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 56 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.
A London taxi driver who knows every street in the city is ordered at gunpoint to drive a man away from a crime committed in front of an art gallery and casino. The passenger escapes to Nairobi, and the case comes to Detective Superintendent Richard Jury through a photograph in the Saturday paper, because he recognises one of the victims.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is building a probe to be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. During testing something goes wrong and an explosion kills seven scientists, and the powerful self-modifying artificial intelligence inside the probe, called Dorothy, escapes into the internet. Wyman Ford is asked by the president's science adviser to find the software, with the help of the woman who created it.
Professor Ravi Mohan Saini is a historian whose childhood friend, an archaeologist who had just deciphered the script on the Indus Valley seals, is found dead, and the police settle on Saini as the murderer. Clearing his name means following his friend's work: four pieces of an ancient seal held by different families, a treasure connected with Krishna, and a killer who believes he is the final avatar of Vishnu and is working through a list of descendants. Saini has to stay ahead of both of them.
Harrison William Shepherd is born in the United States and grows up in his mother's Mexico, where he mixes plaster for the mural painter Diego Rivera and then cooks for Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. He also works as a secretary for Leon Trotsky during his exile, and the politics he witnesses there follow him north.
Jeanne Louise Argeneau leaves work one evening and wakes up tied to a bed by a mortal man. Paul Jones needs a vampire and has decided that only she will do, and while she is more interested than she is annoyed, the immortal world's version of law enforcement is looking for both of them, which leaves very little time.
Lady Clarissa Pomeroy's grandfather has left her a fortune on condition that she marry, so she does the practical thing and proposes to Simon Sinclair, the Earl of Sheridan. He accepts, though he cannot work out why she chose him, and she has reasons she is not sharing, including a home for unmarried mothers that she has been paying for out of her own pocket.
Paul-Edward Logan is the son of a prosperous white landowner and a woman of Black and Native American ancestry, and he is raised openly by his father in Georgia after the Civil War. He looks white, which means Black people distrust him and white people turn on him when they learn about his mother, and he has to find a place of his own.
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes come home to Sussex in 1924 after seven months travelling in India and Japan, and within days Holmes's estranged son arrives asking for help. A woman and a child have disappeared, the search leads into a religious community in the English countryside and then to Scotland, and the whole case is bound up with the personal failure Holmes has never been able to settle.
When the last of the Roman legions leaves Britain, a young officer named Aquila decides that his loyalty belongs to the country he was born in rather than to Rome. He joins the forces of a Roman-British leader to fight the Saxons. The country has to be held together after the legions go.
The last days of Narnia arrive, and all hope appears lost as lies and treachery threaten to destroy everything. Battle lines are drawn and old friends are summoned back to Narnia, though none of them can predict how the story will end. The novel is set some two hundred Narnian years after The Silver Chair and ends the sequence with the world's conclusion.
A captain in the Confederate cavalry is in the middle of a battle when the air around him turns to a strange mist, and he finds himself somewhere he does not recognise. A woman dressed in the clothes of a different century takes him prisoner, and neither of them knows how they came to be there.
John Perry and Jane Sagan are offered the leadership of a new colony called Roanoke, drawn from the first ten human worlds, and they accept and travel out with Zoë and her two alien protectors. When they arrive they are not at the planet they were assigned, and a soldier who rode out attached to the outside of their ship tells them there is no question of leaving.
The Last Continent is the twenty-second of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, published in 1998. It sends Rincewind to the lost continent of XXXX, a place that resembles Australia in every way Pratchett could think of, and it has fun with the paradoxes of time travel along the way; the wizards of Unseen University spend much of the book trying to work out where he has gone.
News of the coming collapse of the Flow streams has spread across the Interdependency, and there is no longer any question that the empire will fall with them. The End system has become the most valuable place in human space, because it holds the only planet able to support life outside a closed habitat. The disgraced House of Nohamapetan has taken End and blockaded its one remaining incoming Flow stream.
Galadriel Higgins is a sorceress at a school of black magic where the pupils are in danger of being eaten before they can graduate. She has spent her whole time there suppressing what she can do, and now she has to get through her final year. She has to decide what to do with what she can do.
Frank Morgan is a gunfighting legend, and he is about to come face to face with another kind of legend, one that stalks the woods of northern California. The loggers call it the Terror of the Redwoods: something that kills like an animal, growling, clawing and ripping. A local timber baron has put a bounty on the creature, and the woods are full of hunters who are bound to hurt somebody.
The warrior Clans are about to be attacked by an army that has been gathering in the Dark Forest for a long time, and the fourth cat named in an old prophecy has still not appeared. Three young warriors prepare to lead their Clanmates into the battle, and the fate of every clan depends on whether the fourth arrives in time.
Three of them share the boarded-up house at the end of a dead-end street on the edge of the Washington woods: a girl who is not allowed outside, a man drinking in front of the television and losing pieces of his memory, and a cat with strong opinions about scripture. What holds the household together is not affection, and it is buried somewhere among the birch trees. Then a new neighbour moves in next door.
Jack Sullivan is a foster child who has been left behind by the end of the world, and he has decided to make the best of it: a fortified tree house, unlimited junk food and video games, and a monster or two to deal with now and then. What he does not have is company, so he sets out to find some.
In 866 the Danes attack Northumbria and kill the father of ten-year-old Uhtred, who is taken as a boy by the Danish earl who raised him and taught him to fight. When events send him into the service of Alfred of Wessex, Uhtred has to choose between the culture that made him and the kingdom that needs him.
Ellie, a journalist, is hunting through her newspaper's archive for a story when she finds a letter from 1960: a man asking a woman to leave her husband for him. She follows the letter into the affair it describes and tries to find out what happened to the couple, while her own private life is complicated by a relationship with a married man. The 1960 strand and Ellie's present-day one alternate as she works out how much a set of letters can really tell her.
Lionel Verney, the orphaned son of an impoverished nobleman, is befriended by a king's son and drawn into the politics of a Britain that has become a republic. His sister Perdita marries Lord Raymond, the soldier who becomes Lord Protector, and the family's fortunes rise before the sickness reaches Europe. Then a plague arrives and sweeps across the world, and Verney is left to write down what happened to everyone he knew.
During the French and Indian War the daughters of a British commander are escorted through the wilderness towards a fort under siege, accompanied by an outlawed scout called Hawkeye and two Mohican men, Chingachgook and his son Uncas. The journey becomes a pursuit by enemy forces and by Huron warriors after a guide betrays the party.
A young mathematician in Sri Lanka finds a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which is not the sort of thing that usually has consequences beyond the mathematics department. In this case it does, because the proof arrives at the same time as an alien invasion, and both of them turn out to be about how a society decides what is worth knowing.
Before Owen Michaels disappears during an embezzlement investigation, he smuggles a note to his wife of one year: protect her. Hannah Hall knows exactly who he means, and it is Owen's sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey, who lost her mother as a child and wants nothing to do with her new stepmother.
Abigail Lovett manages The Passage Inn, a small resort in the North Carolina mountain town of Cutter's Pass, which is known for hiking and rafting and for a history of unsolved disappearances. When a journalist staying at the inn to write about that history disappears himself, the town comes under scrutiny again and his brother arrives looking for answers.
A unicorn lives alone in a lilac wood and hears a butterfly say that the others of her kind were herded away by a creature called the Red Bull; with no way of knowing whether it is true, she sets out to look for them. She is captured by a travelling circus run by a witch who keeps magical creatures as exhibits, which is how she acquires the company of a magician called Schmendrick and a woman named Molly Grue. To get past King Haggard, who has been hunting her kind for years, Schmendrick turns her into a woman, which solves one problem and creates several. The quest takes them through a country that has largely stopped believing in unicorns.
Alisa is five thousand years old and has been a vampire for most of that time. She arrives in Los Angeles to find out who has been asking questions about her, takes the identity of a high-school student called Lara Adams, and makes friends with two boys for reasons that are not entirely honest. Then she goes looking for the men who tried to trap her.
George Orr has an unusual gift: he is an effective dreamer, and his dreams become reality when he wakes. He remembers his past and current life, but the people around him know only the version of reality they are living in, and he begins taking drugs to suppress his dreams, which eventually leads him to a psychotherapist with a machine that records the brain patterns of people as they sleep.
Genly Ai arrives on the frozen world of Gethen as an envoy, offering its nations a place in an interstellar federation. He is a lone human among people who spend most of each month neither male nor female, and who find his fixed sex as strange as he finds their cycle, which is the first thing he has to unlearn before anyone will trust him. His best route to the king runs through a politician named Estraven, whom he distrusts for reasons he later has to revisit. When their position collapses they cross the Gobrin Ice together, two people with no shared assumptions and one tent.
Martin the Warrior is helping to build Redwall Abbey when a travelling hedgehog sings a song that names his father, Luke, whom he has not seen since he was a child. Martin sets out for the northern shore to find out what became of him, and what waits for him there is the record of a long pursuit across the sea.
Ichabod Crane is a schoolmaster in a small Hudson Valley village, and he is superstitious to a degree his neighbours find entertaining. He is also in love with the daughter of a wealthy farmer, and one night on the road home he meets a horseman with no head. The village has its legends, and he believes all of them.
Jack Aubrey has been struck off the Navy List, and the frigate Surprise, bought at auction by his friend Stephen Maturin, sails out of an English port as a privateer with a letter of marque. Her crew is a mixed company of old hands, privateers and smugglers, and her captain is looking for a cruise profitable enough to restore him.
Camorr is a canal city built on the ruins of an older civilisation, where the capa in charge keeps the peace and takes a cut of everything. Locke Lamora is the leader of the Gentleman Bastards, a small gang of thieves raised by a priest of the crooked warden, the god of thieves, and they make their living running elaborate confidence games on nobles who can afford it. A new player called the Grey King is taking over the criminal underworld, breaking the unspoken agreement between the gangs and the Duke's government, and the Gentleman Bastards are caught between them. Their latest scheme has put them in the way of both.
The novel presents itself as a memoir, but its narrator is so effusive and so fond of digressions that he begins with his own conception and does not get as far as describing his birth until the third volume. He is trying to explain four accidents in his early life that he believes have doomed him to unhappiness, and he keeps wandering away from the subject.
The world is run by six mega-corporations, and its population is divided between citizens who are bound to serve corporate goals and the dispossessed, who have no status at all. The corporate armies are at war with the separatists of Mars, who are accused of making the whole population of Sao Paulo disappear. Soldiers are broken down into light in order to be sent to distant battlefronts, some of them come back changed, and all of them learn that talking about it is punished.
The Light Fantastic is the second of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, published in 1986. It picks the story up exactly where The Colour of Magic left off, with Rincewind the wizard, Twoflower the tourist and the Luggage falling off the edge of the world, and it turns on a threat to the whole Disc.
John Butler was four years old when Lenape warriors took him from his family's Pennsylvania farm, and eleven years later he is True Son, accepted as a son by the man who raised him. When a treaty obliged the Lenape to give up their white captives in 1764, he is handed back to a father he does not remember and a life he does not want.
Lucy and Gabe meet in their final year at Columbia, on an afternoon that neither of them forgets, and they agree that the years ahead should count for something. A year later they meet again, and it looks as though they might find that purpose in each other. Then Gabe takes a job as a photojournalist in the Middle East and Lucy builds a career in New York, and the next thirteen years are spent in different countries, in other relationships, and in a conversation neither of them finishes.
Percy Jackson is twelve, has dyslexia and attention problems, and has been thrown out of every school he has attended. On a trip to a museum, a teacher attacks him, and the friend who has been looking out for him turns out to be a satyr with instructions. Percy ends up at Camp Half-Blood on Long Island, where he learns that the Greek gods are still running their old business and that he is one of their children. Zeus's master bolt has been stolen, and the deadline for returning it has already started running.
Mickey Haller defends people who are usually guilty, and he does the work from the back seat of his car, moving between Los Angeles courthouses with a phone in each hand. His job is bargaining rather than truth-seeking and he is good at it. Then a wealthy young man accused of attacking a woman he met in a bar asks for Haller by name.
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill house of the Fedden family. Gerald Fedden is a Conservative Member of Parliament, his wife Rachel has money, and their son Toby was at Oxford with Nick. Over the boom years of the mid-1980s he becomes part of their world of parties and alliances, while the life he leads outside it is something the family accepts only by never mentioning it.
Four children are sent out of London during the bombing and end up in a country house with a wardrobe that opens onto a snow-covered world. Narnia has been in a hundred-year winter under a queen who turns people to stone, and the animals are waiting for a prophecy about four human children and a lion. The youngest, Lucy, gets there first and is not believed, which is a smaller problem than what happens when Edmund follows her and meets the queen. A beaver, a prophecy and a lion called Aslan all arrive, and the children are asked to help break the winter.
A skiing holiday in Utah ends with thirty Secret Service agents dead and the President of the United States kidnapped. Scot Harvath, a former Navy SEAL who is the only survivor of the detail, refuses to accept the official explanation of a landslide. He starts his own investigation, and it takes him to Switzerland.
In a small Mississippi town, a nine-year-old boy called Robin Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree on his family's property, and nobody was ever charged. Twelve years later his younger sister Harriet is twelve herself, brilliant and difficult, and the rest of the household has never recovered: her mother spends her days in a chair and her father is long gone. Harriet decides to find out who killed her brother, and recruits her friend Hely and a great deal of nerve.
On a hot summer after the war, a country doctor is called out to Hundreds Hall, the crumbling Georgian house he remembers visiting as a boy. The Ayres family are down to a widowed mother and her two grown children, living in a house they can no longer afford to keep. Strange things begin happening there, and the doctor has to decide whether they are the usual miseries of a family in decline.
In 1842, thirteen-year-old Maria Merryweather is left an orphan and goes to live with her guardian in a village in the West Country of England. Moonacre Manor is beautiful, the village is charming, and the whole estate is under an old curse that has been running for generations and that nobody living there is willing to explain.
Nora Davis was eleven and doing her homework in her bedroom when the police arrived at the family home: her father had been killing women in the basement. Decades later he is in prison, and Nora is a successful surgeon with a quiet life and a secret she intends to keep, until one of her young patients is murdered in the same distinctive way.
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.
