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 59 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 thatched cottage in Mr Hick's garden burns down, and the children who meet at the scene decide to work out who set the fire. They are Larry and Daisy Daykin, Pip and Bets Hilton, and a newcomer named Frederick Algernon Trotteville, soon nicknamed Fatty from his initials, and they call themselves the Five Find-Outers and Dog. Their suspects include an old tramp, a dismissed servant, a hostile colleague and the cook.
Larry, Daisy, Fatty, Pip, Bets and the dog Buster are at a gymkhana when a house nearby is robbed, and the burglar leaves no sign of how he got in or out. What he does leave is a set of enormous footprints, a glove print, a curious criss-cross mark on the ground and two torn scraps of paper, and the Five Find-Outers have holidays and a mystery at the same time.
The dead have come back, and they take over the bodies of the living; the only weapon that works against them is a kind of exorcism, and there are not enough people who can perform it. The Confederation that governs human space is coming apart, and some of its wealthiest worlds are preparing to abandon everybody else. This is the third and last volume of the story.
Solaria is a Spacer world where nobody touches anybody and conversation happens through holograms, with robots doing all the work and the settlers living alone on enormous estates. It is also the setting for the first murder in two hundred years, and the Solarians want the case cleared up without the disturbance of an Earthman living among them.
In 1327 the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his novice, Adso of Melk, travel to a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy for a disputation between the Pope's representatives and the Franciscans, in a year when emperor and pope are at war. The abbot asks William to look into the death of one of the monks, and then another monk dies. The abbey's library, which nobody but the librarian may enter, sits at the middle of the questions he has to ask.
Kvothe keeps an inn in a quiet village under a name that is not his own, and he is not good at being ordinary. When a scribe with an interest in his reputation turns up, he agrees to tell his story properly, in three days, and the novel is the first day. It covers a childhood in a travelling troupe, years on the streets of a city after somebody killed everyone he knew, and the scholarship, poverty and badly chosen enemy that came with a place at the University. The telling is framed by the present: an inn, a war in the countryside, and a scribe who wants the full account.
In 1987 Cora is trapped in an abusive marriage and has just given birth to a boy, and the novel follows what happens depending on the name she chooses for him. Three versions of the child's life unfold from that single decision, each with its own consequences for the family and for the people around it.
Arthur Gordon Pym stows away on a whaling ship leaving Nantucket with a friend's help, and finds himself trapped below deck with almost no water and no way of getting out. What follows is a voyage of mutiny, shipwreck and hunger, a rescue by another vessel, and a journey further south than any ship had gone before, towards ice and a coast that the account breaks off before reaching.
In 1718 a headstrong fifteen-year-old girl in a parish near Newcastle begins an affair that ruins her, and when the man denies that they were ever joined she has to leave for London. There she takes a position in the household of an apothecary, hoping to salvage what she can of her reputation. What she finds in that house is not what she was promised.
An ancient Phoenician statue called the Navigator was stolen from the museum in Baghdad years ago, and there are men who will do anything to get hold of it. Their first victim is a corrupt antiquities dealer, and their second very nearly becomes a United Nations investigator, who is saved from drowning by Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala. Austin wants to know what makes the statue so valuable.
Cory Brooks cannot stop thinking about Anna Corwin, the new girl at Shadyside High, who is pale, blond and beautiful and seems to want him as much as he wants her. He loses sleep and drops his friends. Then Anna disappears without explanation, and the only way to find her is to go to her house on Fear Street.
In 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano Lopez begins courting Eliza Lynch, an Irish woman who becomes his mistress and follows him to Paraguay. In Asuncion she lives as the first lady of a country she does not understand, while the man she came with rises to lead the nation into the Paraguayan War of 1865 to 1870.
The Nigger of the Narcissus is a novella by Joseph Conrad about a voyage from Bombay to London aboard the merchant ship Narcissus, and about a West Indian sailor on board who is dying of tuberculosis. The American edition of 1897 came out under a different title, and the book carries a subtitle describing it as a tale of the forecastle.
Le Cirque des Rêves appears without warning, opens only at night and leaves as quietly as it came. Inside its black-and-white tents the audience sees astonishing things; behind them, two magicians are playing a game that only one of them can finish. Celia and Marco were trained from childhood by rival instructors for exactly this contest, and neither was given the choice to decline. The circus was built as their board, and the performers and regular visitors caught up in it are as invested in the result as the players are. The Night Circus is a standalone told out of order, a slow assembly of tents, performers and a duel that turns into something neither of them was taught to expect.
Twenty years after a series of killings stopped in Washington, D.C., a body is found in a community garden in a way that suggests the murderer has come back. A homicide detective and two former police officers, one of them retired from the original case, find themselves working the same streets and the same failure all over again.
A disease called Wanderer's Folly has been spreading for two years, filling people's heads with delusions until the world begins to come apart. David Arlen thinks the worst has passed, and within the same day his wife is dead and he is driving a stolen car with his eight-year-old daughter Ellie.
In modern Moscow there are the Others, people with supernatural powers who have taken sides in a very old conflict between the Light and the Dark. A truce has held the balance between them for a thousand years, but a prophecy says that one Other will arrive who can tip it, and when a boy with unusual abilities appears the two sides begin to compete for him.
Vianne and Isabelle are sisters in France when the German army occupies the country, and they answer it in opposite ways: Vianne stays in the village and tries to keep her daughter fed and her household intact, while Isabelle joins the resistance and works on escape routes for downed Allied airmen. The book moves between the occupied years and a frame set in 1995, as an elderly woman looks back at what she and her sister did.
The Nightmare Reader is an anthology of horror stories edited by Peter Haining, published in 1973. Its stories are arranged in pairs of a kind, each one illustrating a different disturbance of the mind, and it draws on authors from the early nineteenth century to the twentieth for its examples.
When the entire Christopher Columbus exhibit disappears from the local museum, a fourth-grade sleuth-in-training named Alec Flint takes the case. He is joined by Gina, a new classmate who wants help with a disappearance of her own, since one of the teachers at their school has gone missing and nobody else seems to be looking for her.
When his sexton finds a corpse in the wrong grave, the rector of Fenchurch St Paul asks Lord Peter Wimsey to find out who the dead man was and how he came to be there. The lore of bell-ringing and a village in the remote fens of East Anglia form the background to a story of an old unsolved crime and its violent unravelling twenty years later.
Mma Precious Ramotswe sells the family property after her father's death, leaves the town where she grew up and opens a detective agency in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. It is the first agency of its kind in the country, its office is in a small storefront, and its cases are the problems that people bring to a woman they have decided to trust.
Sir Waldo Hawkridge is thirty-five, unmarried and famous in society for his athletic skill, which is why everyone calls him the Nonesuch. When a cousin he has never met leaves him a ramshackle property in the West Riding, he travels north to look at what he has inherited, and his arrival turns the neighbourhood upside down.
A Yorkshire whaling ship called the Volunteer is bound for the Arctic in the 1850s, in a trade that is being killed off by cheaper fuels. On board are a harpooner named Henry Drax, who is as dangerous as he is capable, and Patrick Sumner, a disgraced former army surgeon taken on as the ship's doctor for want of anything better.
An older man sits with a faded notebook and reads aloud to a woman who does not understand why he comes to read to her. The story he reads is set on the North Carolina coast in 1946. Noah Calhoun is home from the war and restoring an old plantation house, still thinking about the girl he loved one summer fourteen years earlier. He could not find her afterwards and could not forget her. The reading and the story in the notebook move towards each other.
At a party in Kansas City a young woman tries to introduce a man to her father and ends up married to him before the evening is over. The four of them, two of them mathematicians, find themselves flying a ship that can travel between universes. They are not lost exactly, but they cannot get home, and something is following them.
At the Stahlbaum house on Christmas Eve, Marie is drawn to an ugly nutcracker, and when her brother cracks a nut too hard and breaks its jaw she bandages the toy with a ribbon from her dress. That night the toys in the cabinet come to life and fight a battle against the Mouse King's army.
The Stillness is a supercontinent that suffers a catastrophic season every few centuries, and the last one may be the end of the world. Essun, an orogene able to move the earth, has found shelter but not her daughter, and what she is offered instead is a request from Alabaster Tenring, the man who broke the world, at a price that would settle the fate of everyone.
A man comes back to the town he grew up in for a funeral and finds himself at the farm at the end of the lane, where he remembers a girl called Lettie Hempstock, who had told him that the pond behind her house was an ocean. The past he had forgotten comes back to him there.
Daryn Alwyn is the younger son of one of the richest families in the world, augmented with nanites and tuned before birth by DNA manipulation into what his society calls a pre-select. He does not go to work for the family media corporation, choosing the military and then freelance writing instead.
In November 1963 a German freelance crime reporter follows an ambulance to the flat of a Holocaust survivor who has killed himself, and is given the dead man's diary. What the diary describes is a former SS commander, and the search for him has to be made inside a secret organisation. That organisation exists to protect men like the one he is hunting.
Nell Trent is not quite fourteen, and she lives with her grandfather in his shop of odds and ends near the Strand in London. He adores her and he is gambling away everything they own. The moneylender Quilp has begun to take an interest in the shop and in the girl, and one night the pair walk out of the city with nothing.
Alun Weaver, a writer of modest celebrity, comes back to his native Wales with his wife Rhiannon, who was once a famous beauty. They move into a quiet retirement community that turns out to be full of people Alun used to know, and he takes up with a group of men who have stayed there all along.
Santiago is an ageing fisherman in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, and his luck has run out: he has gone a long time without a catch. He sets out alone once more and hooks a giant marlin that takes him far out to sea and into a struggle lasting for days. The story is also the story of a young boy, Manolin, who has been taught by the old man and cares about him.
Constance and Sophia Baines grow up over their father's drapery shop in Bursley, a town in the Potteries, and their lives run in opposite directions. Constance stays, marries the shop's assistant and keeps the business. Sophia runs away to London with a travelling salesman, goes with him to Paris, and disappears from her family's life for thirty years.
The Wart is a boy in a castle who is not important enough to be educated properly, and Merlyn is his tutor, a wizard living backwards through time. Merlyn knows who the boy will become, and turns him into a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose and a badger so that he can learn what it is like to be something other than a human being. Before Arthur is king, his tutor teaches him that the only justifiable war is one fought to prevent another. The novel collects four volumes, The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight and The Candle in the Wind, which follow the boy from a country childhood to the Round Table, the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the war against his own son.
Thirty-five girls entered the competition to marry Prince Maxon, and four are left at the palace. America Singer never expected to be one of them, or to have come so close to the crown, but the competition is nearly over and the threats outside the palace walls are getting worse. One of the four will be chosen.
Ivan has spent twenty-seven years behind the glass walls of an enclosure in a shopping mall and has grown used to humans watching him. He hardly thinks about his life in the jungle, and occupies himself with television, his friends Stella and Bob, and painting. Then he meets Ruby, a baby elephant taken from the wild, and is forced to see their home and his art through new eyes.
Omelas is a city of extraordinary happiness, and the first day of summer is celebrated with a festival and a race. The narrator describes the place and its people, and then explains the arrangement on which all of it rests: somewhere in the city a single child is kept in misery so that everybody else can live as they do. Some of the citizens, having learned this, walk away.
Ten years ago four Blackfeet men shot a herd of elk outside Browning, Montana, and went home. Something about that hunt was different, and now all four are being stalked and killed in turn by a hunter none of them can name. What is doing it has been waiting a decade.
Princess Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne of Phantasmorania is given the fairy gift of ordinariness at her christening, so unlike her six beautiful sisters she grows up with mousy hair and freckles and would rather have adventures than embroider tapestries. When her parents try to marry her off, she runs away and becomes fourteenth assistant kitchen maid at a neighbouring palace.
Mary Boleyn is married young and becomes the mistress of Henry VIII, and it is her sister Anne who decides what to do with that. The novel follows the two of them through the years in which the king is trying to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the court is working out which family will keep his favour. Mary tells her own part in it: the children she raises, the sister she loves and cannot trust, and a court in which being noticed by the king is both a career and a danger.
A village sorcerer named Alder cannot sleep without being brought to the wall of stones at the border of the land of the dead, where the dead beg him to set them free. He is sent to find Ged, the former Archmage, who knows more about that country than anyone living. What Alder has been seeing turns out to concern the living too.
Nine Americans, whose lives have each been changed by trees in some way, are brought together by the destruction of forests. One of them was shot out of the sky in Vietnam and saved by a banyan tree, and the book is made of their separate stories. The trees are the ones with the longer story.
Patrick Lanigan, a junior partner in a law firm in Biloxi, Mississippi, learns that his firm's client and its senior partners are defrauding the government over navy shipbuilding contracts. He fakes his own death, takes ninety million dollars of the firm's hidden money and disappears to South America, and four years later he is found.
A secret government project turns twelve death-row inmates into something that spreads across the country, and a six-year-old girl is carried out of the facility by an agent who means to keep her safe. The novel follows the collapse of the United States and then, decades later, a community of survivors living behind lights that the infected will not cross.
Henri is a French soldier who follows Napoleon out of a village that expected nothing of him, and he ends up running the Emperor's larder, cooking for the man who has become the reason for his life. Villanelle is the daughter of a Venetian boatman, married to a gambler who has wagered away her heart. The novel follows the two of them through the Russian campaign and back toward Venice, where the news of the war has not entirely arrived.
Ojo the Unlucky lives in poverty in the woods of the Munchkin Country with his laconic uncle, Unc Nunkie, and their neighbour is the magician Dr Pipt, who is about to finish six years of work on the Powder of Life. The powder animates the Patchwork Girl, and an accident leaves Ojo needing to find the ingredients for a cure.
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.
