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 58 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.
An anonymous letter arrives asking Sancha whether she knows who her husband will be with tonight. She has adored Mark since the day they married and never imagined that her tough, handsome husband might turn to another woman, but the letter leaves her with no choice except to confront him. His response is not the one she expected, and the fight that follows becomes a campaign rather than a conversation.
A dust storm forces the Ares 3 crew to abort, and astronaut Mark Watney is hit by debris and left behind for dead. He wakes up alone on Mars with a habitat, a rover, a lot of potatoes and no way to tell Earth he is alive. His log entries are the novel, and they are mostly engineering: how to make water, how to grow food long enough for the next mission to arrive, how to talk to a planet that has already held a funeral for him. Back home, the people who left him have to decide what they are willing to risk to bring him back, and the rescue plan they settle on requires Watney to survive one more trip across the surface.
The book chronicles the exploration and settlement of Mars, home to indigenous Martians, by Americans leaving a troubled Earth that is eventually devastated by nuclear war. The stories progress chronologically, describing the first human colonisation of the planet while a handful of Martians remain, and then the colony left to fend for itself when Earth is destroyed.
A plague called the Red Death is killing half the people in the country, and Prince Prospero has decided not to watch. He retreats into an abbey with a thousand friends, seals the doors and fills the rooms with music and food. Months later he holds a masked ball in seven rooms of different colours, and a guest arrives who was not invited.
Ulysses Paxton is an American soldier who looks up at Mars in the night sky and finds himself standing on it, in the middle of a war. He is taken in by Ras Thavas, an old scientist known across the planet as the master mind, who has perfected a way of moving a brain from one body to another and sells the operation to rich old men. Paxton becomes his assistant, and then his opposite.
Angela Todd is a London seamstress who inherits a country cottage called Dower House and finds herself independent for the first time. From the day she arrives somebody wants her gone: there are cruel pranks, strange accidents and shrill threats, and two men take an interest in her, the schoolmaster Greg Ingram and Roderick Mellory.
Robinton is born into a hall of harpers and is rejected by a father who is jealous of him, so most of his childhood is spent with his mother and with the musicians around him. He is writing successful songs while he is still very young, and he is elected Masterharper at a comparatively early age. When Lord Fax begins taking what he wants, Robinton is one of the people who sees it coming.
In 1756, in the settlements of upper New York, ten-year-old Edward Van Alstyne and his mother are left to look after the farm while his father goes with the militia. The house holds an old Spanish matchlock gun, far too heavy for a boy to manage, and news keeps arriving of raiders burning farms up the valley.
Jack Aubrey is ashore on half pay with no ship when Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders: he is to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant and take two strategic islands in the Indian Ocean from the French. Two of the captains under him, a pleasure-seeking dilettante and a disciplinarian whose severity nearly drives his crew to mutiny, make the commission harder than the enemy does.
Michael Henchard, a hay trusser, sells his wife and child to a sailor at a country fair while drunk, and swears an oath never to drink again. Eighteen years later he is the mayor of Casterbridge, wealthy and respected, and the family and the consequences he thought he had left behind return to the town.
Amy and Dan Cahill discover at their grandmother's funeral that they belong to the most powerful family in history and are being offered a choice: take a million dollars each, or compete for thirty-nine clues. They choose the clues, and the hunt takes them to Paris and into the family's past.
Thomas wakes up in a lift with no memory except his first name. When the doors open he finds himself among boys who welcome him to the Glade, an open expanse surrounded by stone walls. None of them knows why they are there. Every morning the doors to the surrounding maze open, every night they close, and every thirty days a new boy arrives. Then a girl is sent up, with a message.
Randi McCafferty is keeping the identity of her son's father to herself, and she has her reasons. Her brothers, who are used to managing her life, hire an investigator named Kurt Striker to protect her, and Kurt concludes that the only way to deal with the danger is to bring the secret into the open.
The Memory Cathedral takes Leonardo da Vinci past the sketchbook and gives him a working flying machine. In this version of the Renaissance he builds the devices he only ever drew, takes his inventions into the service of a Syrian general, and sees his designs for war used in a battle in the Middle East.
In early March 1964, Dr David Henry is forced to deliver his wife Norah's twins himself, with the help of a nurse named Caroline Gill. Their first child, Paul, is born healthy; the second, Phoebe, is born with Down syndrome. David hands the baby to the nurse and asks her to take the child to an institution, and the novel follows what happens next.
In a West African city recovering from a long civil war, a dying man named Elias Cole spends his last weeks talking about a woman he was obsessed with and her husband, whose life he ruined. A psychologist newly arrived from England listens, and a local surgeon who lived through the war has his own account of what happened.
Bobby Pendragon is a fourteen-year-old boy with a family, a house and a dog, and no idea that any of that is about to become a set of stories he writes down for other people to read. His uncle Press arrives, tells him he is going to save the world, and takes him through a portal to Denduron, a territory of strange creatures, a magical tyrant and something worse stirring underneath it.
Sofia is new at school and anxious to fit in, so when a group of popular girls invites her into their circle she accepts. The group has decided that Brooklyn, a loner they believe to be evil, needs to be rescued from something inside her. Their remedy is an exorcism, and Sofia is expected to help.
Gregor Samsa wakes up in his family's flat as an insect and immediately starts thinking about his job. He is a travelling salesman, his parents and sister depend on the money he brings home, and the first problem the book poses is not the transformation but the fact that he cannot get out of bed to catch the train. Nobody in the family can look at him without difficulty, his employer's clerk arrives to ask what has happened, and over the following weeks the household reorganises itself around the creature in the back bedroom. The family has to decide what to do about him, and it does.
The story opens at Cohenburg Castle in Saxony, where two brothers, Alphonsus and Frederic, have grown up, married and started families. Frederic loses his wife and all three of his children, and grief sends him away from the castle. His brother is then called away to the city, and the family's troubles begin in earnest.
Between life and death there is a library whose shelves go on forever, and every book in it offers the chance to try another life that might have been lived. Nora Seed reaches a breaking point in her own life and finds herself in that library, where the clocks are frozen at midnight and where she can explore the infinite versions of her life.
Jack Reacher is passing through a small town in Wisconsin when he sees a class ring in a pawn shop window: West Point, 2005, small enough to have belonged to a woman, with initials engraved inside. He decides to find out who she is, why she gave up something that took four years to earn, and to give it back to her.
One day the village of Midwich loses consciousness: every person inside a hemisphere two miles across simply drops, and the army cannot get near it. The next day the effect stops, the object photographed on the ground is gone, and the villagers wake with no apparent harm done. Some months later, every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant.
Tom and Maggie Tulliver grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire. Maggie is clever and hungry for affection, and her brother Tom is the one sent away to be educated and given authority in the family, and the difference in what is expected of the two of them shapes everything that happens between the brother and sister.
Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a china rabbit named Edward Tulane who was very pleased with himself and had good reason to be, since he was owned by a girl named Abilene who adored him completely. Then one day he was lost. The journey that follows takes him from the ocean floor to a fisherman's net, to the bedside of an ailing child and the streets of Memphis.
The final instalment of Hilary Mantel's trilogy charts the last four years in the life of Thomas Cromwell, minister at the court of King Henry VIII, from 1536 until his execution in 1540. It follows Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and completes the rise and fall of the man who ran the king's business, on whom the whole machinery of the reign depends.
St Mary Mead has been through a great deal of change, and the newest thing about it is the film star who has bought a local house and invited the village to a garden party for a charity. Miss Marple is old, unwell and dependent on a new housekeeper, and she watches the arrangements with the interest of somebody who has known every family in the parish for sixty years. A guest dies at the party, apparently poisoned, and the question the police cannot answer is who was the intended victim. The title comes from a mirror and a fragment of poetry, and the answer depends on a woman's face.
Grace Byler is twenty-one and wants to find her mother, who left the family home three weeks ago without explanation, taking nothing and leaving no word. Grace suspects that her reserved and uncommunicative father knows why. In the same period an English woman has come to the Amish country to revisit the place where her mother lived, and to face a diagnosis of her own.
A chameleon sits on a leaf, catches a fly and notices the animals at the zoo, each of which has something he does not. He wishes for the best feature of each of them, and gets what he asks for, until what is left of him is a mixture that cannot do anything a chameleon does.
Ambrosio is a monk with a reputation for virtue, and Matilda is the young woman who joins the monastery as his pupil, in disguise, because she wants him. He gives in to her, and once that rule is broken the others come more easily, each act worse than the one before. Whatever Matilda is and whatever she is offering him, she is not finished with Ambrosio.
Ambrosio is the most admired preacher in Madrid, a monk whose reputation for holiness has made him the ornament of his monastery. What he is protecting is a set of vows he has already begun to break, and the novel follows what happens when the temptation he gives in to is one he cannot undo.
Charles Strickland is a London stockbroker with a wife, two children and no apparent interest in anything else. One day he leaves them, moves to Paris with very little money and begins to paint. The woman he has left behind sends an acquaintance to talk to him, and the novel follows that narrator's attempts to understand a man who does not want to be understood.
Luna is a prison colony that grows food for Earth and ships it down a gravity well it can never climb back up. Manuel Garcia O'Kelly is a freelance computer technician, and his best friend is Mike, a self-aware computer that runs large parts of the Moon. When the Federated Nations move to take more of the colony's resources, Mannie and a political agitator named Wyoming Knott end up in the same room as a professor who has been arguing about the state for years, and the four of them start planning something larger than a protest. The plan is to declare independence, and the people making it have one computer, one professor and a deadline.
A large yellow diamond cut from a Hindu idol comes to England and is given to Rachel Verinder as a present on her eighteenth birthday. Within hours it is gone from her room, and nobody in the house can account for what they were doing at the time. The story is told through the statements and letters of the people involved, including the detective brought in to get it back.
Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes investigate a death on Dartmoor, together with sightings of a phantom coach on the moor. The case places the two of them in a landscape whose legends are as much a part of the evidence as the physical traces, and the investigation has to separate the two.
The narrator of the novel looks back over the fortunes of his family, whose businesses and quarrels span the modern history of India, and whose story includes early deaths, forgotten loves and the various ways that money and power can be made and lost. He tells it from the position of a man whose own life is nearly over.
A human ship sent to investigate a signal finds the Moties, a species confined to a single star system by their own biology, and the crew has to work out how to talk to a civilisation that has risen and collapsed over and over again. First contact turns into an argument about what should be done with what they learn.
Ralph S. Mouse is a house mouse who can speak to humans, though typically only to children, and who lives with his family in a run-down hotel where he longs for excitement and independence. He goes on adventures riding a miniature motorcycle, which is how the first of the three books about him begins. The story came partly from the author's son, who played with toy vehicles while recovering from a fever.
The magistrate of a village is shot in his study at the vicarage, and everybody who was in the house at the time seems to have a reason for wanting him dead. Nobody heard the shot, and the person who confesses to the killing is not the only one who could have done it.
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have built a working partnership over a decade, and each of them has secrets that the other has learned to leave alone. This time the secrets belong to the household around them: the housekeeper who has kept Holmes's house since long before Russell arrived, and who has a history of her own that nobody in the house has ever thought to ask about.
Hercule Poirot has retired to the village of King's Abbot and is spending his days growing marrows while the narrator, the local doctor, watches him with amusement. Then a wealthy neighbour is found stabbed in his study, a man who had been about to be married and who had been receiving letters that frightened him. The doctor is drawn into the investigation as both a witness and, for the reader, the person through whom everything is seen. The novel's solution is one of the most discussed in detective fiction.
Poirot receives a letter from a South American millionaire living in northern France, asking him to come at once because his life is in danger. By the time Poirot and Hastings arrive at Merlinville-sur-Mer, Paul Renauld has been stabbed and his body left in a newly dug grave on the golf course beside his house. The local police already have a suspect.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec and his wife return each July to a remote and luxurious manor house in the wilderness to spend their wedding anniversary, and this year they are there at the same time as the Finney family. Before the visit is over, one of the Finneys is dead and Gamache is working through a holiday.
Edgar Allan Poe printed The Murders in the Rue Morgue in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It is a short story in which a man in Paris sets out to solve the killing of two women in a house that was locked up, and Poe called it a tale of ratiocination; it is usually named as the first modern detective story.
Emily St. Aubert loses her mother and then her father, and finds herself with too little protection and a considerable inheritance. Her aunt's marriage to the Italian Signor Montoni carries the family to a remote castle in the Apennines, where unexplained noises, locked rooms and veiled pictures begin Emily's real troubles. Nothing at Udolpho is explained to her, and very little of it is what it appears.
Captain Hastings is invalided home from the war and invited to stay at Styles, the Essex house where a friend's family is at quiet war over the widowed aunt's recent marriage to a man twenty years younger than she is. Then the aunt dies in the night and the cause turns out to be poison. Hastings, who knows a Belgian refugee detective from before, brings him in. It is the first case for Hercule Poirot.
An advertisement appears in the newspaper asking whether the reader is a gifted child looking for special opportunities, and dozens of children answer it. Only four pass the strange tests that follow, and the four of them are then sent into a school run by a man named Curtain to find out who is sending secret messages into people's minds.
Hercule Poirot is travelling to the Riviera on the Blue Train when he meets Ruth Kettering, an American heiress on her way to see a former lover. By morning she has been murdered in her compartment and her jewels are gone, and the only lead is a strange man who was seen loitering near the carriage.
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.
