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 55 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.
Olivia is Chinese-American, and her older half-sister Kwan was born in China and sent to live with the family when their father died. Olivia is embarrassed by Kwan, who does not speak English well and makes a fool of herself, and who believes that her yin eyes let her see the dead and talk with them at night. The novel follows the two sisters, the Chinese stories Kwan tells, and a journey back to China.
Panem is a rich Capitol and twelve poor districts that lost a rebellion and pay for it every year with twenty-four children, who are dropped into an arena and broadcast until one is left. Katniss Everdeen has been keeping her mother and sister alive since her father died, which is why she is good with a bow, and when her sister's name comes out of the reaping bowl she takes her place. Her fellow tribute is the baker's son who once gave her bread. The Games are entertainment, with a betting market, sponsors and rules that can change while they are running, and Katniss understands early that the audience is part of how the arena works.
The Red October is the newest missile submarine the Soviet Union has, and its captain has decided to take it west rather than back to port. The Americans want the boat and the technology in it; the Russians want the captain dead and the submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic. Between them is an analyst, Jack Ryan, who thinks he knows what the captain is really trying to do.
Talasyn grew up in a nation under siege by the Night Empire and found her family among the soldiers fighting it. She is also carrying light magic, a power that is supposed to be extinct and which cuts straight through the empire's shadows. Prince Alaric has spent his life being shaped into his father's weapon, and he has never lost a battle until he faces her. When their powers meet they produce something neither of them understands, and both sides of the war want it. The first Hurricane Wars novel throws them into an alliance that neither trusts, in front of an enemy that is not the one they have been fighting.
Mitchell Rafferty is a landscape gardener planting beds for a client when a stranger telephones to say that his wife has been taken and that he can have her back for two million dollars. Mitch has no idea how to raise that kind of money, and the caller does not care, because he is confident that a man who loves his wife enough will find a way.
Lisa Madison has decided that she wants a husband, and she has picked Robert Langley for the position. He insists on thinking of her as the child she used to be, even though the rest of London has noticed her, and when her looks put her in danger it is Robert who has to rescue her, which he does while insisting that his interest is not romantic.
Violet Brantford has spent years in the shadow of her twin sister Jeannette and in love with the man Jeannette is going to marry, which is a situation she has learned to live with. Then, minutes before the wedding, Jeannette refuses to go through with it, and Violet finds herself walking down the aisle in her sister's place.
A Culture ship has been asked to carry a musician to a performance, and the musician and the ship's avatar become involved in an argument over whether a civilisation should be told the truth about its own founding. The novel moves between several ships and worlds as the departure approaches.
In a suburb of Stockholm a family has been murdered, and the only person who can describe what happened is the boy who survived it, who is in a state of shock and cannot speak. The detective leading the investigation asks a doctor who practises hypnotism to draw the details out of the boy, although the doctor swore he would never do that work again.
Erica Falck returns to her home town of Fjällbacka after her parents die, and finds her childhood friend Alex dead in a bath with her wrists cut, in a house where the heating had failed. The police treat it as a suicide. Erica, who wants to write about Alex, is not so sure, and neither is the detective investigating it.
After the battle with Lord Morgarath, Will and Evanlyn are taken prisoner and shipped north to Skandia aboard a wolfship. Halt, expelled from the Rangers for defying his king, sets out to find them with Will's friend Horace, who is a formidable fighter despite his youth. It is a long way, and winter is coming.
Daniel Lavette is born on the ship that brings his French father and Italian mother to America, and grows up helping on his father's fishing boat in San Francisco. When the earthquake of 1906 destroys the city and his parents with it, he earns money ferrying survivors across the bay and uses it to start a business. He does not stop there.
Adam Black is immortal, arrogant and free to go wherever he likes, which has made him a great many enemies in the faerie courts. A curse strips him of his immortality and makes him invisible to everyone, which for a man like him is a sentence close to death. The only person who can see him is a law student called Gabrielle O'Callaghan, who has always been able to see both the mortal and the faery worlds.
A young Labrador retriever, an old bull terrier and a Siamese cat are left with a friend in the Ontario countryside while their family travels. When circumstances separate the animals from the person looking after them, the three set out together to find their way home, a journey of some three hundred miles through lakes, rivers, forest and widely scattered farms.
In an unnamed Latin American city, the machines of Doctor Hoffman are changing reality: mirages, apparitions and impossible places crowd into the ordinary world, and the government is losing its grip on what its citizens can be persuaded is real. Desiderio, who works for a government minister, falls in love with Hoffman's daughter, and sets out to find the doctor.
Avery Grambs is seventeen, sleeping in her car and hoping for a scholarship, when she learns that Tobias Hawthorne, a billionaire she has never met or heard of, has left her almost everything he owned. The will gives her one condition: she has to move into Hawthorne House. The family he has disinherited lives there too, and they want to know why.
In a crumbling house below Mount Kanchenjunga, a retired judge wants to be left alone and is not. His orphaned granddaughter Sai has arrived to live with him, his cook looks after her while thinking about his own son, and the hills around Kalimpong in 1986 are filling with a political movement that will reach the house. The cook's son, Biju, is in New York without papers.
A hurricane levels the estate of the Bas-Thornton family in Jamaica, and the parents decide that their children should be sent back to England for safety. On the way, the ship is taken by pirates, and the children end up aboard the pirate vessel instead. The captain, Jonsen, is a well-meaning man who has no idea what to do with his new passengers.
Intruders break into a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis in the middle of the night and murder Luke Ellis's parents, and the whole operation takes less than two minutes. Luke wakes up in a room that looks like his own except that it has no window, in a building full of other children who were taken the same way and who have telepathy or telekinesis.
Hal and the Herons are a group of outsiders, and they have just beaten the strongest and most skilled young warriors in Skandia to win the Brotherband competition. Their celebration ends abruptly when the Andomal, the object the Skandians hold most sacred, is stolen, and the Herons are blamed for it. To redeem themselves they have to find the thief and bring it back.
Jake is an ordinary kid in an ordinary suburb until a creature from space finds him and his friends and gives them a power nobody should have: the ability to take the shape of any animal they touch. The five of them become the Animorphs, and the enemy they are up against has already been living among the people they know.
Hugo Cabret is an orphan living in the walls of a busy Paris train station in the 1930s, keeping the station clocks and stealing what he needs to repair an automaton his father left him. His thefts bring him to the attention of a toy-seller, and to the story of the man behind the machine.
Hetty Grimke, known as Handful, is an enslaved girl in an early nineteenth-century Charleston household, and she wants a life on the other side of its walls. Sarah Grimke grows up in the same house certain that she is meant for something large, and on her eleventh birthday the two of them are handed a relationship neither of them chose.
In France in 1714, a young woman makes a bargain to live forever and finds out what the price is only afterwards: everyone she meets forgets her the moment she is out of sight. Addie LaRue spends the next three hundred years being erased, learning to leave marks on a world that keeps smoothing them away, and arguing with the power that holds her contract. Then, in a bookshop in New York, she meets somebody who remembers her name. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a standalone about a deal, the two people on either side of it, and how long a person can keep insisting that they exist.
The Ionian Mission is the eighth of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, first published in 1981. It begins with a marriage and a spell of blockade duty off Toulon, and it ends with the two of them sent to the Greek islands to look for a new ally among the pashas.
Leonidas Witherall is writing the latest adventure of his fictional detective when he notices that a parcel of bank papers has gone missing, and he sets off for a dinner at the home of the banker Fenwick Balderston, where he serves as a director. He arrives to find his host dead on the floor, beaten with a bronze bust of Shakespeare.
Rhys Trahaearn freed England from Horde control and became a national hero, and he has since built a trading empire on his name and on the fear of it. When a body is dropped from an airship onto his doorstep, the detective who comes to investigate is a woman he decides he wants, and the case she is working on threatens everyone in the country.
On a beach walk during a family holiday, Beth Anderson finds something that looks like a skull and remembers the retired couple who vanished from the island's coast months earlier. A stranger approaches, she panics and covers it up, and when she returns the skull has gone. Her brother treats the story as entertainment, and the other holidaymakers agree with him.
A shipwrecked gentleman named Edward Prendick is stranded on a Pacific island presided over by the notorious Dr Moreau, and he confronts dark secrets, strange creatures and a reason to run for his life. The novel is an early work by H. G. Wells in which the possibilities of science are shown as a source of terror rather than of wonder.
The Parijatdvipan empire rules over a set of conquered kingdoms, and Ahiranya has had its language, its religion and its temples taken from it. The rot is spreading through the region, a sickness that pushes plants out through people's skin, and the empire finds that convenient. In the old temple called the Hirana there are the deathless waters, where the powers of another kind of spirit were once earned at a cost that most children did not survive; Priya is one of the few who did. Malini, the emperor's sister, refuses a ritual that was meant to kill her and is imprisoned in the Hirana for it, where Priya is sent to serve her. The first Burning Kingdoms novel is an Indian-inspired epic in which the rebellion runs through both the palace and the temple.
Malcolm Ross, a young barrister, is called out in the middle of the night to the house of the Egyptologist Abel Trelawny, whose daughter has found her father unconscious and bleeding on the floor of a room full of Egyptian relics. The instructions Trelawny left behind require that his body stay where it is, watched, until he wakes. At the centre of the house, and of the archaeologist's work, is the mummy of an Egyptian queen.
Four Chinese women who came to San Francisco meet every week to play mahjong and to tell one another the stories of what they left behind in China, and four daughters grow up hearing none of it. The book is built out of what each of the eight of them has to say.
The novel follows a Lithuanian immigrant family in the Chicago stockyards at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it exposes the conditions of their working lives. Sinclair set out to show the odds against immigrants and other working people who were trying to secure a share of the American dream, and the book instead became a national scandal about the meatpacking industry.
The Jungle Book follows Mowgli, a man-cub raised by wolves in the jungle, along with a cast of animal characters that includes Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear. Most of the stories are set in a dry forest in India, and one place named repeatedly is Seeonee. The theme running through the book is abandonment followed by fostering, in the life of Mowgli and in the parallel stories.
Will Trent arrives at an abandoned Atlanta warehouse where a former police officer has been shot, and the blood trail shows that a second victim, a woman, was carried out and has disappeared. The building belongs to the city's most famous athlete, a man married to Will's ex-wife and under investigation for rape. Then Sara Linton finds something at the scene.
Iliana Wildwood is being pressed into marriage by a baron who wants her lands, and her answer is to run for the Highlands and marry a Scottish laird instead. Duncan of Dunbar Castle is a warrior with a household and a reputation, and the wife who arrives with her own reasons for the marriage is not what he expected to be sent.
Before the organisation in the other books was formed and before the maze was built, solar flares struck the Earth and killed most of the people living on it. Mark and Trina were in New York when it happened and they survived, and what they find afterwards is a second disaster: a virus that fills the people it infects with murderous rage.
The Battle of Gettysburg is told over three days from the point of view of the officers who fought it, among them Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet for the South and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain for the North. The novel follows their decisions and the ground they have to take or hold, with the outcome of the war resting on them.
Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small Texas town, and the worst thing most people say about him is that he is a little slow and a little boring. He also carries a sickness that nearly had him locked up when he was younger, and it is about to surface again.
Someone has put a price on Anita Blake's head, and dating both a vampire and a werewolf was not the hardest part of her life. Love cannot save her this time, so she turns to Edward, a hitman, for help in finding out who is behind the threat. The buyer is not somebody she knows, and the reason for the contract is not obvious.
The killer takes two victims at a time, leaving the first body to be found with all the clues needed to locate the second, who is dying slowly while the police work. They have never been in time. Now a heat wave has settled over the country and two girls have disappeared, and a rookie FBI agent believes the deadline can still be met.
Clay Carter works for the public defender's office in Washington, which is not where ambitious lawyers stay. He takes on the case of Tequila Watson, a young man accused of a random street killing, hears an account of not being in control of his own body, and follows that unlikely claim out of the office job and into an industry built on other people's injuries.
Danielle D'Aville is the ward of Edward III, and she is sworn to obey the King's order that she marry her enemy: Adrien MacLachlan, the Scottish knight who masterminded the fall of Aville, the home she loved. She becomes the reluctant wife of a man she has promised herself she will despise, and she is carried off to his castle in the Scottish Highlands.
Geronimo Stilton, a mouse journalist, is pulled out of his office and into the Kingdom of Fantasy, where the queen has been kidnapped and the realm is in danger. He is given a quest and a set of companions, and the book follows him through the kingdom's regions as he tries to earn the title of knight.
Stella Lane is an econometrician who is comfortable with numbers and far less so with people, and she decides that the solution to the second problem is practice. She hires an escort to teach her how intimacy works, with terms agreed in advance and no expectations attached. The arrangement is tidy on paper and much less so in practice, and Stella has a mother with firm ideas about the kind of man her daughter should be with. Stella's work, her family and her own judgement of herself all come into it.
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years, and now Helen, who believes that she is dying, wants to bring everything into the open. Winnie's answer is that she will tell her American-born daughter, Pearl, about her own past, including the part of her life in China that she has never once discussed.
Amir grows up in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, the son of a wealthy man, and his closest friend is Hassan, the son of his father's servant. Their friendship is shaped by the inequality between them. The novel follows Amir into adulthood, through the Soviet invasion, the flight of Afghan refugees and the rise of the Taliban, as he reckons with an act of betrayal he committed as a boy.
Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown, a settlement where a germ has left every man able to hear the thoughts of every other man and nobody able to keep anything to himself. A month before the birthday that would make him a man, he has to run, taking a dog with him and meeting something he has never encountered before: a person whose thoughts he cannot hear at all.
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.
