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 57 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
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Sonia and Sunny see each other for the first time on an overnight train in India, and both of them are embarrassed, because their grandparents once tried to arrange a marriage between them and the attempt drove them apart before they ever met. Sonia has come home from studying in Vermont; Sunny is a journalist who has been living in New York.
Gina Bennett has already survived one accident and does not want her publisher, Leo Sterne, going over the past with her. He believes she damaged his sister's marriage, which is bad enough, and what he actually wants is her help with his young deaf son, which is harder to refuse.
The second novel featuring the private detective Dirk Gently is a humorous fantasy detective story. Its plot involves a Norse deity in difficulties, an advertising agency, a contract that cannot be broken and a client who is found dead in a locked room, and the investigation proceeds by the detective's own methods rather than by deduction in the ordinary sense.
Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov have been together for ten years and have told nobody: not their families, not their friends and not the league they both play in. Shane believes the secrecy is what keeps his career intact, and Ilya has run out of patience with it. The two of them play for different teams and have spent a decade in each other's company on and off the ice.
Marlowe meets Terry Lennox outside a club, drives him home, and becomes the one man in Los Angeles who will take his side. Lennox's wife is rich, difficult and about to be dead, and when her body is found her husband disappears, leaving Marlowe to deal with a police department that thinks he helped and a gangster after the same answers. It is the sixth of the Marlowe novels.
July is born on Amity, a sugar plantation in Jamaica, and grows up enslaved there in the last years before emancipation. The novel is presented as her memoir, looking back in old age, and follows her through the Baptist War of 1831 and the abolition of slavery in 1833, along with her mother Kitty, the people who work the cane, and Caroline Mortimer, the white heiress who inherits the estate.
Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that bores tunnels through space for other people to travel through, because she wants a job far from her past. The crew is a mix of species: a captain who worries about money, a reptilian pilot, a doctor who also cooks, two engineers who bicker constantly, and the ship's own artificial intelligence. They take a contract to open a tunnel to a planet that is joining the Galactic Commons, on the far side of a long stretch of nothing, and the voyage gives everyone aboard time to work out what they are to each other.
After an October blizzard the Ingalls family leaves their claim shanty for the town of De Smet, intending to wait out the winter there. A local man has predicted seven months of bad weather. The trains stop running, the town runs short of food, and the blizzards keep arriving one after another.
Rickie Elliot arrives at Cambridge from a miserable boarding school and finds, for the first time, a place where he is not simply the sum of his lameness and his shyness. He falls in with Stewart Ansell and a circle of argumentative undergraduates. Then his old friends from home appear: Agnes Pembroke, whom he half loves, and her brother. When Agnes's fiance is killed, Rickie takes on the role of consoler, which leads him into a marriage and a family secret that will not stay buried.
On a Virginia plantation in the years before the Civil War, the oldest and most respected enslaved man on the estate begins to tell the story of his life. His son Chapel has taught himself to read, has fallen in love with the owner's daughter, and intends to run north. The father has to decide what he is willing to do about it.
The Longest Ride is a novel by Nicholas Sparks, published in 2013, and it tells two love stories that are some distance apart in time. An elderly widower is trapped in a wrecked car, remembering the life he had with his wife, while a college student falls for a cowboy whose work puts him in danger every time he rides.
A British military intelligence department that has been living on its wartime reputation tries to prove that a defector's account of a Soviet missile build-up in East Germany is true. The attempts it makes are not competent ones, and the people who pay for them are its own agents. What the Department wants is a success to justify its existence.
The story everyone knows is that Alice was an ordinary girl who visited an invented world. The truth, in this novel, is that Wonderland is real: Alyss Heart is its heir until her aunt Redd murders her parents and takes the crown, and Alyss and her bodyguard are separated while fleeing through the Pool of Tears.
Caroline Thorpe was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy duke, and everyone knew it except her. She is summoned to the home of the Duke of Cley, where the household is a strange one and the house is not the happiest place to be, and her new sisters make their opinion of her plain.
Jason wakes on a school bus holding hands with a girl who says she is his girlfriend, with no memory of anything before that morning. Piper knows more than she is telling and has dreams about her missing father, and Leo can build almost anything. When monsters attack a school trip, the three of them are taken to Camp Half-Blood and given a quest to rescue a goddess.
A thriller set in Washington DC after the events of The Da Vinci Code, built on Freemasonry for both its recurring theme and its major characters. It centres on the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and a kidnapping that proceeds through the symbols and secret societies of the American capital, with a deadline attached to the search.
The journalist Ed Malone asks for an assignment dangerous enough to impress the woman he wants to marry, and is sent to interview Professor Challenger, who claims to have found a plateau in South America where prehistoric animals still live and where no expedition has returned. A party sets out to prove or disprove the claim.
Olive Smith is a PhD candidate at Stanford, and her best friend has developed a crush on the one man Olive has already been out with. To prove the date meant nothing, Olive kisses the first man who walks past the lab, and then has to live with it, because he is Adam Carlsen, a professor and one of the department's least forgiving supervisors. The story they invent to explain the kiss grows into an arrangement that both of them keep extending. Olive is also trying to hold her research, her funding and her own judgement together.
Ailey Pearl Garfield grows up in a northern city and spends her summers in Chicasetta, Georgia, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors were brought from Africa. Her grandmother expects her to become a doctor and Ailey wants to be a historian. The book moves between her own life and the generations before her, from slavery through the civil rights movement to the present.
Susie Salmon is fourteen when she is raped and murdered near her home, and the novel is narrated by her afterwards, from a personal heaven. From there she watches her family and friends try to carry on and to work out what happened, while she comes to terms with what her death has done to the people she loves.
Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika on the New Zealand goldfields in 1866 and walks into a meeting of twelve men who are trying to work out a series of crimes committed in the town. Each of them holds a piece of the story, and the novel assembles them into a structure that mirrors the heavens.
Althea Vestrit is serving aboard another liveship while her family's own ship has fallen into the hands of a pirate who intends to make himself king of the Pirate Isles, and her brother Wintrow is aboard it with him. In Bingtown the merchants are being squeezed by the Satrap's taxes and his Chalcedean soldiers, and more of the Old Traders are beginning to think about rebellion.
After her encounter with a copycat of Jack the Ripper, Rory Deveaux has been living in Bristol under her parents' supervision, and when her therapist suggests she go back to her London school she takes the chance. What she has brought back with her is a new and dangerous ability, and the people who deal with the city's ghosts know about it.
An eight-year-old girl lives on a farm in the English countryside next door to the Gregg family, who spend their time hunting. She is angry about it, and when her anger gets the better of her she points her magic finger at them, and something happens to the Greggs that none of them expected.
Trung Le Nguyen wrote and drew The Magic Fish, his first graphic novel, and Random House Graphic published it in 2020. The book is semi-autobiographical: the family at the centre of it is a Vietnamese family living in the United States, the mother and son in that family read fairy tales together as a way of practising English, and the boy is trying to work out how to tell his parents something about himself.
Olivia Dunne, a Denver minister's daughter who had planned to study archaeology, finds herself pregnant and quickly married off to a farmer she has never met in southeastern Colorado. In a landscape of beet fields and wartime shortages she starts a life with a patient stranger and makes friends with two Japanese American sisters held at a camp nearby.
Melanie puts on her mother's wedding dress one night and goes out into the garden, and the next morning she learns that her parents have been killed in a plane crash. She and her two younger siblings are sent to south London to live with an uncle they have never met, who makes life-sized puppets and toys and rules his household absolutely. His wife does not speak.
The Amazing Arden is the best known female illusionist of her day, famous for the trick in which she appears to saw a man in half. One night in Iowa she uses a fire axe instead of a saw, her husband is found dead under the stage, and the policeman who catches up with her hears a story he cannot quite believe.
Digory and Polly discover Uncle Andrew's secret workshop and are tricked into touching magic rings that take them out of this world. The experiment succeeds, and the little girl vanishes before Digory's eyes. Neither child is prepared for what follows, because the rings lead to the gateway of the land of Narnia, and to the beginning of its history. Digory's attempt to undo what his uncle has done is what carries the two children from the workshop into the new world.
Quentin Coldwater is a brilliant, unhappy high school senior in Brooklyn who is still half in love with a series of children's books about a magical land called Fillory. On the day of his interview for Princeton he is taken instead to Brakebills, a college of magic in upstate New York, and spends four years there. Graduation leaves him with powers and no idea what they are for.
The Magicians' Guild is the first novel of Trudi Canavan's Black Magician series, published in 2001. It follows a girl from the slums of a walled city who turns out to have magic she cannot control, and the guild of magicians who have to find her before her untrained power does serious damage.
The Ambersons are the first family of a midwestern town, and their magnificence rests on a fortune made in 1878 and a house everybody knows. Three generations live on it while the town grows into a city around them and their money is overtaken by people who make things. George Amberson Minafer, the grandson, is the last to notice.
Nicholas Urfe takes a teaching post at a school on a small Greek island to get away from an unhappy affair in London. He is bored and mostly alone until he is invited to the estate of a wealthy Englishman who lives there, and who begins to involve him in games that are more elaborate and less harmless each time.
Molly Gray is twenty-five, works as a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel and takes real joy in returning a messy room to a state of perfection. She does not read social cues well, and since her grandmother died she has had to interpret the world on her own, which leaves her easy for other people to deceive.
Mariana Andros, a group therapist, is certain that Edward Fosca, a charismatic professor of Greek tragedy at Cambridge, is a murderer. Fosca is protected by his reputation and adored by the students, especially the members of a secret society of young women known as the Maidens, and Mariana becomes fixated on them when one of them is found dead.
The Maid's Version is a novel by Daniel Woodrell, published in 2013. It is set in a small town in Missouri, and it turns on an explosion at a dance hall in 1929 that killed forty-two people, on the question of who was responsible, and on what one woman's pursuit of an answer cost her and the people around her.
Usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, the Malleus Maleficarum is the most famous of the many treatises written against witchcraft. The German clergyman Heinrich Kramer wrote it, the first printing appeared at Speyer in 1486, and it set out to prove that sorcery was heresy, to explain how witches might be found and convicted, and to tell the courts what should be done with them.
A woman comes into Sam Spade's office with a story about a missing sister and a man named Floyd Thursby, and Spade's partner takes the job of following him. By the end of the night Archer is dead, Thursby is dead, and the client has given a false name. Spade then has to work out who killed his partner while several people hunt the same jewel-encrusted bird.
Ayla and Jondalar, travelling with two horses and a wolf, reach the camp of the Mamutoi, the Mammoth Hunters, and are taken in by the Lion Camp. Ayla must learn the Mamutoi language and customs before she can be accepted, and the attentions of a man from another camp put the bond she and Jondalar have formed under strain, while the camp's ceremony and hierarchy shape what she is allowed to say.
It is 1914 and Britain needs Russian support in the naval arms race against Germany, so the Tsar's nephew is sent to London for secret talks. One of the men at the table is married to a Russian aristocrat whose nephew the prince is. An anarchist named Feliks arrives intending to kill him.
Anne Beddingfeld has just been left on her own and is looking for some adventure when a man falls onto the live rail at a London tube station and dies. A doctor who examines the body drops a piece of paper as he leaves, and Anne picks it up. The next day a woman is found strangled, and a fortune in diamonds has gone missing.
The Axis powers won the Second World War, and by 1962 the United States has been divided between Imperial Japan on the west coast and Nazi Germany in the east, with a thin buffer of mountains in between. The novel follows a handful of people living inside that arrangement: a dealer in American antiques in San Francisco who trades with Japanese officials, his ex-wife, a Swiss businessman travelling on German papers, and a young woman who works for a Japanese trade mission. They are all reading the same banned book, a novel that imagines a world where the Allies won.
In Providence, Rhode Island in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of an eleven-year-old boy named Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared. The boy's story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist, and the investigation places a real disappearance beside the kind of fiction its investigator writes. Edmund has almost no authority of his own, which is why he needs the writer.
In a park in London a policeman falls into conversation with a man who says he is an anarchist, and talks his way into the strange council that runs the movement's affairs in Europe. He is given the name of a day of the week and the position that goes with it, and he has not met the man at the head of them all.
A one-way time tunnel to six million years before the present is opened by researchers of the Galactic Milieu, and every misfit for light years around queues up to go through it. Each of them is looking for a happiness they cannot find in their own world, and none of them can guess what is waiting on the other side.
Four people meet in Rome and become entangled there: Miriam, a painter with a past she does not describe and a persecutor who follows her; Hilda, a copyist whose innocence makes her severe; Kenyon, a sculptor who loves Hilda; and Donatello, a young Italian count who resembles the marble faun of Praxiteles and has something of its nature. Then a crime is committed.
General William Tecumseh Sherman marches sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then north into the Carolinas, in the last months of the American Civil War. His soldiers live off the land as they go, and a population of freed people and refugees follows them. It is the people in the path of the army that the novel follows.
Annabeth is terrified. Just as she is about to be reunited with Percy after six months apart, it looks as though Camp Jupiter is preparing for war, and the Roman demigods have good reason to distrust the ship she arrives in. She also carries a gift from her mother that came with a command: follow the Mark of Athena and avenge her. An already heavy prophecy will send seven demigods to find and close the Doors of Death.
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.
