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 60 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.
Elayne, Nynaeve and Aviendha use a ter'angreal called the Bowl of the Winds to undo the unnatural heat the Dark One has worked into the weather, and then have to escape a Seanchan invasion. In Andor one of their companions is murdered and the group works out that one of its own number belongs to the Black Ajah, while Perrin takes his people into Ghealdan.
Natty Bumppo, called the Pathfinder, is in his middle years and guiding a party across the country towards Lake Ontario, the inland sea of the title. The journey takes them through forest and water and past men who would rather they did not arrive. Among the travellers is a young woman, Mabel Dunham, and Natty finds his own convictions tested by her.
The story follows Kino, a pearl diver, and explores questions of purpose as well as greed, defiance of social convention and evil. Steinbeck took the material from a Mexican folk tale he heard in La Paz in Baja California Sur, in a region that had once been rich in pearls, and the book is often described as a parable.
Two Supreme Court justices are murdered in a single week, one a liberal killed at home and one a Republican appointee shot inside a Washington cinema, and nobody can explain why anyone would want both of them dead. A Tulane law student writes a brief setting out her own theory of the case, and the people who read it begin to die.
The Baudelaire orphans travel to a hotel that is meant to be the last safe gathering place for the noble side of the organisation their parents served. Kit Snicket, who is pregnant, leaves the three of them there disguised as concierges with instructions to watch the guests and work out who is on which side, but the hotel is run by identical twins whose loyalties do not match.
In 1950 a young doctor named Norton Perina joins an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a tribe that may not exist. The expedition finds the tribe, and finds as well a turtle whose meat appears to hold off age, which makes Perina's scientific career and sets off everything that follows him afterwards.
Preston McQuinn likes his apartment the way he likes his life: dark, empty and exactly as he arranged it. Then Cybil Campbell moves in next door and brings her brightness into his carefully ordered gloom, and he cannot deny a grudging interest in the woman who barges in without being invited. When she tries to hire him as her date, he has to decide what he is prepared to open up.
Lucinda Bromley is a botanist whose talent is an unusual one: she can detect almost any poison, which is useful to the investigators who consult her and ruinous to her reputation. When a lord is murdered with a poison made from a rare fern stolen from her own conservatory, she needs help to keep her name out of it.
Flynne Fisher lives in a small town in a near-future America where steady work is scarce and the drug trade is the largest employer. Her brother Burton, a veteran with an implant and a limp, is offered security work that he thinks takes place inside a simulation, and when he cannot take the shift Flynne sits in for him. What she sees through the headset is a murder in a city that is not hers.
Bagoas is a young Persian from an aristocratic family who is captured by his father's enemies, castrated and sold as a slave to King Darius III, who makes him his favourite. When Alexander the Great overthrows Darius and takes the Persian Empire, Bagoas becomes his lover and most faithful servant. The novel is narrated by Bagoas and covers the last seven years of Alexander's life.
Milo is bored by everything and cannot see the point of school, so one afternoon a tollbooth arrives in his room with a map and a set of instructions. He drives through it in his toy car and arrives in the Kingdom of Wisdom, where the cities are called Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and where the two princesses, Rhyme and Reason, have been exiled by their brothers. To restore them, Milo has to travel with a dog that ticks and a large beetle-like insect called the Humbug, collecting words, numbers and arguments along the way.
In England in 1020 a boy watches his mother die and decides to become a healer. Barred from studying medicine at home, Rob Cole travels across Europe and into Persia, where he conceals who he is in order to enter the school of a famous physician, and learns a medicine that Europe has not yet imagined.
Basil Hallward paints a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man whose good looks are the whole of his reputation, and Dorian is frightened of what time will do to him. He wishes that the painting, and not he, would carry the years, and his wish is granted: the portrait ages and rots while his own face stays as it was. Everything he does from then on is recorded in the painting.
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.
The Pioneers is set in a settlement beside Lake Otsego, where a new town is working out how to live on land it has only recently taken. Into this comes Natty Bumppo, a hunter and frontiersman whose understanding of the forest is shared by almost none of his neighbours, and whose freedom the new laws do not protect.
Ayla and Jondalar are travelling west along the Great Mother River, away from the lands of the Mammoth Hunters and towards the country Jondalar was born in. The journey crosses the territories of many peoples, each with its own customs and its own way of treating strangers, and the two of them have to find a way through all of them.
Jernau Morat Gurgeh is the best game player in the Culture, and he has grown bored of being the best. When a Culture contact drone offers him the chance to travel to the Empire of Azad and compete in the tournament that decides who rules it, he takes it, because the game is genuinely difficult and nothing else in his life is. What nobody tells him is the framing: the Culture is interested in what the Azad do to their own people, and in whether an outsider playing their game well can change anything. Gurgeh learns the rules of a game designed by a society that shows you exactly what it values, and he has to live inside it for years.
An alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the Roth family through the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families are persecuted on various levels. The narrator is the young Philip, whose confusion and terror are rendered closely.
Jack McEvoy is a crime reporter in Denver whose twin brother, a homicide detective, has died in what the authorities call a suicide. Unable to believe it, Jack re-examines the case his brother was working on and concludes that the death was staged, and his search leads him towards a killer who preys on detectives.
Sundew has wanted to destroy the HiveWings since she was old enough to understand what they did to her tribe, and it is the whole purpose of her life. The LeafWings survive only in the Poison Jungle, a place dangerous enough to have kept them safe, and Sundew has to decide what the war costs the people she is fighting for.
In 1959 Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist missionary, takes his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo. The family's belongings and beliefs are both transformed by the country they arrive in, and the novel is told by the five women who came with him.
Rin is a war orphan in a poor province, and the only way out of the marriage her guardians are arranging is to sit the imperial examination and come first, which nobody from her district has ever done. She gets in, and then finds that the elite academy trains shamans alongside soldiers, that the gods who answer are not safe to bargain with, and that the people around her are there for reasons of their own. What begins as a school story becomes a war between the Empire and the island federation of Mugen, fought with the weapons the school taught her to use. The novel draws on the history of twentieth-century China.
Isabel Archer, a young American with more imagination than money, is taken to Europe by an aunt and refuses two good proposals to keep her independence. A legacy from her cousin changes her situation entirely, and the freedom it gives her becomes the ground on which two expatriates scheme to arrange her life for her.
Frank Chambers drifts into a roadside tavern in California, takes a job from the man who owns it and falls for the owner's young wife, Cora. The two of them want the same thing and are willing to do the same thing to get it, and the plan they settle on is simpler than living with the alternative. The story is told by Frank.
The Power is a science fiction novel by the British writer Naomi Alderman, published in 2016 and winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017. Its premise is that women develop the ability to release electrical jolts from their hands, which turns them into the dominant sex. The book is framed as a history written thousands of years after the events it describes.
In a Mexican state where the church has been suppressed, a whisky priest is the last of his kind still at large, moving between villages and avoiding the police. He is not a good man, and the novel follows his flight and the people who shelter or betray him as the pursuit closes in.
This edition collects twenty of Edith Nesbit's dark stories. They turn on love, on terror and on people enduring something by themselves, and among them are a man whose devotion to his dead wife is tangled up with something he cannot see properly, and a country superstition that turns out to be true.
Peekay is an English-speaking boy in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, sent away to a boarding school where being English among Afrikaans children is reason enough to be a target. The people he meets along the way shape the rest of his childhood and decide what he will do with it.
Five hundred miles beyond the Mississippi, five hundred miles into the Louisiana Purchase, a party of squatters crosses the prairie in 1805 looking for somewhere to settle. Among them are the rough Ishmael and Esther Bush and their grown sons, Esther's brother Abiram White, a niece called Ellen Wade and an eccentric naturalist, Dr Obed Bat, and they are watched by an old trapper who knows the country better than they do.
Tom Dreyfus is a prefect, one of the officers of Panoply whose job is to keep order among the thousands of orbital habitats of the Glitter Band, and to investigate any of them that steps far enough out of line. When the entire population of a habitat is killed in what looks at first like an accident, the investigation runs into the interests of the very people who are supposed to be keeping the Band safe. The book is set before the catastrophe that the other Revelation Space novels are already living with.
Toni MacNally and her friends buy a run-down Scottish castle and turn it into a tourist attraction, complete with a re-enactment and an imaginary laird named Bruce MacNiall. Then the castle's actual owner arrives, a formidable Scot who shares the invented laird's name, and young women begin to be murdered nearby.
Therese Belivet is nineteen, working the toy counter of a Manhattan department store through a Christmas rush while she tries to find a way into stage design. A customer in a fur coat stops at her counter, and the two of them exchange only a few sentences and an address. Therese writes; Carol Aird writes back, and what starts as a courtesy becomes the centre of Therese's life. Carol is older, married and in the middle of a divorce she has not fully decided on, with a daughter and a husband who is watching her closely. The novel follows the two of them out of New York.
In sixteenth-century London, a poor boy named Tom Canty and the Prince of Wales discover that they look exactly alike, and they exchange clothes for a few minutes to see how it feels. The exchange is not undone, and each boy is taken for the other: Tom is treated as the heir to the throne while Edward is driven out into the city.
Jeremy Adair North, Earl of Clume and known to his friends as Dare, is one of England's most notorious rakes, a pleasure-seeker whose habits are a way of burying the memory of the actress who broke his heart seven years earlier. When treachery threatens the Crown he decides to use his former beloved to help him expose a traitor.
Tom Wingo teaches and coaches football in South Carolina until his twin sister's third suicide attempt takes him to New York to talk to her psychiatrist. He tells the doctor the story of the family the two of them came from, and in doing so he describes a childhood on an island in the low country that neither of them has ever quite escaped.
Two years after The Princess and the Goblin, Curdie the miner's son has grown old enough to hunt for pleasure and has begun to doubt the story Princess Irene told him about her great-great-grandmother. Then he shoots a white pigeon, remembers whose bird it must be, and is led by a light to the old Princess, who burns his hands clean in her fire of roses.
Irene is a princess in a mountain kingdom, and she is a small girl in a large palace with more stairs and corridors than anyone has told her about. In one of the upper rooms she meets her great-grandmother, who is very old and very hard to find twice, and below the palace there are goblins who have plans for the kingdom.
Goldman presents the book as an abridgement of a much longer novel by the fictional Florinese author S. Morgenstern, keeping, in his telling, the fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes and true love, and cutting the politics. Buttercup is the most beautiful woman in the world; Westley is the farm boy who loves her and goes away to make his fortune; and the story of what happens to them involves a Sicilian who thinks faster than anyone else, a Spanish swordsman with one thing left to do, a giant who is kind, and a prince who is not. The frame story about Goldman and his son is part of the book.
The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years, and the arrangement depends on Queen Sabran producing a daughter. She is still unmarried, the assassins are getting closer, and the truce that keeps the world intact is thinner than the court admits. Ead Duryan is a lady-in-waiting whose real loyalty belongs to a hidden order of mages, and she has been quietly using forbidden magic to keep the queen alive. Far across the sea, Tané has trained her entire life to ride a dragon and is one decision away from losing that future. The east and west have stopped talking, and the thing they were both built to guard against is beginning to wake. The Priory of the Orange Tree is a standalone epic told from several sides of the same story.
Michael Vey has a secret he cannot show to anyone: he can send a current of electricity through his hands. When an organisation with its own interest in people like him starts watching him closely, Michael and his friends have to work out what it wants from them, and then it takes his mother.
Prince Oak is imprisoned in the icy north and bound to the will of a monstrous new queen, and the betrayal that put him there was his own. High King Cardan and High Queen Jude would use any means to retrieve their stolen heir. Oak has to decide whether to try to win back the trust of the girl he has always loved, or to stay loyal to Elfhame and give up the one thing that would end her reign.
Josh January is a private investigator with a case behind him that nearly killed him, and what he wants from Maggie Gladstone's bed and breakfast is a quiet place to recover and, ideally, an undemanding flirtation with the woman who runs it. Maggie has read a great many detective novels and expects a different sort of man.
Devlin O'Neill is a captain in the British Royal Navy with one thing on his mind: destroying the man who murdered his father. He has almost ruined the Earl of Eastleigh financially and is waiting to strike the final blow when the earl's niece arrives from America. Virginia Hughes has sailed to England alone to borrow money from her uncle, and gets kidnapped for her trouble.
Suicide has become an epidemic among young people, and the country has one proven treatment for it. The Program erases the depression along with everything else, and the people who come out of it return as blank slates. Sloane knows better than to cry in front of anyone, and she knows that her parents have already lost one child and will do anything to keep her alive.
A quiet evening at a Dodgers game turns into a proposal on the scoreboard in front of forty-five thousand people, and Nikole Paterson says no where everyone can see her do it. Getting out of the stadium is the next problem, and Carlos Ibarra and his sister, sitting nearby, are the ones who help. When the video spreads, Nik's week gets considerably worse before it improves, and Carlos, a doctor in Los Angeles, keeps appearing in it. Nik has been very clear that she is not looking for a relationship.
Lady Edwina Bollash is a linguist who has been set a challenge: turn a rough, incorrigible man from outside society into a gentleman in six weeks. Mick Tremore is the man, and he has no intention of being turned into anything, though the two of them have more in common than either wants to admit.
When Jeanie's aunt gives her the Pumpkin Spice Cafe in the small town of Dream Harbor, Jeanie takes the chance to leave a dull desk job behind. Logan is a local farmer who avoids the town's gossip wherever possible, and the arrival of the relentlessly cheerful new owner disrupts everything about his routine. He wants nothing to do with her, except that he finds himself drawn to her anyway, lattes and all.
Jean le Flambeur is a thief imprisoned in a prison of his own psychology, where he has to outwit copies of himself to survive. He is broken out by a warrior from a society that hides its thoughts, who wants a particular artefact stolen and has arranged for Jean to be in her debt. The theft takes the pair to a moving city on Mars.
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.
