Book library

Stories for the midnight shelf

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.

RomanceFantasySci-FiHorrorMystery & ThrillerHistorical FictionLiterary FictionAdventureRomantasy tagContemporary Romance tag3473 booksEdited by Baby Bat

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Cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

The shelf

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 6 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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Showing 48 of 3473 books

Rating coming soon

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · 2014

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind, and she and her father leave Paris for her great-uncle's house inside the walls of Saint-Malo when the German army arrives. Werner Pfennig is an orphan in a German mining town whose talent for building and repairing radios takes him first to a military school and then into service tracking resistance transmissions. The novel alternates between the two of them through the war years, and moves back and forth in time towards the same summer.

Historical fictionWorld War II fiction

Rating coming soon

Atonement

Ian McEwan · 2001

On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis misreads a scene between her older sister Cecilia and the housekeeper's son, Robbie, and tells a story about it that changes all three of their lives. The novel follows the consequences through the Second World War, through Briony's adulthood, and through her life as a writer and the way the book she is writing relates to what happened. McEwan divides it into three periods: England in 1935, wartime England and France, and the present day.

Historical fictionWorld War II fiction

Rating coming soon

Between Shades of Gray

Ruta Sepetys · 2011

Lina Vilkas is fifteen and wants to be an artist, living in Kaunas in Lithuania with her parents and her younger brother. On the night of 14 June 1941 the Soviet secret police break into the family's home, and Lina, her mother and her brother are deported, with thousands of others, by train and then on foot towards labour camps in Siberia. The novel follows the three of them and the people they are transported with, and it is told in Lina's voice.

Historical fictionWorld War II fiction

Rating coming soon

Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel · 2012

Thomas Cromwell is now the king's chief minister, and Henry VIII has tired of Anne Boleyn. The novel covers the months in which the second marriage is taken apart: the questions asked, the evidence gathered and the men Cromwell uses to gather it, while the court watches to see who rises next. It is the second of three novels following Cromwell, and it keeps to his view of the work in front of him and the household he comes home to.

Historical fictionTudor fictionBiographical fiction

Rating coming soon

Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier · 1997

Inman is a wounded Confederate soldier who walks away from an army hospital as the American Civil War closes and sets out for Cold Mountain in North Carolina, where Ada, the woman he barely knew before he left, is trying to keep her father's farm from slipping away. Ada was raised to be ornamental and has no idea how to work land, until a young drifter called Ruby arrives and teaches her. The novel moves between his walk home and her farm, through a South being remade behind them.

Historical fictionCivil War fictionHistorical romance

Rating coming soon

Fingersmith

Sarah Waters · 2002

Sue Trinder has grown up in a London house run by a baby farmer and populated by petty thieves, and a well-dressed con man makes her an offer: if she takes a place as maid to Maud Lilly, a sheltered heiress in a country house, and helps him court her, the three of them will share Maud's inheritance. Sue agrees, then finds herself pitying and liking the woman she was sent to cheat. The novel is set in a Victorian England of asylums, doctors and property.

Historical fictionVictorian fiction

Rating coming soon

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier · 1999

In the 1660s Griet goes into service in Johannes Vermeer's house in Delft, after an accident costs her father his sight and the family its income. She is careful and quiet and watches how the painter works, and in time she is allowed to help him in the studio and then to sit for him. The rest of the household notices, and the debts, the order of the house and the difference in station between them all come into it.

Historical fictionBiographical fiction

Rating coming soon

Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell · 1936

Scarlett O'Hara is the eldest daughter of a well-off plantation family in Clayton County, Georgia, and the novel opens on her life of parties and suitors before the American Civil War. It follows her through the war and the Reconstruction that follows, including the fall of Atlanta and the march through Georgia, as she works to keep hold of the family land and to rebuild the position she was born into.

Historical fictionCivil War fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2006

Ugwu is a village boy who becomes houseboy to Odenigbo, a mathematics professor with revolutionary opinions in a Nigerian university town, and Olanna is the wealthy, educated woman the professor loves. The novel follows the three of them, and Olanna's twin sister, through the ethnic and political tensions of the 1960s and into the Nigerian Civil War, when households that had looked settled are pulled apart and the people in them have to keep moving.

Historical fictionWar fiction

Rating coming soon

Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell · 2020

In Stratford in the 1580s a young Latin tutor meets a woman called Agnes, known for her herbs, her falconry and her habit of knowing things before other people do. They marry, she moves in with his family while he goes to London to work in the theatre, and between them they raise three children largely apart. Eleven years later their son Hamnet falls ill, and the novel stays with the household and with Agnes through the days around his death and what follows it.

Historical fictionTudor fictionBiographical fiction

Rating coming soon

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 2016

Effia's marriage takes her into the household of the British governor at Cape Coast Castle, while Esi, her half-sister, is imprisoned in the dungeons of the same building, waiting to be shipped across the Atlantic. Neither sister knows the other exists. Each following chapter belongs to a later descendant of one of the two women, so the novel runs from the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century through the slave trade, plantations in the American South, the mines and jazz clubs of the twentieth century, and towards the present, one generation at a time.

Historical fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

I, Claudius

Robert Graves · 1934

Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus was born in 10 BC, and the stammer and limp that came with him led his own family to treat him as a fool. He lived through the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and the emperor Caligula, mostly by being underestimated, and in AD 41 the guard made him emperor. The novel is written as his own autobiography, covering the murders, marriages and poisonings of the imperial household from close enough to be in danger himself.

Historical fictionAncient world fictionBiographical fiction

Rating coming soon

Ivanhoe

Walter Scott · 1819

Wilfrid of Ivanhoe comes home from the Third Crusade in disguise, disinherited by his father for following King Richard instead of marrying as he was told, and finds England split between the Normans who hold it and the Saxons who do not. He rides in a tournament at Ashby, becomes caught up in the fate of a Jewish moneylender and his daughter, and ends up among the outlaws and loyalists trying to raise the king's ransom. The novel runs on disguise, trial by combat and the slow return of Richard.

Historical fictionMedieval fictionHistorical adventure

Rating coming soon

Les Miserables

Victor Hugo · 1862

Jean Valjean is released from the galleys after nineteen years and finds that no one will take him in, until a bishop gives him a bed and, in doing so, alters the direction of his life. The novel follows him from 1815 to the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, along with the people whose paths cross his: a dying seamstress, her daughter Cosette, a police inspector who will not allow a former convict to become an honest man, and the students who build the barricades.

Historical fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry · 1985

Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are former Texas Rangers living in a small border town with little to occupy them, until Call decides to drive a herd of cattle north to Montana. The novel follows the drive and the people attached to it: the cowboys who sign on, a woman they rescue along the way, a young man with something to prove, and others who have no intention of leaving Texas. It is set in the late nineteenth century and built out of the ordinary work of the frontier rather than its legends.

Historical fictionWesternFrontier fiction

Rating coming soon

Master and Commander

Patrick O'Brian · 1969

Jack Aubrey, a Royal Navy lieutenant newly promoted to master and commander, meets the physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin at a concert in Port Mahon and takes him aboard as surgeon of the sloop Sophie. The two of them sail the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars, chasing prizes under a first lieutenant, James Dillon, whose Irish politics complicate the ship. Their orders run from escort work to a fight against a far larger opponent.

Historical fictionNaval adventureHistorical adventure

Rating coming soon

Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden · 1997

Chiyo is nine years old in 1929 when her father sells her and her sister into the entertainment districts of Kyoto: Chiyo to a geisha house in Gion and her sister to a brothel. She is trained in music, dance and the etiquette of the teahouses, takes the name Sayuri, and learns how a geisha's career is financed, negotiated and envied. Her account runs from the fishing village she came from, through the war years and the decades on either side of them.

Historical fiction

Rating coming soon

Outlander

Diana Gabaldon · 1991

Claire Randall, who served as a nurse in the war, is travelling in the Scottish Highlands in 1945 when a standing stone takes her to 1743, into a country of raiding clans and a Jacobite rising not yet begun. A clan that does not know what to make of an Englishwoman in strange clothes takes her in, and the safest arrangement available is marriage to Jamie Fraser, a young Highlander with a price on his head.

Historical fictionHistorical romance

Rating coming soon

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 2017

Sunja is the daughter of a fisherman in Korea in the early 1900s, and she falls for a wealthy stranger who turns out to be married. She refuses his offer to buy her out of the consequences and instead accepts a proposal from a sickly minister on his way to Japan, which takes her away from her home and sets the family on a different course. The novel follows four generations through the markets, churches, universities and pachinko parlours of Japan, in a country that treats Koreans as outsiders.

Historical fictionFamily sagaImmigrant fiction

Rating coming soon

Pompeii

Robert Harris · 2003

Marcus Attilius Primus comes from Rome to take up the post of aquarius on the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that waters the towns around the Bay of Naples, and finds its springs failing and the man he replaced missing. Working along the line from Pompeii towards Misenum, he is drawn into the affairs of the towns it serves, including a wealthy former slave, the engineers who answer to Rome and the officials with their own arrangements. Nobody yet knows what the mountain above the bay is about to do.

Historical fictionAncient world fiction

Rating coming soon

Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh · 2008

The Ibis is an old schooner with a mixed crew and a hold full of opium, sailing the Indian Ocean in the years just before the Opium Wars. The passengers include a ruined raja, a village widow, an American of mixed parentage and an opium trader with a missionary streak, alongside sailors, stowaways and convicts. The novel moves from the poppy fields of the Ganges to the high seas and the back streets of China, and as their old ties fall away the people aboard begin to think of themselves as ship-brothers.

Historical fictionHistorical adventureColonial fiction

Rating coming soon

Shogun

James Clavell · 1975

John Blackthorne, an English navigator, is wrecked on the coast of Japan and wakes in a country closed to most of the world. He has to learn the language and the rules of a society in which the line between life and death is thin, and he becomes a piece in the struggle between two warlords, the Portuguese and Spanish missionary presence, and the Japanese lords who want his knowledge of ships and guns. The novel is set in feudal Japan at the start of the seventeenth century.

Historical fictionHistorical adventure

Rating coming soon

Silence

Shusaku Endo · 1966

A young Portuguese Jesuit is smuggled into seventeenth-century Japan, where the government is determined to stamp out Christianity and foreign influence, and finds the Christian communities driven underground. He is a fugitive in a country he does not know, dependent on villagers who risk their lives to shelter him, and he begins to doubt his mission as he waits for an answer that does not come. The novel is told partly through his letters and partly through the record of the persecution around him.

Historical fiction

Rating coming soon

Small Island

Andrea Levy · 2004

In London in 1948, Hortense arrives from Jamaica to join a husband she has barely met, expecting the country she was raised to think of as home. Gilbert has served in the Royal Air Force and is living in a single room in a house owned by Queenie and Bernard, a white English couple whose war has left its own damage. The novel is told in four voices and moves between Jamaica and England, and between the war years and what came after them.

Historical fictionPost-war fictionImmigrant fiction

Rating coming soon

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Lisa See · 2005

Lily is the daughter of a farmer in nineteenth-century China, and at six years old she is told by the local matchmaker that her feet, if bound properly, will be flawless. Since a woman's prospects are judged by the size and shape of her feet, that is very good news for her family and years of pain for her. She learns the secret women's script called nu shu, and she is matched with an 'old-same', Snow Flower, from a more refined household; the two of them carry that bond through their marriages and their households.

Historical fiction

Rating coming soon

Suite Francaise

Irene Nemirovsky · 2004

Suite Francaise follows French families of very different kinds through the exodus of June 1940, when the roads out of Paris filled with people fleeing the German advance. The first part covers that flight and the small cowardices and fragile moments of solidarity that came with it; the second moves to the village of Bussy, where a German garrison is billeted and old resentments between neighbours find new encouragement. Nemirovsky wrote it while the events were unfolding, and it was published decades later.

Historical fictionWorld War II fiction

Rating coming soon

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak · 2005

Liesel Meminger is nine when she arrives in a small German town to live with foster parents, having buried her brother on the way and lost her mother. She learns to read with her foster father, steals books where she can find them, and lives through the Nazi years among her neighbours, the Jewish man hidden in the basement and the war that eventually reaches the town. The novel is narrated by Death, who takes an interest in the girl and her use of words.

Historical fictionWorld War II fiction

Rating coming soon

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 1982

Celie is a poor Black girl in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century, and the novel is made of the letters she writes, first to God and later to her sister Nettie, who has gone to Africa as a missionary. Through them the reader follows Celie's marriage, the women who come into her life, including the singer Shug Avery, her sister's letters from another continent, and the slow accumulation of a life that Celie begins to shape for herself.

Historical fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas · 1846

Edmond Dantes is a young sailor with a promotion and a wedding ahead of him when he is denounced by men who want what he has and imprisoned without trial in an island fortress. The novel follows what becomes of him, of those who accused him and of the people who once depended on him, across France, Italy and the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1839. It opens on the day Napoleon leaves Elba, and the politics of the Bourbon Restoration run underneath everything.

Historical fictionHistorical adventure

Rating coming soon

The Crimson Petal and the White

Michel Faber · 2002

Sugar works in a Victorian London brothel and has a plan for getting out of it, and William Rackham is the heir to a perfume business who decides that he wants her. He installs her in his house, where she is drawn into the running of the business, the unhappiness of his wife and the household's arrangements. The novel moves between its characters and follows Sugar's own writing as well as the family's fortunes, taking in the smells, streets and commerce of the 1870s.

Historical fictionVictorian fiction

Rating coming soon

The Essex Serpent

Sarah Perry · 2016

Cora Seaborne is a recent widow with an interest in natural history, and she moves with her son to a village in Essex where an old rumour has revived: that a serpent has come back to the marshes. The local vicar, William Ransome, is certain the stories are superstition and that there is something worse behind them, and the two of them argue over what nature and faith can account for while the parish looks on. The novel is set in late nineteenth-century England.

Historical fictionVictorian fictionHistorical mystery

Rating coming soon

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows · 2008

In January 1946 Juliet Ashton is a London writer looking for her next subject when a stranger from the island of Guernsey writes to her about a book that once had her name written in it. He belongs to the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a reading group that began as an alibi when its members were caught breaking curfew during the German occupation. The novel is told in letters, telegrams and diary entries as Juliet gets to know the islanders and what the occupation did to them.

Historical fictionPost-war fiction

Rating coming soon

The Long Song

Andrea Levy · 2010

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.

Historical fictionColonial fiction

Rating coming soon

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco · 1980

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.

Historical fictionMedieval fictionHistorical mystery

Rating coming soon

The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah · 2015

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.

Historical fictionWorld War II fiction

Rating coming soon

The Other Boleyn Girl

Philippa Gregory · 2001

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.

Historical fictionTudor fictionBiographical fiction

Rating coming soon

The Pillars of the Earth

Ken Follett · 1989

Kingsbridge is a small English town with a priory, a market and no cathedral, and in the twelfth century a group of people set out to build one. The novel follows the masons, monks, nobles and villagers whose lives the building changes, from the sinking of the White Ship to the murder of Thomas Becket, through a civil war that leaves the country without a settled ruler. A prior, a builder and a woman who works in wool each carry part of the story across several decades.

Historical fictionMedieval fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989

Stevens has been a butler at Darlington Hall for most of his working life, and in the summer of 1956 his new American employer suggests that he take a motoring holiday. He drives into the West Country, going back over what he remembers of the years between the wars in the house: the guests, the politics of his employer's dinners, his own standards of service and the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who left. The novel is Stevens's own account of those years and of what he chose to do with them.

Historical fictionPost-war fiction

Rating coming soon

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Baroness Orczy · 1905

During the Reign of Terror a band of English gentlemen keeps smuggling French aristocrats out of the country before they reach the guillotine, and nobody knows who leads them, only that a small red flower is left behind each time. In London, Marguerite Blakeney is a celebrated French actress married to Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy man whose visible talents appear to be clothes and a good-natured drawl. French agents are hunting the person behind the flower, and Marguerite knows more about him than she would like.

Historical fictionHistorical adventure

Rating coming soon

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · 2016

Cora is enslaved on a cotton plantation in Georgia, and when a new arrival tells her about the Underground Railroad she decides to take the risk and go. In this version of it the railroad is real: engineers and conductors operate tracks and tunnels under the soil of the South. Cora and her companion travel north from state to state with a slave catcher behind them, and each place they stop has its own arrangements for Black people and its own particular danger.

Historical fictionCivil War fiction

Rating coming soon

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston · 1937

Janie Crawford grows up in Florida in the early twentieth century and tells her own story to a friend after she returns to the town she left. The novel follows her through three marriages: a farmer chosen for her, a mayor who wants a wife he can display, and a man who takes her to the Everglades to work the bean fields.

Historical fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe · 1958

Okonkwo is a wrestler and farmer in Umuofia, a village in southeastern Nigeria, who has built his standing by refusing to resemble his father. The first part of the novel describes his household, the customs and gatherings of the Igbo and the fear of weakness that drives him. The later parts bring the arrival of British missionaries and administrators, who introduce a church and a court and a version of order that the clan's own structures cannot hold against.

Historical fictionColonial fiction

Rating coming soon

True Grit

Charles Portis · 1968

Mattie Ross is fourteen when a hired hand named Tom Chaney kills her father in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and rides off with his horse and his money. She does not intend to leave the matter to the courts. She hires Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed deputy marshal with a taste for drink and a reputation for shooting first, and a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf attaches himself to the pursuit. The three of them follow Chaney into Indian Territory, and Mattie is the one keeping the expedition pointed at what she came for.

Historical fictionWesternFrontier fiction

Rating coming soon

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy · 1869

Tolstoy follows five aristocratic Russian families through the years of the Napoleonic Wars, from drawing rooms and balls in St Petersburg and Moscow to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino and the French invasion of 1812. Between the narrative chapters the book argues about history and about how much credit any one man, Napoleon included, deserves for events. The private lives and the war move through each other: marriages, debts, duels, retreats and the long withdrawal from Moscow.

Historical fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel · 2009

Thomas Cromwell is the son of a blacksmith who has become a lawyer, a trader and a man useful to cardinals and kings. The novel follows his rise through the court of Henry VIII between 1500 and 1535, from inside his own head: the household he keeps, the accounts he manages, the people he protects and the ones he moves out of the way. At the centre of it is the king's need for a male heir and the marriage to Catherine of Aragon that stands in the way.

Historical fictionTudor fictionBiographical fiction

Rating coming soon

Ayesha at Last

Uzma Jalaluddin · 2018

Ayesha Shamsi has put aside her plans to be a poet and taken a teaching job so that she can pay back her wealthy uncle. She lives with her large Muslim family in Toronto, where the conversation keeps returning to her younger cousin, who is about to turn down her hundredth marriage proposal, and to Ayesha, who is lonely and does not want an arranged marriage. Then Khalid arrives in her life: clever, handsome, and just as conservative and quick to judge as she had feared.

Contemporary romanceEnemies to lovers

Rating coming soon

Beach Read

Emily Henry · 2020

January Andrews writes romance novels with happy endings, and the man in the next beach house, Augustus Everett, writes literary fiction and thinks very little of hers. Both are broke, blocked and spending a summer on the same stretch of coast, and they were rivals at college before either of them was published. They make a bet: each will write the other's kind of book by the end of the summer. January is also clearing out the house her late father left her, while working out what she now knows about him.

Contemporary romanceRomantic comedyEnemies to lovers

Rating coming soon

Better Than the Movies

Lynn Painter · 2021

Liz Buxbaum has given her heart to Michael since they were children, and he never noticed her before his family moved away. Now he is back, and Liz intends to get his attention and an invitation to prom, even if that means being friendly with Wes Bennet, the neighbour she has spent years disliking. Wes is attractive and infuriating and he agrees to help, which means spending time together. Liz is also still dealing with the loss of her mother and with the way films, rather than the people around her, have shaped what she expects.

Contemporary romanceFriends to loversNew adult romance

About the book library

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.

From our books editor

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Browse by genre

Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.

Primary genre

Romance

The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.

676 books Primary genre

Fantasy

Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.

685 books Primary genre

Sci-Fi

Generation ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.

536 books Primary genre

Horror

Haunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.

381 books Primary genre

Mystery & Thriller

Detectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.

599 books Primary genre

Historical Fiction

Cathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.

580 books Primary genre

Literary Fiction

Novels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.

575 books Primary genre

Adventure

Shipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.

324 books

One 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.

Browse by tag

Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.

Tag

Romantasy

Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.

70 books Tag

Contemporary Romance

Modern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.

155 books

Romantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.