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 5 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.
The faction-based society Tris Prior once believed in has been shattered by violence, power struggles and loss. Offered a chance to explore the world beyond the limits she has known, she takes it, hoping that she and Tobias will find a simpler life free of lies and tangled loyalties. What they find is more alarming than what they left, and Tris has to face impossible choices.
Darren Shan, now a Vampire Prince and a killer of vampaneze, is obliged to attend school. Homework turns out to be the least of his problems, because bodies are piling up, time is running out and the past is catching up with the hunters. The school is cover for an investigation into whether the vampaneze have taken territory in the town.
Elizabeth Cameron, the Countess of Havenhurst, is discovered in the arms of Ian Thornton, a gambler whose wealth and lineage are both a mystery, and the scandal that follows changes her position in society. Years later the two meet again, each with reasons to distrust the other, and are drawn into an arrangement neither of them planned. Both believe the worst of the other and have their own reasons for it.
Pepper Prescott was the middle child of siblings who were separated into foster homes around the country after their parents disappeared, and she has grown up independent and rebellious. Then she witnesses a shooting and goes on the run, and the only place she can think of is the remote mountain ranch where she once felt at home. Her old lover lives there now.
Alex Cross is a detective and a psychologist in Washington, called to a murder in the projects and then seconded to a kidnapping case involving two children of famous families. The kidnapper is a teacher at their school, a man who has been planning this for years. Cross works alongside the Secret Service, the FBI and a supervisor named Jezzie Flanagan.
Set in a future where interstellar travel and relative immortality are made possible by transferring consciousness between bodies, the novel follows Takeshi Kovacs, a former elite soldier turned private investigator, as he investigates a rich man's death. The case puts him inside a society where death is negotiable and where the powerful can afford to survive almost anything.
A charity dinner at a San Francisco hotel is broken apart by the strongest earthquake the city has felt since 1906, and four guests come out of the wreckage into lives they did not expect: Sarah Sloane, whose financier husband's fraud is exposed when the power fails, the singer Melanie Free, the photographer Everett Carson and a nun named Maggie Kent, who works with the city's homeless.
Annabelle Pace was Gregory Talbott's true love until she left him without any explanation. Now she is back in town, and he is determined to get answers out of her, if he can keep his hands off her long enough to ask the question. He has waited a long time for the chance to ask, and he does not intend to waste it.
Five young Ayrtons grow up at Amberwell, playing in its gardens and preparing themselves to go out into the world. To each of the children the house means something different, but they share the belief that Amberwell is more than where they live. It drives one of them into a reckless marriage and heals another of his wounds, and one child stays at home and gives up her life to keep it running.
Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, published in 2006 with colouring by Lark Pien, tells three stories that look separate until the end of the book. One of them retells the Monkey King from the Chinese classic Journey to the West, and all three are concerned with what it is like to want to be someone else.
Shadow Moon leaves prison a few days early, on the day his wife dies, and takes a job from a man calling himself Mr Wednesday who seems to know more about him than he should. The work is errands: driving, standing where he is told, and being present at meetings with people who are more than they appear. Wednesday is recruiting allies for a war with the newer gods of media, highways and credit, while the older gods he approaches came to America with the people who brought their beliefs and now have far fewer worshippers. Shadow is caught between the two sides, his dead wife keeps turning up, and the trip runs from the northern lakes towards a small town in the middle of the country.
American Gothic is an anthology edited by Charles L. Crow, published in 1999, which gathers Gothic writing from nineteenth-century America. It sets stories, novellas and poems by a wide range of authors into conversation with one another, and it takes the fears of that society as its subject, along with the arguments that those fears provoked among the writers who lived through them.
Seymour Levov, known to everyone as the Swede, is a successful businessman and a former school athlete in Newark, New Jersey, and his life looks settled from the outside. Then the politics of the 1960s reach into his own household, and the ordinary American happiness that he had built for his family comes apart.
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six, works in mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street, and spends his evenings in restaurants where the food and the reservations matter more than the people eating it. He is also a killer, and the novel gives both lives in the same flat, detailed register: the suits, the tapes, the grooming routine and the violence are described with identical care. The narration is his own and is not reliable. The book is a satire of a particular version of the 1980s, delivered in the voice of the man it is describing.
Ifemelu is a young Nigerian woman who emigrates to the United States to attend university, and the novel follows her life in both countries. It is threaded through with her love story with Obinze, a classmate from her Lagos secondary school, and with the blog she writes about race in America, a subject she encounters directly only after arriving. The novel moves between Lagos, the United States and Britain, which lets it compare what each country demands of the people who arrive in it.
Mori Phelps is fifteen, Welsh, and newly sent to an English boarding school after a summer in which her twin sister was killed. She walks with a cane, she has a mother she does not trust, and the things she relies on are the science fiction novels she reads and the fairies she has known since she was a child in an industrial town in the valleys.
Luke Garner has been living at a school under a false name: that of Lee Grant, a boy who died in a skiing accident and whose family agreed to give his identity to another child. Then the Grants decide to send their younger son, Smithfield, to the same school, and he wants to talk about the brother he lost. Luke also finds two documents in Smithfield's room that have no explanation.
The government of this country says the world is overcrowded, and a family may have two children. A third child is a shadow child, and a shadow child is killed when found. Matthias, Percy and Alia are taken from their school with a crowd of other children and put on a truck that is described as a work detail. What happens on the road gives them a way to fight back from inside the Population Police.
Luke Garner has been working inside the Population Police from the stables, waiting for a chance to bring it down. When he is sent out to help hand new identification cards to citizens, a moment of refusal sets off a rebellion that sweeps the country, and the organisation that hunted children like him loses its grip. What replaces it turns out not to be what he had in mind.
Luke Garner is the third child of a farming family, which makes him illegal. In a country where the government has taken drastic measures over population, families are allowed only two children, and Luke has lived his whole life as a shadow child, kept out of sight. When new houses are built on part of the farm he loses what little freedom he had, and then he finds another hidden child living next door.
Luke Garner is terrified. He is out of hiding for the first time in his life, and any minute one of his new classmates could discover his secret: he is a third child passing as the recently deceased Lee Grant. In a society where families may not have more than two children, being a third child means death.
Owen is a high school teacher with an implant in his head, put there when he was a boy to control epilepsy, and he has always thought of it as a medical device. In the society of the near future, that is no longer a neutral fact: neural implants have made the people who carry them equal or superior to everybody else, and the Supreme Court has just ruled that those people are no longer a protected class.
Three of Molly Lane's former lovers meet at her funeral: the newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, the composer Clive Linley, and the Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony. Clive and Vernon are old friends, and the pact they then make with each other about how their lives should end becomes the engine of the story.
After her father dies in a car accident, Emily Hayes moves with her mother and brother into her great-grandfather's old house, where she finds a stone amulet in the library. When her mother is taken by a creature from below the house, Emily has to accept what the amulet makes her and go after her.
Emily, Navin and the resistance fighters they have joined leave on an airship to look for the lost city of Cielis, hoping to find the Guardian Council and the Stonekeepers who might be able to help them. Time is short, because the Elf King is hunting Emily as well, and the survival of their world depends on reaching the city first.
Colin Singleton is a child prodigy who has dated nineteen girls called Katherine and has just been dumped by the nineteenth. Convinced that he is losing the thing that made him special, he lets his best friend talk him into a road trip that ends in a small Tennessee town, where he meets a girl with a different name.
Clyde Griffiths is brought up by poor and devoutly religious parents, and he spends his youth taking whatever work will help to support them. What he wants is a life like the one he can see other people having, and the way he goes after it is what destroys him. The novel is based on a real murder and on the trial that followed it.
Hadassah was thrown to the lions in the arena, and the young physician who chose her body to study finds that she is still alive. She is carried away to heal in secret while the man whose family she once served begins to look for the faith she would not give up, even when it cost her everything.
At nineteen Hillary was a girl trying to keep pace with a husband who was years ahead of her, and when the marriage ended she built a wall around the memory of Clive Eastman. Six years later she has grown up, made a name as Brisbane's foremost interior designer and found a man she thinks she could share her life with. Then Clive comes back, and a single chance meeting is enough to revive feelings she believed she had successfully hidden.
Laia is a Scholar living under the rule of the Martial Empire, and when her brother is arrested for treason she goes undercover as a slave at the empire's military academy in exchange for the rebels' help in saving him. Elias is a soldier at the same academy who wants out of the life he was raised for.
The snow is thick, the telephone line is down and nobody is leaving Warbeck Hall, where a party has gathered for Christmas: a socialist cabinet minister, a historian from central Europe, a butler and his daughter, and an elderly viscount who is gravely ill. As the bells ring in Christmas Day, one of them is murdered inside the house, and the household is cut off from every kind of help.
Aster Gray is a healer in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a generation ship whose society is organised along the lines of the antebellum South, with dark-skinned passengers confined to the lower decks. The ship's leaders say it is carrying the last of humanity to a promised land. When the Sovereign dies, Aster looks into the connection between that death and her mother's suicide decades before.
Cordelia Gray, twenty-two years old, arrives at the London office of the Pryde Detective Agency to find that her partner Bernie Pryde has killed himself, leaving her the agency, its unlicensed handgun and a failing business. Her first client, the assistant to a prominent scientist named Sir Ronald Callender, hires her to discover why his son Mark hanged himself after leaving Cambridge to work as a gardener. Cordelia goes to Cambridge expecting to explain a suicide, and begins to suspect that Mark was murdered.
Mitchell's Inn is a lodge deep in the woods of the Catskills with spacious old rooms, wood-burning fireplaces and a well-stocked wine cellar, and a winter weekend there is meant to be a quiet, even romantic, escape. Then a blizzard takes out the electricity and all contact with the outside world. One guest dies in what looks like an accident, and a second death follows.
Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists and philosophers protected from the corrupting influences of the outside secular world by stone, tradition and ritual. Beyond the concent's walls cities and governments have risen and fallen, and three times violence has invaded the community and devastated it. The avout are banned from most advanced technology.
Breq was a ship: one mind running a starship and walking around in dozens of human bodies at once, until the day her ship was destroyed and she was left in a single body with a grievance and no rank. Nineteen years later she is in the snow of a distant system, looking for the one person she believes can help her reach the ruler of a self-declared empire that is quietly tearing itself apart. The Radch absorbed the planets it conquered, and its language does not mark gender, so the book's English pronouns work differently from most novels. The revenge she wants turns out to take longer and cost more than she planned.
Breq, who used to be a warship and is now a single body, has been given a station to look after and a fragile peace to keep. A search of the station's slums turns up someone who should not exist, and a messenger from the Presger empire arrives with questions nobody can answer.
Breq is a soldier who used to be a warship: once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, she now has a single body and serves the emperor. With a new ship and a troublesome crew she is ordered to Athoek Station to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew.
And Another Thing... is the sixth Hitchhiker's Guide book and the only one not written by Douglas Adams. Eoin Colfer was asked to write it by Adams's widow, Jane Belson, and it appeared in hardback on 12 October 2009, thirty years to the day after the first book in the series. It begins where Mostly Harmless left off and follows the surviving characters on from there.
In 2079 an attempt to mine a nearby asteroid sends it towards the Earth instead, and the disasters are already under way when two people walk into a bar in Reno, Nevada. The demon they meet there tells them the Earth is one of thousands of universes, and that he can save it if they gather six pieces of a magic item for him.
In a village in Afghanistan in 1952, a ten-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister are separated when their father decides to sell the girl to a childless couple in Kabul. The decision follows the family for generations, and the book is told by nine different people. Each of the nine speaks in their own voice.
Emmaline Dove is an authority on etiquette and works as the secretary to a viscount who runs a publishing house. She wants a book of her own, and the man who could give her that chance is the last person likely to take her advice about anything, since he has no idea that the person keeping his business in order is the woman whose manuscript he keeps putting aside.
Ten people are brought to an island off the coast of Devon, and each has a death in their past that was never answered for. Then they begin to be killed one at a time, in the order set out by a counting rhyme that hangs in every bedroom. Nobody can leave the island, and nobody can work out who among them is doing the killing.
Anya had wanted to move to Britain and start again, and now that she is there she sits in a school where nobody understands her and thinks about the Polish summer skies she left behind. Then she meets a boy called Dan. He is not a good influence on her.
Terry Brooks closed his Word and Void sequence with Angel Fire East, the third of its three books, in 1999. Its Christmas-season story is set in 2012, a decade on from A Knight of the Word, and the action comes back to Hopewell, Illinois, where Nest Freemark and John Ross are trying to unlock a magic that could change the world they live in.
Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, is called to a research institute in Switzerland overnight after a physicist is found murdered with a symbol burned into his chest. The symbol belongs to the Illuminati, a society long thought extinct, and a canister of antimatter has gone missing from the dead man's laboratory. Langdon and the scientist's daughter, Vittoria Vetra, follow the trail to Rome and to the Vatican, where the cardinals are gathering to elect a pope and the Swiss Guard has only hours to find the canister. The novel runs on a single day.
Reece Gilmore is the only survivor of a violent crime back east, and she has come to a small town in Wyoming to work in a diner and be somewhere nobody knows her. While hiking she sees a couple arguing on the bank of a river, and through her binoculars she watches the man put his hands around the woman's throat. By the time she brings help, there is nothing there.
Lyman Ward is a retired historian who uses a wheelchair and has lost touch with his son, and he decides to spend what time he has writing the story of his grandparents. Their letters describe a life spent on the frontier of the American west, and the work of reconstructing it makes him examine his own marriage at the same time.
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.
