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 54 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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Oscar Wilde put out a small book of stories for children in May 1888 under the title The Happy Prince and Other Tales. The best known of the five is the title story, in which a swallow who has been left behind by his flock meets the statue of a prince who never knew sorrow during his lifetime and who now looks down on a town full of suffering people.
Jack Reacher watches a man walk out of a New York building, cross the street to a parked Mercedes and drive it away. The car was carrying one million dollars in ransom money, and the man who paid it, Edward Lane, will find more where that came from to get his family back. Lane runs a soldiers-for-hire operation, and he means to have his wife and child returned whatever it costs him.
Starr Carter is sixteen, black, and lives in a poor neighbourhood while attending an elite private school in a white and wealthy part of the city. On her way home from a party she is in the car when a white police officer shoots and kills her childhood friend Khalil. The grand jury's decision afterwards leads to a riot.
Lucy and Josh share an office and a job title at the publishing house that came out of a merger, and they have been at war since the day they met: small campaigns of desk tidying and pointed remarks, with one promotion available at the end of it that only one of them can take. Their colleagues treat the pair as a running joke. When work forces them into a shared project, the rules of the original battle stop being useful, and both of them have to work out what the last few years were actually about.
This book gathers ten short horror stories for younger readers, published in 2001 by Parachute Press and Collins. Among them are a babysitter who enjoys playing cruel tricks, a boy who decides to lie down inside an ancient mummy case, and two friends who want to have the most frightening Halloween that anyone has ever managed.
Four people come to Hill House: an occult scholar who wants evidence that a haunting is real, his assistant, a friendless young woman with nowhere else to go, and the man who will inherit the house. They expect a few odd noises and some inexplicable events. Instead the house works on each of them in turn, and it becomes clear that it has been choosing.
Toby Jugg is a decorated fighter pilot who was shot in the back during a raid on Cologne and is now paralysed below the waist. Sent to convalesce in a house in Wales, he finds himself tormented at night by a shadowy many-legged presence, and the man in charge of the house turns out to belong to a Satanist brotherhood.
Tom Barton and his uncle Jack are smugglers, and they are good at it: quick wits, a fast vessel and secret cargo holds have kept them ahead of the authorities for years. What they are carrying through Europe in the 1500s is more dangerous than the goods they usually run, and the people who want it stopped have the power of the law behind them.
Alice has spent her childhood moving from place to place with her mother, staying one step ahead of the bad luck that follows them. Her grandmother wrote a scarce book of dark fairy tales that Alice has never read, and when her mother is taken, Alice and an obsessive fan of those stories go looking for the world they came from.
Tea, a bone witch who can raise the dead and take life in return, has ended her exile and set her heart on revenge against the royals who took the person she loved. With the daeva, the terrible creatures she can command, she has what she needs to act, but other powers want her magic for themselves and war is gathering between the kingdoms.
John Singer is deaf and mute and has shared a room with another deaf man, Spiros Antonapoulos, for ten years. When Antonapoulos is committed to an asylum, Singer moves alone into a boarding house in a mill town in Georgia. Four people in the town begin to visit his room and tell him their lives, and each of them is sure that he understands what nobody else does.
In 1972, workers digging foundations in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well, and a mezuzah found beside it points the police towards the town's only Jewish resident. A hurricane then washes the scene away, and the novel travels back to the 1920s and 1930s and to Chicken Hill, where Black and Jewish families lived side by side and where a deaf boy needed hiding.
A man who has tried every pleasure he can find buys a puzzle box and solves it, which opens a door for the Cenobites: beings who make no distinction between pain and pleasure, and who are in no hurry to give back what they are given. The box is known as the LeMarchand Configuration, and it is not a toy.
Lady Averill Mortagne has spent years learning to control a fierce temper, and her father's habit of parading her in front of English lords who look sideways at her flame-coloured hair is testing it. Her only relief is the time she spends with Kade Stewart, a wounded Scot her brother brought home from the Crusades. He is grateful to her for helping save his life, and he does not think he could subject a gentle lady to the life of a laird's bride.
It is 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter has returned home after graduating from university, and her mother will not be satisfied until she has a ring on her finger. Aibileen is a Black maid raising her seventeenth white child, changed by the death of her own son. Minny is her closest friend and the sassiest woman in the state, and cannot keep her opinions to herself. The three of them take one step together.
A devastating palace fire has killed the royal family of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, leaving Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen Nefertiti, as a survivor whose family has been branded heretical. She is pushed aside and left to run wild in the palace until the Pharaoh's aunt takes her in hand and has her educated as a future queen. Then she catches the eye of the crown prince, and much of Egypt objects to the match.
Aerin is the only child of the king of Damar and the only person at court who looks like her mother, which is all the excuse the rumours need. She has not inherited the royal gift for magic, she is mocked for it and she is left to herself, so she teaches herself the things nobody else will. The princess the court did not want is the one who goes out to meet the dragons.
The mists are killing people and lingering longer than they should. The Ashmounts are pouring more choking ash into the sky, burying the crops everyone needs to eat. Ruin, the creature Vin was tricked into freeing from a prison of a thousand years, is loose. Life under the Lord Ruler begins to look like paradise by comparison, and the heroes discover that what they thought was the danger was never the real one.
A professional thief in Toronto is asked by a woman he has befriended to steal objects from her brothers and sisters, because she believes that each of them holds one clue to where a large inheritance has been hidden. He takes the job, and then he has to solve the puzzle. What he is looking for may not exist at all.
Glory is a RainWing and knows her tribe is not what the other dragons say it is, because she is not lazy herself. When the dragonets take shelter in the rain forest they find a tribe of RainWings who sleep all day and do not know that members of their own tribe have been going missing.
After angering his father Zeus, the god Apollo is cast down from Olympus. Weak and disorientated, he lands in New York City as an ordinary teenage boy, and the four-thousand-year-old deity has to learn to survive in the modern world until he can find a way to regain Zeus's favour. Apollo has enemies, and the only place he can think of to go is Camp Half-Blood.
In the last volume of the Prydain chronicles the forces of Arawn Death-Lord come south in earnest and the allies gather for the final campaign. Taran, who began the series as an assistant pig-keeper, has become a leader, and the book asks what he is prepared to give up for the good of the country. It also requires him to part with the people he loves.
Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs has been unhappy since her mother's death, living like a servant on her father's farm near Lancaster under the thumb of her father and three sullen brothers, doing the cooking and cleaning. When her father tells her she can no longer go to school, she runs away, becomes a hired girl on six dollars a week, and sets out to become her own young woman.
A young woman finds an old book and a bundle of letters in her father's library, each letter addressed to a successor expected to continue a search begun centuries earlier. Following the trail leads her into her father's past, her mother's disappearance and the history of Vlad the Impaler, whose name has been attached to something much older than he was.
In New York, a fourteen-year-old girl named Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness, and she believes the answer lies with the author of a book her mother is translating. Across the city, an old man called Leo Gursky is living out his last years and thinking about the woman he loved in Poland sixty years earlier, and about the manuscript he wrote for her.
Squire Allworthy comes home from a trip to London and finds a baby asleep in his bed. He decides to raise the foundling, calls him Tom Jones, and the boy grows up beside the squire's nephew and near the daughter of a neighbouring landowner. Tom is generous, careless, good-natured and always in trouble, and his feelings for Sophia Western are the beginning of a long journey.
Arthur Dent's house is scheduled for demolition, and then so is the Earth, which is being cleared away to make room for a hyperspace bypass. His friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an out-of-work researcher for a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and manages to get them both a lift on a passing ship. What follows involves a two-headed president of the galaxy, a stolen ship with an infinite improbability drive, a depressed robot, the best drink in existence, and the problem of a supercomputer that took seven and a half million years to answer a question nobody could remember. The guide the pair are carrying has two words printed on its cover in large friendly letters: don't panic.
Bilbo Baggins is a respectable hobbit of Bag End with a comfortable chair, a full pantry and no interest in adventures, until a wizard he has not seen in years marks his door and thirteen dwarves arrive for dinner. They need a burglar for a journey to the Lonely Mountain, where a dragon has been sitting on their people's treasure since it destroyed the kingdom under the mountain. Gandalf has told them Bilbo is the fourteenth member of the company, and the dwarves' leader, Thorin Oakenshield, intends to reclaim what is his. Bilbo signs the contract, and the company sets out east from the Shire, with trolls, goblins and worse between them and the mountain.
London is in the middle of an outbreak of supernatural Visitors that Scotland Yard cannot handle and that has brought people onto the streets in protest. Lockwood and Co. keep doing the work the larger agencies will not take on, and the arrangement between the three young agents who run it is about to change.
Captain Honor Harrington is sent to the planet Grayson, a society governed by men who treat a female officer as an offence. She is there to escort a diplomatic mission that matters to Manticore's chances in the coming war. The Graysons need the alliance as much as she does, and their neighbours are being courted by the other side.
A boy and a talking horse share a dangerous journey north towards Narnia in order to warn of an invading army. The story is set during the period covered by the last chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while the four Pevensie children rule as kings and queens, and the travellers are two children and two talking horses escaping from Calormen.
On a snowy morning in upstate New York, two girls take their horses out and a truck comes round the bend. One girl and one horse are killed, and Grace Maclean is left with a partly amputated leg and a horse called Pilgrim that will not be handled. Her mother Annie, who has built a career as a magazine editor, decides that both of them are going to be saved.
Book the Eighth. Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, accused of a murder they did not commit, escape into a van belonging to a group called Volunteers Fighting Disease and end up at Heimlich Hospital, a building that is only half finished. It has a Library of Records the children hope will explain their parents' secrets, and their enemy is already inside it.
Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead on his land in Devon, and the family story says that a great hound has been killing Baskervilles for generations. Sherlock Holmes takes the case and sends Dr Watson down to Dartmoor while he works on it from London. The question is whether the death came from the legendary dog or from somebody who needed the legend believed.
Little Nettlebed is a village where the uncanny is part of ordinary life: strange creatures wash up on the riverbed and ravens settle on the roofs of people who are about to die. Then the villagers begin to hear barking at night, and one of them claims that he has watched the Mansfield sisters change shape in front of him in the lane outside his own house.
The novel moves between three women in three different decades, each of them touched by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. In 1923 in Richmond, Woolf is writing that novel while struggling with mental illness. In 1949 in Los Angeles, Laura Brown is reading it while she plans a birthday party for her husband, a veteran of the Second World War. In 1999 in New York, Clarissa Vaughan is preparing a party of her own, for a friend who is dying.
The second book about Winnie-the-Pooh collects ten more stories from the Hundred Acre Wood, in which a house is built for Eeyore, Tigger arrives and is unbounced, and Rabbit has a busy day. The stories are about the ordinary business of the forest: building, eating, getting lost and being found. At the end of the book Christopher Robin is growing up, and Pooh finds an enchanted place on top of the forest.
Linus Baker is a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, and he has spent seventeen years writing reports on orphanages from a desk that is too small. His new assignment is a classified one on the island of Marsyas, where six children live with a master who is not what the file describes: a gnome, a forest sprite, a wyvern, a shapeshifter, a boy who is not shaped like a boy, and one called Lucy, which is short for Lucifer. Linus has to decide whether what he writes will keep them safe or close the only home they have, and his department is not the only party interested in the island.
Thomas Small is thirteen when his family moves from North Carolina to Ohio to live in the house of a long-dead abolitionist, a building full of hidden passages that once sheltered people escaping slavery. His father has taken the lease in order to study the house, and somebody in the town wants them gone.
Hazel and the remaining crew of the Argo II face a choice. They can sail home with the Athena Parthenos and try to stop Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter going to war, or they can continue the quest for the House of Hades, where they may be able to open the Doors of Death, rescue Percy and Annabeth from Tartarus and stop monsters being reborn. Either way they have to hurry, because Gaea has set the date of her rise to power.
London, 1890, and a fine art dealer named Edmund Carstairs comes to Baker Street to ask for help. A man in a flat cap has followed him all the way from America and means him harm, and in the days that follow his house is robbed and his family is threatened, so that a case beginning as a matter of intimidation leads somewhere the doctor is careful about setting down.
Esperanza Cordero is a twelve-year-old girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, and the house her family has bought on Mango Street is not the house she was promised. Over the course of a year she watches the people in her neighbourhood and the women in her own family, and she works out what she wants for herself and what she intends to leave behind.
Lewis Barnavelt, newly orphaned, goes to live with an uncle he has never met in a town in Michigan, and discovers that his uncle is a warlock and that the neighbour is a far more capable witch. The house used to belong to a couple who practised black magic, and something they left behind is still in the walls.
The narrator takes a live-in job cleaning for the Winchesters and is glad of it: a room on the top floor, a child to collect from school, meals to cook and a family that seems to need her. Nina, the wife, makes work for her and tells lies about her own daughter. The narrator makes one mistake with Nina's things, and then works out what the lock on her bedroom door does.
The narrator has moved into a house of her own with her husband and children, on a quiet street where the neighbours introduce themselves over the fence. She used to clean other people's houses and now she has one of her own, and she intends to keep the life that came with it. The first dinner with the people next door is where the trouble starts.
An employer who does not ask too many questions about the past is hard to find, and the Garricks give the narrator a job cleaning their penthouse and cooking in their kitchen. She has a secret of her own to keep, and the arrangement is nearly perfect. Then she notices that she has never met the wife, that there are stains on the nightgowns in the laundry, and that she can hear somebody crying.
A retired professor of classics in his seventies is accused of racism by two students after he uses a word they take as a racial insult, and the uproar ends his career. The writer who lives nearby and becomes his neighbour is the one who tells the story of what happened. What the neighbours make of him is only part of it.
Wanda Petronski wears the same faded blue dress to school every day, and one day she tells the girls who tease her that she has a hundred dresses at home. The teasing becomes a game, and then Wanda stops coming to school. The girls who teased her have to think about what they did.
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.
