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 52 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.
Two princes, Peter and Thomas, are the sons of a king who is murdered by his own magician, Flagg, in a scheme that puts Thomas on the throne and Peter in a cell. The novel follows the brothers, the friends who try to save Peter, and the long plans of the magician who wants the kingdom for himself.
The Fall of Gondolin, published in 2018, gathers the several versions J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of one of the central stories of Middle-earth. It is one of the three great tales of the First Age, and it describes the founding of the hidden city, the centuries in which it stood, and the treachery that brought it down.
An unnamed narrator rides to the decaying mansion of a friend from childhood, summoned by a letter that describes an illness and asks for help. Roderick Usher is pale, agitated and hypersensitive, his sister Madeline is wasting away, and the house itself seems to hold a mood of its own. The narrator stays, and what he is asked to help with is a burial.
The sickness took the adults of London, rotting their minds first and their bodies afterwards, and what is left of them now hunts the streets of the city. The Holloway crew have fought their way across town to the Natural History Museum, and their next trip out for medical supplies asks them whether humans are a greater danger than the creatures.
Rodrigo Borgia becomes Pope Alexander VI, and his belief that his office will excuse anything is the assumption his family lives on. His son Cesare is an ambitious soldier and politician, his daughter Lucrezia is married off to one husband after another for the sake of alliances, and the family's interests are always the first question in Rome. The city's other powers have to decide whether to work with them.
Shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones learns that she has inherited a large townhouse in Chelsea, London. Adopted as an infant, she knows very little about her biological family, and what she learns is that she was found alive in the house as a baby after the police uncovered the bodies of three adults. Libby's own birth name was Serenity Lamb.
Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child, living in an unnamed African city, and he is able to move between the spirit world and the world of people. The novel follows him and his family through poverty and political upheaval, with the two worlds running alongside each other rather than one being a figure for the other.
Captain Jack Aubrey is given a new mission: to take his ship to the Pacific and protect the British whaling fleet there from an American frigate, which will mean his first voyage around Cape Horn. Dr Stephen Maturin has not yet identified the senior French agent who escaped him, and he does not know that the letter he sends his wife is going by the hand of exactly that man.
The Farthest Shore is the third of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea novels, published in 1972 and awarded the National Book Award for children's books the following year. Something is wrong with the world: magic is failing, songs are being forgotten and people and animals are falling ill, and the Archmage Ged sets out from Roke Island with a young prince to find the cause of it.
As a small girl Dakin announced that she meant to travel to the Farthest-Away Mountain, meet a gargoyle and marry a prince. Two days before her fifteenth birthday she hears the mountain call to her in a dream and sees it nod, and leaves her valley for a place nobody she knows has ever reached, where a magician's son rules and a frog keeps watch.
It is 1961 in a world where a meteorite strike pushed humanity off the Earth faster than history managed, and the International Aerospace Coalition has a colony on the Moon. Elma York, the Lady Astronaut, is flying shuttles on rotation and calculating orbits. The next target is Mars, and the crew list for the first exploratory mission contains no women, on the grounds that the journey is too dangerous for them.
Frodo Baggins inherits a gold ring from his uncle and learns, over a long spring, that it is the one artifact the enemy of the world wants back. Keeping it in the Shire is not safe; carrying it anywhere is worse, because the ring works on whoever holds it. Frodo leaves with three friends and a guide, pursued by riders in black, and reaches the council at Rivendell where the ring's history is finally explained. Nine companions set out from there to take it to the only place it can be destroyed: a mountain in the enemy's own country, with mountains, mines, a forest and a broken kingdom on the way.
Before the maze, there was the world's end: forests burnt, rivers dried, the oceans swollen, and then a plague that spread across the globe until families were dying and people were killing each other. Then came WICKED, an organisation looking for a way out of it, and the children it collected in order to find one.
Harriet and David Lovatt marry young, share a taste for the settled family life they cannot find elsewhere, and buy a large house with room for the children they intend to have. The first four arrive to general disapproval and private happiness. Then Ben is born, and the household that was built for a particular kind of contentment cannot hold him.
The Stillness is a continent that tears itself apart every few centuries, and the people who live there have built a whole civilisation around surviving the next one. Essun lives quietly in a southern town as an orogene, a person who can move the earth with her mind, until she comes home to find that her son has been murdered and her daughter is gone. Two other stories run alongside hers: Damaya, a child handed over to a Guardian because her family cannot bring themselves to kill her, and Syenite, a Fulcrum-trained orogene sent out on a mission with the most powerful orogene alive. Orogenes are feared, controlled and conscripted, and the season that begins in this book will not end in a lifetime.
Storm has worked out which dog betrayed the Pack, but coming back from exile has put her straight into the traitor's hands. Held prisoner in the Wild Pack's camp, she is short of allies and shorter of time, and saving the dogs she grew up with means finishing what the traitor started. The pack she left is divided, and every dog in the camp is a possible enemy.
The prison that holds the Dark One is weakening, and his immortal servants have been tightening their hold on the nations of men for a long time. Rand al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn, must strike first, but his own forces are divided by treachery and ambition, the Aes Sedai are fighting among themselves and he carries the madness that comes to men who use the One Power.
Lila's father makes fireworks for a king, and Lila wants to be a maker herself rather than a daughter who is married off. Told that she must find the Royal Sulphur from the sacred volcano of the Goddess of Fire to earn the title, she sets off through a country far to the east with her friend Chulak and a talking white elephant for company.
Mitch is the best student in his year, and instead of the big-city offers he takes a job with a small, extremely rich tax firm in Memphis that pays far more than it should and treats its new man like family. The partners are proud that nobody has ever resigned. Then the FBI makes contact, and Mitch understands that staying and leaving both have a price.
Laura and Almanzo Wilder are married and working their own homestead on the prairie, and this book follows the first four years of their life together. There are good crops and bad ones, debts, weather, neighbours, sickness and livestock, and a daughter called Rose, and not everything the couple builds survives the seasons that follow.
Gemma Grantham and Bette Dickens pool their savings for a luxurious holiday at the Hotel Splendide on the south coast of France. Gemma, escaping a dreary working life in the north of England, pretends to be an heiress, is taken up by Rudy Shore, a handsome fortune seeker, and the holiday brings a shipwreck off the Brittany coast before it brings true love.
The First Men in the Moon is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells about two Englishmen who travel to the Moon and find an advanced civilisation of insect-like creatures living inside it. It appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic in 1900 and 1901, and came out as a book in 1901.
Abe and Dan are widowers who fish together in the woods of upstate New York, and the shared habit is the one thing keeping either of them upright. When they hear about a creek where the fishing is meant to be extraordinary, and where the catch is supposed to be able to undo a loss, they treat it as a tall story. Then they follow it up the water and into an older story about a bargain, a long-kept secret and a man called Der Fisher.
Eddie is the maintenance man at a seaside amusement park, and on his eighty-third birthday a ride comes apart and he is killed trying to save a child. He wakes in heaven, where he is told that he will meet five people whose lives crossed his own. The first of them is a stranger whose death Eddie caused without ever knowing it.
Heather Simmons is an orphan in London, put into service and then forced onto a ship bound for America. Brandon Birmingham, a wealthy planter, comes across her at the docks and takes her with him, and the marriage that follows is not one that either of them chose or wanted at that moment.
William Mandella is drafted into a war against an enemy nobody has met, trained on a frozen planet where the survival rate is the point, and shipped out for a first strike that almost kills him. Relativistic travel means every tour he serves costs years at home while costing him months, so he comes back to a world that has moved on without him, again and again, and to promotions that exist because the people above him are dead. The war lasts for centuries while the soldiers who fight it age only months at a time, and every leave he takes on Earth is spent in a country he recognises less than the last time.
Patricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, published in 1974, took the World Fantasy Award for best novel the following year. It is the story of Sybel, who has lived alone on a mountain with the mythical creatures her father summoned, and of what happens when a child is left in her care and she is made to promise that she will love it.
On her twenty-first birthday Nell learns that she was adopted, that she was found on an Australian wharf in 1913 at the age of four, and that nobody ever discovered her name. The news rearranges her life. Sixty years later a set of clues sends her to Cornwall, to a house called Blackhurst Manor and to the author of a book of fairy tales.
Maya Andreyeva is a camera: a reporter in a future Russia whose virtual reality broadcasting equipment is implanted in her brain, so that what she sees millions see and what she feels millions feel. In a twenty-fourth century where the United States has fallen as a world empire and most nations are third-rate powers beside a hypertechnological Africa, what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre.
Bound home from the far side of the world to take up a new command, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin have their passage interrupted by a fire aboard ship, and they find themselves caught up in a war that began while they were away. Much of what follows takes place in Boston, and the book turns two real battles of 1812 into fiction.
Howard Roark is an architect who will not design anything he does not believe in, which costs him the commissions that would make his career. Peter Keating, who was at school with him, takes the opposite approach and prospers. Around them are arranged a critic, a newspaper publisher and a woman who cannot decide whether she wants Roark to succeed or to be destroyed.
In the twenty-second century an engineer named Vannevar Morgan proposes to build a tower from the equator to geostationary orbit, a structure 36,000 kilometres high that would carry payloads into space without rockets. Only two places on Earth can anchor it, and the better of them is a mountain occupied by a community of monks who want nothing to do with the project.
The four warrior Clans have shared the land around the lake as equals for many seasons. A prophecy says that three ThunderClan cats will hold the power of the stars in their paws, and two of them already know who they are, but the identity of the third is still hidden. Two young sisters are preparing to take their apprentice names.
Marion Sharpe and her mother live quietly at The Franchise, a shabby country house, until a young woman named Betty Kane accuses them of having kidnapped her and held her in an attic room. The story sounds absurd to the local solicitor who takes the case, and then the girl describes the house, the room, the kitchen and the old trunks in a way that cannot easily be dismissed.
The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel by John Fowles, published in 1969 and set in Victorian England. Charles Smithson, a gentleman with a taste for natural history, is drawn to Sarah Woodruff, a former governess whose reputation has been ruined and whom the town has nicknamed the French Lieutenant's Woman, and the book tells their story while keeping one eye on the Victorian novels it imitates.
Kristen Petersen does not do drama, fights for her friends and has no patience for men who do not understand her. She is also keeping something to herself: a medically necessary procedure that will leave her unable to have children. She is helping to plan her best friend's wedding, which is complicated enough before she meets the best man, Josh Copeland, who is funny, unbothered by her sarcasm and popular with her dog. The problem is that Josh wants a large family of his own, and Kristen has decided he would be better off with somebody else.
Princess Emeralda is not a model princess: her laugh is like a donkey's bray, she trips over her own feet and she has no interest in the prince her mother wants her to marry. When she is persuaded to kiss a frog, the spell goes the wrong way and she turns into a frog herself.
In Maine in 1789 the Kennebec River freezes over, and the body of a man is found locked in the ice. Martha Ballard is called out to examine him because she is the midwife and healer for the district, and the death turns out to be connected to a case she is already entangled in.
Christy Mansel runs into her cousin Charles in Damascus, and because the two of them are young, rich and used to doing as they please, they decide to visit their eccentric Great-Aunt Harriet. The family has a rule against arriving unannounced at Dar Ibrahim, her crumbling palace in the Lebanese hills, and the cousins go anyway.
Gora has no water, no air and no native life, and its only advantage is that it sits near a transit hub where several wormhole tunnels meet, which makes it a useful stopover for ships crossing the Galactic Commons. The Five-Hop One-Stop on its surface sells fuel, transit permits and supplies to long-haul crews. Then a technical failure brings down almost every satellite in orbit and halts traffic for days, and the travellers stranded at the Five-Hop have to spend that time in one another's company.
Travelling incognito, Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes head for India to search for a missing spy, the man whose story is said to have inspired a famous imperial adventure novel. They find themselves caught in an intrigue that involves more than one government's interests in the region, and the search has to be conducted behind cover.
Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen when she first heard of the man who had been the gardener to the Emperor of Japan, and a war and a decade would pass before she travelled up to the Garden of Evening Mists in 1951 to see him. A survivor of a Japanese camp, she has been helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, and she asks the gardener to create a memorial garden for her sister.
Liam Hegarty, an alcoholic, has killed himself in the sea at Brighton, and his mother and eight of the nine surviving children gather in Dublin for his wake. The narrator is his sister Veronica, who is thirty-nine, and the novel follows her through the family's past and her own memory of what was done to Liam as a child.
A captain in the United States Army, a graduate of West Point and the daughter of a famous general, is found dead on the firing range at the base where she grew up. The investigation has to be handled carefully, and the man given it is a specialist in difficult cases.
Henry Montague was raised to be a gentleman and has spent his life avoiding it, with the gambling halls and the late nights and the company of whoever he pleased. His father's last attempt at reform is a grand tour of Europe with his best friend and his sister, and the tour goes wrong almost immediately when somebody else's property ends up in his hands.
The Colonial Defense Forces learn from a captured alien scientist that one of their own consciousness-transfer specialists has turned against them and built an alliance of three species aimed at wiping out humanity. He had stored a copy of his mind on a computer before he vanished, so a soldier is built from his DNA to carry it.
The Ghost Map is a work of popular history by Steven Johnson about a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and about the physician whose investigation of it changed how people thought about disease. It also takes in the growth of cities in the nineteenth century and the beginnings of modern epidemiology.
The Ghost Road is the last book of a trilogy about shell-shocked British officers at the end of the First World War. Its main figures are the real psychoanalyst William Rivers and the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior, who has been treated for shell shock and is preparing to go back to France.
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.
