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 51 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.
The Devil in the White City sets two stories side by side in Chicago at the time of the 1893 world's fair: that of Daniel Burnham, the architect who had to get the fair built, and that of H. H. Holmes, whose crimes have led him to be described as the first American serial killer.
Mario's four-year-old daughter is diagnosed with leukaemia, he loses his job and his health insurance, and the treatment does not work. To pay for it he takes work as a hired killer, and once that door is open it does not shut. When his daughter dies and his wife leaves, a final job, robbing a cartel's cash shipment, looks like the only way out.
Persepha cannot believe it when her beloved guardian dies suddenly. Perhaps it is the numbness of grief that makes her listen to Don Diablo Ezreldo Ruy, her guardian's friend, when he announces that he intends to marry her. She protests that she does not love him, and he assures her that love will come. All too soon she understands that what he actually wants from her is a child.
Penn Cage was a prosecuting attorney who sent killers to death row, and now he is the mayor of the town he grew up in, where the arrival of casino gambling has changed everything. Beside the old slave market float five steamboats, and one of them is drawing gamblers away from Las Vegas.
The story of an engineer who creates a device for raising a girl capable of thinking for herself, and of what happens when a young girl from the poor underclass obtains that device. The novel is set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects every aspect of life, and it is to some extent a coming-of-age story focused on a girl named Nell.
At the start of the twentieth century Ellen Rimbauer, the young bride of a Seattle industrialist, begins to keep a diary. In it she records her anxieties about her marriage, her confusion about her own desires and the growing strangeness of her life, while the enormous house her husband is building, Rose Red, becomes a place where people disappear.
Lucas is a playboy, a rebel and a rogue, and nobody denies him anything: women fall at his feet and into his bed at the click of his fingers, and his life is charmed, reckless and carefree. Grace Carter knows that working with a man as uncontrollable as Lucas could ruin her career, and she will not tolerate his behaviour, whatever the chemistry between them. Working with him, however, turns out to be thrilling.
Shevek is a physicist on Anarres, a world settled by anarchists who left the capitalist planet Urras generations earlier. He travels back to Urras to work on his theory, and finds that each society holds ideas about him that he cannot satisfy, and that his own has become something he no longer recognises.
Delia Rae Ivers left the small town of Serendipity ten years ago for medical school, ending her relationship with Zach Bowden and not telling him that she was pregnant. Her mother's illness brings her back to the town, and to the man she left behind. The son she has been raising knows very little about his father.
Ashley is ten, still furious about her father's death, and she and her mother have moved into the upper floor of a boarding house whose owner dislikes children. The overgrown garden is forbidden to her, and it is where she meets a younger neighbour, hears crying coming from the hedges, and digs up an antique doll buried in a box with a note of apology inside it.
The dolphins the original colonists brought to Pern are still there in the Ninth Pass, and two young people are the ones who rediscover what they are. Readis, the son of the Paradise River Lord Holder, was saved as a boy by dolphins he calls shipfish; T'lion is a young dragonrider who had an encounter of his own.
Robin is ten years old and about to be sent away to serve as a knight's page when illness takes the use of his legs. With the plague sweeping through London and the household that was to take him in emptied by it, he is left behind with nothing to do and has to find another way of being useful in a country that has already decided what a boy like him can be.
Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon and the George, published in 1976, was the first of his Dragon Knight books. Its hero is a medieval historian at an American university who follows his fiancee into another world and finds himself inhabiting the body of a dragon. It is a comic novel, and the joke is that his reading has prepared him for everything about the Middle Ages except the way things actually work there.
The Dragonbone Chair opens the trilogy that Tad Williams called Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. It takes place in Osten Ard, a land shared by humans and other thinking creatures, and it follows a castle servant called Simon from the last days of a long reign into a country that is coming apart.
Five dragonets were raised together beneath a mountain because a prophecy says they are the ones who will end the war between three queens. When they meet Queen Scarlet the encounter goes badly, and most of them are taken to the Sky Kingdom, which is the first time any of them has seen the world they were born to save.
Roland, the last gunslinger, walks a beach and finds three mysterious doorways. Each one opens into the life of a different person living in New York, and through them Roland draws the companions who will travel with him. Their company is the point of the exercise, because the quest he is on cannot be completed alone.
Randolph Carter dreams three times of a marvellous city at the edge of the sunset, and then cannot find it again. He sets out through the dreamlands to reach it, and the route runs through places that the gods of that world keep guarded, past creatures that have no interest in whether he arrives, and through cities of the dead that answer questions only in their own way.
A thousand five hundred years after the Commonwealth barely survived a war against an alien species called the Prime, the galaxy is facing something larger. At its centre is the Void, a self-contained microuniverse that cannot be entered or destroyed and has been expanding for millions of years, consuming everything in its path. Then an astrophysicist studying it begins to dream of people who live inside.
Solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps, temperatures at the equator have become unbearable, and London is now a flooded tropical lagoon. Robert Kerans is a biologist working there, and the novel follows him as he is drawn further into the drowned city and the world that has replaced it, and further away from restoring what was there before.
Aaron Falk left the farming town he grew up in twenty years ago, after he and his father were driven out of it. He does not go back for the funeral of his childhood friend Luke, whose family was murdered with him, until a note arrives saying that Luke lied and Falk lied and that he should be there. So he goes, into the worst drought the district has seen.
Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, comes back to London in 1813 with a reputation for arrogance and no intention of ever marrying. Daphne Bridgerton is the eldest daughter of a large and noisy family whose mother has pushed her into the marriage market, and the two of them agree to a pretence that will keep the matchmaking mothers of the ton away from both of them for the season.
Virginia Shreves is fifteen and a sophomore at a private school in Manhattan, where she is the one member of her family who is not thin, brilliant and good-looking. Her sister has gone to Africa to get away from their mother, and her brother Byron, whom she has always admired, has been suspended from Columbia University. Virginia is hiding most of herself, and then she stops hiding.
Marian works at a market research company, shares an apartment with a friend who keeps borrowing her clothes, and has a boyfriend she is not sure about. Then he proposes, and the wedding begins arranging itself around her. At about the same time she stops being able to eat, and the food she cannot eat starts to look like the people around her.
In a mining town in southern Illinois, a man is tried and convicted of shooting his neighbour during a weekend gathering of the two families, and sentenced to be executed. Days before the sentence is to be carried out he is rescued by masked men and disappears, and what follows is the story of what became of him and of his family.
Norman is the clever one of a close-knit Jewish family in the East End of London: an infant prodigy, a brilliant barrister and the pride of his parents. At forty-one he is a drug addict confined to his bedroom, at the mercy of hallucinations and paranoia, and his committal to a mental hospital is where the novel begins.
The Electric State is an illustrated novel by the Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, published in 2018. In Swedish it is called Passagen, and the English edition came from Skybound Books. The story is told in short passages attached to large paintings of landscape, machinery and people travelling through them, and it follows a teenage orphan and a robot as they cross a ruined America looking for the brother she lost.
Beldame is a strip of land on the Gulf where three Victorian summer houses were built and sand has been swallowing the place ever since. Two are still used by the McCray and Savage families from Mobile; the third is being left to fill up, and something is living in it. This summer the families arrive with a funeral behind them and a divorce ahead.
Dante Maroni is the heir to a criminal outfit and has been trained for the position since he was a child. While working undercover inside the syndicate responsible for a series of missing children, he finds something that changes what he thought he knew, and the game he sets in motion pulls in Amara.
Hai is nineteen and standing on a bridge over a river in East Gladness, Connecticut, in the rain, when an old woman calls out to him from the far bank. Grazina is a widow whose memory is failing, and she talks him back from the edge. He has nowhere else to go, and he becomes the person who looks after her.
The Emperor's New Clothes is a literary fairy tale by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. Its emperor cares only for fine clothes, and the tale turns on the way he is exposed in front of his own subjects. It came out in 1837 alongside The Little Mermaid, as the last part of a collection of his tales, and the phrase it gave to the language has been in use ever since.
Lucky has always been a Lone Dog, surviving on the city's streets by instinct and keeping away from Leashed Dogs and their owners. Then the Big Growl, a devastating earthquake, flattens the city, and he has to work out how to live with a pack of frightened former pets who have lost everything. Water runs short, the weather turns, and the pack must decide what it is willing to do to survive.
An old stone prison, seen through the eyes of a man on death row who survives it by reading and by imagining the world around him in brighter colours than it has. Into this place comes an investigator whose job is to dig up the history of the men waiting to be executed, and she finds information that unsettles the distinctions she has relied on.
Three children are on holiday in the West Country when they find a country estate that looks like a castle out of a fairy tale. In a maze in the rose garden they come across a sleeping princess, who is a girl playing a game, and a ring that makes whoever wears it invisible.
Alex and Conner Bailey have not been back to the Land of Stories since their first visit, and then the Enchantress takes their mother. To get her back, the twins have to find a way into the fairy-tale world themselves, against their grandmother's instructions. The world they remember as joyful is not the one they find on the other side.
Earth and the Colonial Union have parted ways, and neither is on good terms with the Conclave, the coalition of alien governments. The Union is running out of soldiers because no new recruits are coming from Earth, and something calling itself Equilibrium is attacking both sides. A lieutenant and a small group of diplomats have to find out who before the colonies become easy targets.
Eternity is an organisation that exists outside ordinary time and adjusts human history from within, smoothing away disasters and the risks that would otherwise shape it. Andrew Harlan is one of its technicians, and the assignment he is given sets him against the rule he has spent his working life serving.
Maurice Bendrix is a writer in London, and he is telling the story of an affair he had during the war with Sarah Miles, the wife of a civil servant he has counted as a friend. He is telling it because she has died, and because he wants to know what happened in the months when he was sure she had left him for someone else.
At the edge of a strange lake that seems to stretch on forever, Lucky and his Pack are about to discover even more dangers than the ones they have already survived. With the Fierce Dogs on their trail and the Storm of Dogs looming on the horizon, every dog will have to fight for survival or be swept away.
A statue of a two-legged alien, recovered on Iapetus, one of the moons of Saturn, settled the long question of whether human beings were alone, and faster-than-light ships went on to find enormous Monuments circling other stars. The people who built them were never seen. Priscilla Hutchins, a starship pilot, and the scientists she flies for are still trying to explain the Monuments, where their makers put them and what they were for.
Leonie de Conyers is an aristocratic young woman whose life is broken by the French Revolution and who lives afterwards in the shadow of the guillotine. Roger St. Eyre is an English nobleman who sets out to bring her to safety, without knowing what taking her out of France will cost either of them.
At the end of the Second World War, four damaged people are living in a ruined Italian villa: a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief and a burned man who cannot remember his own name. As they care for the patient his past as a desert explorer returns in fragments, and the others reveal what the war has cost them.
Genie Lo is an overachiever in a sleepy Bay Area suburb, working at volleyball, at her grades and at the question of how to get into Harvard. Then her home town comes under attack from demons straight out of Chinese folklore, and her priorities are rearranged. A new boy in her class, Quentin Sun, appoints himself her guide to fighting them.
Cora Seaborne is a recent widow with an interest in natural history, and she moves with her son to a village in Essex where an old rumour has revived: that a serpent has come back to the marshes. The local vicar, William Ransome, is certain the stories are superstition and that there is something worse behind them, and the two of them argue over what nature and faith can account for while the parish looks on. The novel is set in late nineteenth-century England.
Shay Goldstein has spent close to ten years producing programmes at a public radio station in Seattle and cannot imagine working anywhere else. Her newest colleague, Dominic Yun, is fresh from a journalism master's and sure he knows how public radio should be made, and the two of them clash every day. When the station needs a new show, Shay suggests that two exes could give relationship advice live on air, and their boss decides that the pair of them, who can hardly be in a room together, should present it.
Gary Gilmore became famous in 1976 after he robbed two men in Utah and killed them, and after he was tried and convicted he insisted on being executed for it. He then had to fight a legal system that was prepared to keep him alive long after he had given up on the idea himself. The book follows the short and blighted life that led to the killings and what happened when he refused to let the case be appealed.
Regan MacNeil is eleven, her mother is a film actress, and the behaviour that begins in their Washington house is not an illness any doctor can name or treat. When medicine fails, two priests are brought in to attempt an exorcism on the girl. The novel grew out of a case of possession and exorcism its author heard about as a university student, and it is set in the neighbourhood around that campus.
In the remote village of Emond's Field, in the Two Rivers, the arrival of a mysterious noblewoman is followed by an attack by Trollocs. She identifies herself as Moiraine Damodred, of the Aes Sedai, and warns that servants of the Dark One are looking for one of three young men: Rand al'Thor, Perrin Aybara and Matrim Cauthon. They leave the village with Moiraine and her Warder, Lan Mandragoran, joined by a young woman from the same village, and spend the first volume being chased across a map that keeps getting larger. The world has a history built out of seven ages that repeat, women who can channel the One Power and men who cannot safely, and a prophecy about a dragon that nobody wants fulfilled.
A year after her son Danny is said to have died on a camping trip, the stage producer Tina Evans is preparing a new show in Las Vegas and trying to decide whether she is allowed to be happy again. Then words appear on the chalkboard in Danny's old room telling her that he is not dead. She never saw his body.
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.
