reasons of her own for being tired of compromise.
Daniel bar Jamin saw his father crucified by Roman soldiers and has lived in the mountains with a band of rebels ever since, waiting for the chance to fight. When his sister is left alone and unwell he has to care for her, and the teacher he meets near Capernaum asks him to give up the hatred he has built his life on.
On 22 June 1941 Tatiana Metanova turns seventeen the next day, and the morning begins with her older sister Dasha announcing that she is in love and with the radio reporting that Germany has invaded the Soviet Union. Later that day, waiting for a bus in Leningrad, Tatiana is watched by a Red Army officer. His name is Alexander Belov, and he is Dasha's new love.
Linus Weems wakes in a concrete building with no windows and no doors, where an elevator is the only way in or out. Five other people arrive from different backgrounds, all of them kidnapped, and none of them knows who has taken them or what he wants. Linus keeps a diary of it.
Axl and Beatrice are an elderly couple in a Britain that has been at peace since Arthur's wars, and neither of them can hold on to a memory for long. They are certain they once had a son, and they decide to walk to the village where they believe he lives. On the road they fall in with a Saxon warrior and a wounded boy, and the errand turns out to be about more than the son.
Apollo is still serving his sentence as a mortal teenager called Lester, with a demigod daughter of Demeter assigned to keep him company, and he still has to restore five dark oracles before he can go home. The third of those requires finding a Roman emperor in a maze. Apollo has to go through the Labyrinth to reach him, and he has none of his old powers to help.
Near an isolated mansion lies a garden of flowers and shady trees, and among its ornaments are young women who have been kidnapped and intricately tattooed to resemble the butterflies they are named for. The man who keeps them calls himself the Gardener, and when the garden is discovered a single survivor is brought in for questioning by two FBI agents.
Ann Hamilton is ten years old in 1784 when her family settles on land west of the Allegheny Mountains, in a cabin whose door faces west because that is the way the family came from. She is lonely for the town she left behind, and then a stranger rides up to the house and everything about the place looks different.
In March 1952 a meteorite strikes the east coast of the United States and kills most of the government, and the dust and warming that follow are calculated to make the Earth uninhabitable within decades. Elma York, a mathematician who flew as a WASP during the war, joins the international effort to put people into space, and finds that its doors are closed to women.
Buck, a mixed-breed dog, is taken from his home, where breakfast and comfort were a given, and finds himself facing the hardship of a sled dog's life instead. He passes into hands that drive him and the rest of the team on when conditions are too rough for any of them. He also fights the urge to run with the wolves that live around the route he is working.
The American minister to the Court of St James's buys a country house in England and is warned by the man selling it that Canterville Chase is haunted. Mr Otis says he will take the furniture as well as the ghost at a valuation, and moves in with his wife, his eldest son and his twin boys. The ghost, who has been frightening people there for three hundred years, has never met a family like this one.
Iris Scanlon runs the only daytime concierge service for vampires in Half-Moon Hollow, which means letting in plumbers and picking up chilled blood for clients who cannot go out in daylight. Her rules are strict and businesslike until she finds her newest client poisoned on his kitchen floor and has to decide how much of her ordinary life she is willing to disturb for him.
Charles Dexter Ward is a young man from a prominent Rhode Island family who has become obsessed with an ancestor called Joseph Curwen, a merchant of unpleasant reputation and, it is said, a wizard who knew things a man should not. Ward vanishes from the asylum where he had been held, and his family doctor sets out to establish what has been done to him.
Enola Holmes has few people in her life beyond the occasional run-in with her brother Sherlock, and the closest thing she has to family is her landlady, Mrs Tupper, who is nearly deaf and cannot cook but is thoroughly endearing. So when Enola comes home to find that Mrs Tupper has been kidnapped, the search becomes personal almost at once.
Enola Holmes is the much younger sister of the detective Sherlock Holmes, and she has been brought up quietly in the country by a mother who does not care what the neighbours think. On her fourteenth birthday her mother disappears, leaving a small amount of money and no explanation, and Enola's older brothers arrive to arrange her future.
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes gathers the last twelve of the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, which had all run in the Strand Magazine across the years from October 1921 to April 1927. The collection itself was issued in book form in June 1927 in Britain and the United States, in editions that differ over how the title should be punctuated, and it closes the Holmes canon.
Princess Eilonwy, the latest enchantress born of the House of Llyr, is sent to the royal court of the Isle of Mona to be educated as a young lady, an ordeal she regards as entirely unnecessary. Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper, travels with her. Soon after they arrive she is taken by agents of the sorceress Achren, who has a use for her in a plan of her own.
Manfred, the lord of the castle of Otranto, is preparing his son for marriage when a gigantic helmet falls out of the sky and kills the groom. Determined to keep the castle in his own line, he sets out to marry the intended bride himself, and the household is overtaken by omens, apparitions and the return of the rightful heir.
Matilda Weimar flees her lecherous uncle and takes refuge in the ancient Castle of Wolfenbach, where the abandoned chambers hold the horrifying mystery of the missing Countess. The castle is not a safe hiding place for long, because her uncle is still looking for her, and the novel was one of the horrid books named in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.
In the early 1950s an eleven-year-old boy boards a ship in Colombo, bound for England, travelling on his own. At meals he is seated at the cat's table, the one furthest from the captain's, with two other boys and a collection of adults the rest of the passengers have no use for, and over three weeks at sea the three of them find out what is on board.
Holden Caulfield, who is about to be expelled from his school, leaves early and spends three days in New York City, and the novel is his account of what he did with them. He is nearly of age, he has opinions about almost everything he sees, and it is one of the most widely read American novels.
Elijah Baley is a New York police detective in a future city buried under steel and roofed against the outside, where most people live in enormous communal blocks and housing is rationed down to the last square metre. A Spacer has been murdered, and the Spacers will only accept the arrest if the investigation is carried out alongside a robot partner.
Phillip Enright is eleven and living on the island of Curacao when the war comes close enough for his mother to take him away by ship. The ship is torpedoed, and Phillip wakes on a raft in the middle of the sea with an old West Indian sailor called Timothy, a cat called Stew Cat and a head injury that has left him blind.
The narrator travels to Peru in search of an ancient manuscript that is said to hold a sequence of insights into the way human beings might live, and he is not the only person looking for it. The book presents itself as an adventure in pursuit of a spiritual mystery, and it is written as a first-person account of a spiritual awakening in which the manuscript's insights are discovered one at a time.
Percy Jackson saved the world more than once, and now he wants to finish his senior year of school and get into university like anybody else his age. The gods have other plans, and the letter of recommendation he needs from Mount Olympus can only be earned by completing three more quests for them, starting with one that somebody else has already made a mess of.
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.
