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 53 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.
Sara Winchester was a child bride, and she has grown up expecting the day her husband, Nathan, Marquess of St. James, will come back and claim her heart. She is innocent enough to dismiss the ancient feud between his family and hers, and she has no idea who he has been in the meantime: the pirate known as Pagan.
Deka is sixteen and lives in fear and anticipation of the blood ceremony that will decide whether she can be accepted as a member of her village. She has always been different, because of an intuition she cannot explain, and she prays for red blood so that she will finally belong. On the day of the ceremony her blood runs gold, which is the colour of impurity, and she knows the consequence will be worse than death.
A minimalist London house comes with a long list of rules imposed by the architect who designed it, and a woman recovering from a traumatic break-in is glad to move in. Three years earlier another woman lived in the same house and died there. Both of them answered the same strange question about what they owned.
Okiku has been dead for centuries and spends her time hunting the living who murder the innocent and freeing the ghosts of their victims. Then she meets Tark, a quiet teenager covered in intricate tattoos, and instead of a killer she finds somebody who is being haunted by something that has attached itself to him.
Alexis Spencer is having the sort of year in which she loses her job and her relationship on the same day, and she blames the world for it, including the younger version of herself who should have tried harder. Then she finds a bottle of vodka from her college days and wakes up in the year 2002.
Keshav Rajpurohit graduated from the Indian Institutes of Technology and now teaches at a coaching centre for the entrance examinations, which he dislikes. He turns up on his ex-girlfriend's birthday to wish her well and finds her dead in her room. He has an obvious motive and no alibi, so the investigation he begins is partly an attempt to keep himself out of it.
Jules and her family have moved into an abandoned house while her father restores it, and she is lonely enough to start thinking about the girl who lived there a century earlier. The two of them begin to communicate, and the story the girl tells about her own life comes out slowly.
Rachel takes the same train twice a day and has learned the houses it passes, including the one where a couple she has never met eat breakfast on their deck. She has names for them and a whole idea of their lives, which are better than hers since her marriage ended. One morning she sees something she cannot explain away, and taking it to the police puts her inside the case.
During a family hiking trip, nine-year-old Trisha's mother and brother argue constantly about the divorce, and Trisha falls back to avoid listening. She wanders off the trail to find somewhere to relieve herself and cannot find her family again. Taking a shortcut to catch up, she slips and falls down a steep embankment and ends up hopelessly lost, heading deeper into the forest with only what she is carrying.
She wakes in a ransacked cabin with no memory of who she is or how she came to be there. Two men are arguing about whether to kill her, and one of them says to take her out back and finish her off. She runs, and the rest of the story is her attempt to find out who she is.
Melanie is ten and lives in a cell, collected each morning for lessons with a teacher she likes. She is one of a group of children studied by scientists at a military base, and the reason for the arrangement, and what Melanie actually is, becomes the novel's central question and changes what the reader thinks of everyone on the base.
Adunni is fourteen and living in rural Nigeria when her father marries her to a man who wants a son, and then sends her into domestic service in Lagos. She still wants the education her mother told her about, and the novel follows her through a household where she has no rights and a city where she has no protection.
Scotty has what looks like the perfect girlfriend: Lora is smart, beautiful and popular. When Lora leaves town, Scotty spends a secret weekend with Shannon, a girl he has just met. On Monday he wants to go back to Lora, but Shannon intends to keep him whatever it takes, and some of the ways she has in mind are not survivable.
Jonas lives in a community where everything has been arranged so that nobody is frightened or uncomfortable. Food arrives, families are assigned by committee, jobs are handed out at the Ceremony of Twelve, and the whole system is described by a word the community uses for it: Sameness. Jonas is given the assignment nobody else wants, the Receiver of Memory, and the old man who trains him begins passing on the memories of what the world was like before the community decided to stop feeling things. He is also given the rule that he may lie. The rest of the novel is about what he does with that permission.
Edwin Trequair professes to live by an Eastern saying: that a woman's mind is a jungle, and the one jungle in which a man should never lose himself. Yet he has asked Heron to marry him, and she has accepted, which neither of them can fully explain. He has money and the house that has meant everything to Heron all her life, the Glass Castle. What she feels for him is closer to fear and curiosity than affection.
Paul is a lonely student at the University of Toronto who gives some tablets to band members he was hoping to befriend, one of whom dies shortly afterwards, and who then flees to the apartment of his half-sister Vincent. Five years later the two of them are working at a hotel at the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island, where a line of graffiti written on the lobby window with an acid marker is discovered. Vincent meets the investor who owns the hotel, and the book follows what that meeting costs everyone connected to him.
Rajkumar is a poor boy in Burma when the British invade in 1885, and he is there when the royal family is taken out of their palace and sent into exile. He becomes friends with Dolly, one of the queen's attendants, and from that beginning he builds a life in the Burmese timber trade, and a family whose story runs through the century that follows.
Maia is the youngest and least favoured son of the emperor of the Elflands, of mixed Elven and Goblin heritage, and has spent his life in exile from a court that considers his mother's marriage an embarrassment. Then an airship crash kills his father and his older brothers, and he is emperor at eighteen, with no friends, no training in court politics and a half-goblin face in a court of elves. He has to learn the protocol, the petitions and the names, work out who arranged the crash, and decide how far he can trust the people whose advice is suddenly worth taking.
Two-egg twins, Estha and Rahel, are seven years old in Ayemenem, Kerala, in 1969, living in their mother's family home with a grandmother, a grand-aunt and an uncle who has come back from England. Into this household arrives a nine-year-old English cousin, Sophie, whose visit sets off the events the adult twins are still circling twenty-four years later. The novel moves between the two periods in a jagged order, and its subject is the rules that decide who may be loved, and how much.
It began as a problem in one of Holmes's beehives, led to a murderous cult, and appeared to end with an escape from a sacrificial altar. Instead, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have stirred the anger and the resources of the people they thwarted, and now they are separated and on the run, wanted by the police and pursued across the Continent.
The Godfather follows the Corleone family, a Mafia family in New York City and Long Island, from 1945 to 1955 under its head, Vito Corleone. It also carries the story of Vito's own childhood and rise, from his early years to adulthood, and it introduced English-speaking readers to the vocabulary of the American Mafia.
John Carter is returned to Mars after ten years away and lands in the Valley Dor, the Barsoomian afterlife from which nobody is supposed to leave. With his friend Tars Tarkas he discovers that the white-skinned Therns have built their power on a lie about the pilgrimage, and that Dejah Thoris has vanished. Together they save Thuvia, a slave girl held by the Therns, and are caught up in an attack on the Therns by the Black Pirates of Barsoom.
By 2100 humanity has found a way to exchange matter with a parallel universe through a device called the Pump, and the arrangement has made the world wealthy. One physicist works out that the exchange will eventually destroy the sun, and the novel follows the three stages of the argument against the people who refuse to hear it.
Theodore Decker is thirteen when he and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a day that ends with a bomb going off inside it. His mother is killed. In the confusion he carries out a small Dutch painting she had pointed out to him, and the painting stays with him through the years that follow, through a friend's family home on Park Avenue and the antiques trade in which he learns his business.
The Golem's Eye, published in 2004, is the middle volume of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. It belongs to an alternate-history London where magic is a commonplace and the people who practise it hold most of the power, and its story turns on a golem and on the magical eye that brings such a creature to life.
Wang Lung is a Chinese farmer who works his land and takes pride in it, and the novel follows him and his wife O-Lan from poverty to a position where the family of the great house nearby is no longer above him. The land is what he holds on to and what he loses sight of.
Timothy Carrier is a stonemason having a beer after work when a nervous stranger sits down beside him, mistakes him for somebody else and hands him an envelope of cash with an instruction about a woman who is to be killed. Before Tim can explain the mistake, the man is gone, and shortly afterwards a second stranger arrives who takes Tim for the client who hired him.
Rachel Morgan is a witch and an independent bounty hunter, and she spends her nights in downtown Cincinnati among the creatures of the night. She can handle the leather-clad vampires and tangle with a demon or two, but a serial killer who feeds on the experts in the most dangerous kind of black magic is pressing the limits.
Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, who is called Ani, was going to be the queen of Kildenree, and then her father died and she was sent to Bayern to marry a prince she has never met. On the journey her lady-in-waiting turns on her and takes her place, and most of the guards go along with it. Ani's only advantage is that she can speak to animals.
The Joads are a poor family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, changes in the agricultural industry and bank foreclosures. They take to the road in a battered truck and head for California to look for work, and find hundreds of others in the same position, forced to accept breadline wages. They begin as fruit pickers, and then as strikebreakers.
A family is murdered in their house in the middle of the night, and the youngest child, a toddler, escapes by crawling out of the door and up the hill to the graveyard next to it. The ghosts who live there argue about what to do with him, and the argument is won by a couple who have been dead for centuries and who take him in. He is called Nobody Owens, Bod for short, and he is raised among the dead, the caretaker and a guardian who can leave the graveyard when the living cannot. The man who killed his family is still looking for him.
It is 1974, and Leni Allbright's father comes home from the Vietnam War and decides to move his family to Alaska to live off the land. The Allbrights arrive in a small community before winter with almost nothing and no experience of the country. As the dark closes in, Leni watches her parents' marriage come apart, and she has to grow up quickly.
Nick Carraway takes a small house on Long Island for the summer of 1922, next door to a mansion where enormous parties are thrown by a man nobody seems to know. The host is Jay Gatsby, whose money has no visible source and who has spent years arranging to meet Nick's cousin Daisy, now married to a rich and careless man. Nick is drawn into the middle of it, and what he is told is not always the same as what he sees.
A doctor performs an operation on a young woman that opens her mind to what he calls the great god Pan, and the experiment leaves her ruined. Years later her son, and everyone who comes into contact with him, are changed by whatever entered the world through that operation, and the trail is followed by a man who was present at it.
For centuries gleemen have told the tales of the Great Hunt of the Horn, and there have been as many Hunters as there are stories about them. Now the Horn of Valere itself has been found, the horn long thought to be only legend, the one that will raise the dead heroes of the ages. And it is stolen. The hunt that follows covers a continent and cannot be abandoned.
Five years after the death of a celebrated New York painter, two biographers are competing to write his life, and both of them go to the women who knew him: his wife, his mistress and his sister, who is a painter herself. What each woman tells them does not add up to one story.
Paul Edgecombe runs E Block at Cold Mountain penitentiary, which is where the state keeps the men it intends to execute, and the walk from the cells to the chair is a green linoleum floor the guards call the Green Mile. In 1932 a new prisoner arrives: John Coffey, a very large man convicted of murdering two girls, who is quiet, frightened of the dark and able to heal the illnesses he touches. The guards on the block are ordinary men doing a job they have mostly made peace with, and Coffey's arrival changes what that job means to them.
Separated from their friend Quigley by a waterfall in the Mortmain Mountains, the Baudelaire orphans come aboard a submarine called the Queequeg, whose captain is hunting a sugar bowl he refuses to describe. The trail leads into a grotto where a fungus grows that can kill anyone who breathes it, and the children have to judge how far the crew around them can be trusted.
The narrator of this story makes her living by reading auras at a shop called Spiritual Palms, a fraud she has refined over the years to something close to a small science. Then Susan Burke comes in, a rich and unhappy woman with a stepson and a house that frightens her, and the woman who does not believe in ghosts is invited to spend time in one.
Keith Russo, a young lawyer in a small Florida town, is shot dead at his desk one night, and the police settle on Quincy Miller, a young Black man who had once been his client. Quincy is convicted and spends twenty-two years insisting he is innocent before writing to a small innocence project run by a lawyer who is also a minister.
In January 1946 Juliet Ashton is a London writer looking for her next subject when a stranger from the island of Guernsey writes to her about a book that once had her name written in it. He belongs to the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a reading group that began as an alibi when its members were caught breaking curfew during the German occupation. The novel is told in letters, telegrams and diary entries as Juliet gets to know the islanders and what the occupation did to them.
Jules Keegan, a magazine publisher in London, is marrying Will Slater, a television presenter, on an island off the coast of Ireland. The guests have been carried over by boat and the weather is turning. Somebody on the island has been waiting for a chance like this for a long time, and by the end of the weekend one of the wedding party is dead.
Thomas Lang is offered money to kill an American industrialist, and instead of taking the job he warns the man he was supposed to shoot. It is a good deed that is not left unpunished, and within hours he is caught up in something much larger. Lang is not a careful man, and the book does not pretend that he is.
Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, has been chasing his adversary, the man in black, for years. The novel follows his trek through a vast desert and beyond in pursuit of him, and the people he meets on the way, including a boy named Jake Chambers who travels with him for part of the journey. It fuses western fiction with fantasy, science fiction and horror.
Beatriz's father is executed and her home destroyed in the upheaval after the Mexican War of Independence, and when Don Rodolfo Solorzano proposes she accepts, ignoring what people say about his first wife's death, because his estate offers her a home. Hacienda San Isidro is not the refuge she imagined. When her husband returns to the capital she is left in the house with his sister.
Drizzt Do'Urden and Wulfgar are racing the assassin Artemis Entreri across the sea to Calimport, where their friend Regis is being held captive along with the panther Guenhwyvar and the gem that started all of it. The dwarf Bruenor is on his way there too, having survived something that everyone believed had killed him.
Gilead was built out of the United States by people who read the Bible literally, and it arrived at a state where women are property. Offred is a Handmaid, valued for a functioning womb and assigned to a Commander's household to bear a child, which means she remembers having a job, a bank account, a name and a daughter. Her account is mostly about ordinary things: the shopping, a bath, a card game with the Commander, the driver, and the small acts of interest left in a life with no choices. The regime is policed through informers and the Eyes, and the reader only sees what Offred chooses to tell.
Peter Grant, London's resident police wizard, is pulled into a case that begins with a dead teenager in a luxury flat and stops being ordinary almost immediately. The girl was the daughter of Lady Tyburn, a river goddess who has never had much time for Peter and now wants a favour from him, and the pathologist finds magic in the death as well as drugs. As Peter and Sahra Guleed work their way through the very rich, traces keep surfacing of a manuscript that has been missing since the eighteenth century.
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.
