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 49 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.
Apollo Kagwa deals in rare books, has dreams he has never been able to explain, and is determined to be a better father than the one who left him. When his wife Emma starts pulling away from their baby son he puts it down to exhaustion or depression, until the night she does something unforgivable and disappears. Finding her takes him into an enchanted world where the old stories are true.
When her little brother seems to be taken over by an evil spirit, fourteen-year-old Laura Chant goes for help to the older boy at school she is convinced has supernatural powers. What she asks for is a changeover: a deliberate move from one kind of life to another, which she has to be willing to make.
Jimmie Blacksmith is an Aboriginal man in nineteenth-century New South Wales, caught between his own family and culture and the world of white settler colonialism. The novel is written from his perspective, and it follows him on a mission of revenge. It is based on the life of the bushranger Jimmy Governor and was written from Jimmie's point of view.
Dev Deshpande has spent his career producing a long-running reality dating show, arranging other people's love stories on camera while his own relationships fall apart. The new season casts Charlie Winshaw, a disgraced technology founder who does not believe in romantic love and has signed up to repair his reputation. On set Charlie is stiff, anxious and visibly unenthusiastic about dating twenty women on national television, and Dev is the producer responsible for making it work. The season is long, the cameras are always on and neither of them is being entirely honest.
The narrator has just moved into a house with her brother and two of his friends, one of whom is Colin Fitzgerald, a hockey-playing student who has decided that she is flighty and superficial. She is not interested in chasing anybody, but the two of them are living under the same roof with an attraction neither will admit to.
Bree Camden and Nathan Donelson have been best friends for years. Bree is in love with him and has decided that saying so would ruin the friendship, which is a complicated position to hold when he is also an NFL quarterback and the most photographed man she knows. After one drink too many she tells a reporter how she really feels, and the story is everywhere by the morning. Nathan's answer to the resulting attention is that the two of them should pretend to be together, and the pretending takes more managing than either of them expected.
Tara, princess of Helium and daughter of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, has suitors she has no patience for, and Gahan, jed of the city-state of Gathol, is one of them; her first impression of him is that he is vain and decorative. Then a storm catches her flier and drives it far beyond the country she knows, and she is taken captive in a region where the name of Helium carries no weight at all. The fifth Barsoom novel follows a princess who has to survive on her own.
In 1944 in Brooklyn, fifteen-year-old Reuven Malter plays a baseball game between his Modern Orthodox school and a team from a Hasidic yeshiva, and the opposing team turns out to be carried by a single player, Danny Saunders. When Danny's line drive breaks Reuven's glasses and drives a piece of glass into his eye, the accident begins a friendship between two boys whose Jewish communities hold to very different doctrines.
Hazel finds a coded message hidden inside a book in the shop where she works, and then more of them. Following the trail of clues needs a second person, and the one who volunteers is Noah, a fisherman who has been coming into the bookstore for months for reasons he has not mentioned.
Mae Holland, a recent college graduate, lands a job at a powerful technology company called the Circle, mainly through the help of her college friend Annie, who is one of the most influential people in the firm. Mae is impressed by the campus with its housing, gyms and parties. Her initially rewarding experience turns darker as the company's reach expands.
A middle-aged spinster decides to give up her house in the city for a summer and takes a furnished place in the country with her niece and nephew. The house comes with a reputation, and the strange events that begin there turn into a series of crimes that she has to make sense of with the police a step behind her.
Cathy Day's first book, The Circus in Winter, was published in 2004. It is a group of connected stories about the Great Porter Circus, which spends its winters in the invented town of Lima, Indiana, and they are presented as exhibits in a travelling display, each one introducing another of the people whose lives the circus has shaped.
Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad in Besźel investigates the murder of a foreign student found dead in the street with her face disfigured. His inquiries lead him towards Ul Qoma, the city that shares his city's ground, and towards the quarrel between two places whose citizens are forbidden to acknowledge each other.
Nahri survives in Cairo by pretending to be a healer, with just enough real talent to be dangerous and no idea where it came from. When she calls on a djinn as a joke for a paying client, she gets an answer: a warrior from a hidden city, who tells her that the magic in her blood belongs to a people she has never heard of and that the things hunting her are not going to stop. He takes her to Daevabad, a city of brass and the capital of the daeva, where six tribes have kept an uneasy peace under a king who does not want a human-raised girl with that much power inside his walls.
The city of Ember was built as a last refuge for the human race, and two hundred years later the great lamps that light it are beginning to flicker. When Lina finds part of an ancient message she becomes sure it holds a secret that will save the city, and she and her friend Doon have to work out the clues before the lights go out for good.
The twelve original creatures have been destroyed, along with most of the viral population they created, and the survivors on the continent are beginning to build something. Their relief lasts one generation. Two survivors go looking for the truth about what remains: one hunting the creature that started everything, the other sailing in search of the minefields that were supposed to keep the infection contained.
New York is a city that has become conscious, and its avatar has fallen into a coma and vanished. Five new avatars, one for each borough, are waking up instead: a graduate student who steps off a train without his memory, a gallery director in the Bronx, a politician in Brooklyn and others, and all of them have the same enemy.
The old tale has the spell broken by a prince's kiss. This retelling, the first of a trilogy, begins with the prince waking Beauty by other means and taking her away from the castle, where she is trained in the customs of his household instead of being returned to the parents who have slept through her hundred years.
A five-year-old girl named Ayla, who readers come to understand is Cro-Magnon, is orphaned and left homeless by an earthquake. She is taken in by a group of Neanderthals, and the novel follows her upbringing among people unlike her, in a story that speculates about the interactions between Neanderthal and modern human populations in prehistoric Europe.
Eleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother are smoking a forbidden cigarette in a vacant lot near Memphis when a car pulls up and a lawyer parks beside them. What happens in the next hour leaves Mark knowing where a murdered senator's body is, and makes him the person both the federal prosecutors and the Mafia most want to find.
The Climb is Anatoli Boukreev's account of the 1996 disaster on Everest, in which eight climbers died, written with the journalist G. Weston DeWalt. It is also a reply to criticism of Boukreev's own conduct during the climb, and it was published in the same year as Jon Krakauer's account of the same events.
Agatha Christie's The Clocks came out in Britain in November 1963 and in the United States the following year. It features Hercule Poirot, and it is unusual among the Poirot books in that its detective never leaves his chair to visit a crime scene or question a witness; the puzzle turns on the times shown by a set of clocks found in the room with the body.
Commander Elena Shaw is chief engineer aboard a Central Corps ship, and when her crewmate Danny is murdered on the colony world of Volhynia the authorities arrest her lover Treiko Zajec, who she knows was with her at the time. Retracing Danny's last hours, the pair uncover a link to a starship explosion the government has lied about for twenty-five years and may go to war with the outlaw PSI to protect.
Ringil Eskiath carries a broadsword forged by the kiriath, has been disowned by his family and is wanted by the slave traders of Trelayne. He is also being noticed by the dark gods, who are taking an interest without making any more sense than usual. With nowhere else to go he travels south, to the city at the heart of the Empire, where his old comrade Archeth advises the emperor.
Winter Santiaga is the teenage daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin, and she has grown up certain that she deserves the best of everything and that her father's power will always be standing behind her. Then he is arrested for drug trafficking and she is sent to a girls' home with nothing but the habits she learned from watching him.
The first book of the Interdependency sequence is set in a human interstellar empire whose settlements depend on a network of routes through space. When those routes begin to change, the arrangement that keeps the empire's worlds supplied and connected starts to fail, and the people who understand the problem have to convince an establishment that does not want to hear it.
In the Queendom of Sol, programmable matter called wellstone can imitate almost any substance, and a crystal made of miniature black holes called collapsium can send matter and information across the solar system instantly. Bruno de Towaji invented collapsium and dreams of an instrument that could reach the edges of spacetime, while his rival Marlon Sykes is building a ring of it around the sun.
A lonely young man has watched a female art student across London for a long time, and when money comes his way he buys a house in the country with a converted cellar. Then he takes her, keeps her there and tells himself that patience will do the work. The novel gives the captive half the book to answer him, and her account does not agree with his.
Celie is a poor Black girl in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century, and the novel is made of the letters she writes, first to God and later to her sister Nettie, who has gone to Africa as a missionary. Through them the reader follows Celie's marriage, the women who come into her life, including the singer Shug Avery, her sister's letters from another continent, and the slow accumulation of a life that Celie begins to shape for herself.
A man's body is found on a small island off the coast of Maine, with no wallet, no name and no explanation for how he got there. The case goes nowhere: the police are left with dead ends, and more than a year passes before anybody identifies him. Everything else about the death stays open, and the two people who run the island's newspaper never stop thinking about it.
Discworld is a flat world carried through space on the back of four elephants standing on a turtle, and its first tourist is Twoflower, a property insurance salesman who has read a book about the place that was wrong in every important line. He arrives in Ankh-Morpork with a magic suitcase made of sapient pearwood that walks on its own legs and is full of gold. Rincewind is the failed wizard appointed to keep him alive, mostly by running away, because he has a spell stuck in his head that makes real magic impossible. Together they travel towards the edge of the world, pursued by the city's guilds, a fire, and a great many people who want the luggage.
Jack Aubrey, now a commodore with a squadron under him, is sent to the coast of West Africa to act against the trade in slaves, and afterwards to a station where Napoleon's navy is to be found. On land, meanwhile, Stephen Maturin meets a daughter he has never seen and finds that an old enemy intends to reach him through her.
The Concubine is the first novel by the Nigerian writer Elechi Amadi, published in 1966 in the Heinemann African Writers Series. It is set in a village in eastern Nigeria that European influence has not yet reached, and it tells of a woman of great beauty whose lovers come to grief.
In 1998 a young woman is abducted and killed outside a small East Texas town, and the man who did it watches the police arrest a high school football player for the crime. Nine years later Travis Boyette is ill and decides to clear the innocent man's name. Donté Drumm has days left before his execution, and the lawyer fighting for him is running out of ways to be heard.
Mehring is a rich white businessman in apartheid South Africa who is not satisfied with his life. On a whim he buys a four-hundred-acre farm outside the city, and although he knows nothing about farming and the black workers run it, the land becomes the place where his wealth and his losses start to press on him.
Tessa Quayle is murdered beside a lake in northern Kenya, and the doctor who was travelling with her, the man the newspapers call her lover, has disappeared. Her husband Justin is a diplomat posted in Nairobi, much older than Tessa and not by any account a man who chases things. He resigns and goes looking for who killed her and why.
Katherine of Aragon is born Catalina, the Spanish Infanta, to parents who are both rulers and warriors, and at four years old she is betrothed to Arthur, Prince of Wales. In this version of her life the marriage becomes a real and loving partnership with plans to rule England together, and it ends after three months when Arthur dies of the sweating sickness. What follows is the rest of her career in England.
The Flow, the extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel between the stars possible, is disappearing, and when it is gone the star systems of the Interdependency will be cut off from one another. Emperox Grayland II is trying to make the empire prepare for a collapse that most of its people would rather not think about. Claiming religious visions to force the issue wins her enemies inside her own church and among the great houses.
Wydrin of Crosshaven and Sir Sebastian make their living by going down into ruins and coming back with something worth selling, and they have heard the stories about the caverns beneath the Citadel without believing any of them. Then a crippled nobleman offers them money to go and look, and the thing they find down there has been waiting for someone to open the way.
For as long as anyone can remember, the demons have come up out of the ground at night and hunted human beings down to a few scattered settlements. This is the book in which the story that began with The Warded Man is brought to an end. The reckoning with that place is what the book is for.
Alfred and Enid Lambert have raised three children in a Midwestern suburb, and Alfred is slipping into Parkinson's disease and dementia while Enid decides that the family should spend one more Christmas together. Their children are spread across the country and occupied with the lives they have built, and every one of them is dealing with something they have not told their parents about.
Sybil Van Antwerp writes letters. In the mornings she writes to her brother, to her closest friend, to a university president who has refused to let her sit in on a class, and to authors whose books she has just finished, and she also writes, over and over, a letter that she never sends. Then something arrives that makes her read it again.
Edmond Dantes is a young sailor with a promotion and a wedding ahead of him when he is denounced by men who want what he has and imprisoned without trial in an island fortress. The novel follows what becomes of him, of those who accused him and of the people who once depended on him, across France, Italy and the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1839. It opens on the day Napoleon leaves Elba, and the politics of the Bourbon Restoration run underneath everything.
Lady Sophia Bryant has no intention of ever marrying, but her parents have been estranged for fourteen years and her one wish is to bring them back together. Announcing a betrothal, even a false one, would force them both to attend to her. Lord Francis Sutton, a handsome and notorious rake, is perfect for the deception, being always ready for a game provided it costs him nothing.
Christiana's marriage was short and unpleasant, and when her husband dies she decides not to let the required period of mourning spoil her sisters' first season. She has him put on ice and carries on, which works until the man's twin brother turns up, having been robbed of his name by the husband she has just buried.
Anne and Marco Conti appear to have everything: a loving marriage, a good home and a baby daughter called Cora. One night, while they are at a dinner party at the neighbours' house, a crime is committed, and suspicion falls immediately on the parents, although the truth is more tangled than that.
Sarah Noble is eight years old when she travels with her father into the Connecticut wilderness to build a new home for the family. She is left in the care of a neighbouring Native family while her father goes back for the other children, and she has to find her courage in a place she has never been.
Nico di Angelo and Will Solace return from Tartarus and travel to Camp Jupiter, where Hazel Levesque needs help with a problem they caused: the monsters of the Underworld have learned that they have options and some have come to the camp seeking refuge. Then the newcomers start disappearing one by one, and all three of them turn out to be connected to whoever is taking them.
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.
