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 61 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.
Jude Duarte is the exiled mortal queen of Faerie, without power and without a place, after being betrayed by the king she had put on the throne. Her twin sister's trouble gives her a reason to go back into the realm she was pushed out of. She is a mortal in a court of faeries, and her position there has to be taken back rather than granted.
Lestat has risen from the earth and become a rock star, and his songs wake Akasha, the first vampire and queen of the damned. Her plans for the world involve the destruction of most of the men in it, and the older vampires have to decide whether to act against the being they came from.
Duncan McKaskel is taking his wife Susanna and their twelve-year-old son west to start again, and he has prepared for the travelling and the weather. What he has not prepared for is the men who follow families like his, or for Con Vallian, the stranger who saves his life one night and does not explain why. The family's own camp is the part he cannot read.
The Quiet American is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1955 and set in Vietnam in the last years of French colonial rule. Its narrator is Thomas Fowler, a British journalist, and its story turns on his young Vietnamese lover Phuong and on Alden Pyle, an earnest young American whose certainty about how the country should be remade draws all three of them in.
Georgette Heyer's The Quiet Gentleman, a Regency novel from the beginning of 1951, belongs to the spring of 1816, the year after Waterloo. It tells what happens when the Seventh Earl of St Erth comes home from the wars to claim an inheritance that his stepmother and half-brother, who are living in the house, had hoped never to see him take up.
In colonial New England, the British are hunting a masked patriot whose raids frustrate them at every turn, and he is known only as the Raider. Jessica Taggert, proud and quick-tempered, is thrilled by the Raider's midnight embrace and despises Alexander Montgomery, the drunken town buffoon. The two men are the same person, and only his success against the Redcoats will let him tell her so.
When Father mysteriously goes away, the children and their mother leave their comfortable life in London for a small cottage in the country. The house, called Three Chimneys, stands beside a railway line, which becomes a constant source of interest for all three of them. They make friends with the station master, Perks the porter and the Old Gentleman who waves from the train every day, but the question of where Father has gone remains.
Three generations of the Brangwen family live in the Erewash Valley, on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and the novel follows them from the 1840s to the beginning of the twentieth century. Each generation has its own way of loving, and each of them runs into the limits that the life around them sets.
Fay Larkin is being held prisoner in a hidden canyon near a Mormon village where wives are sealed to their husbands, and anyone who finds the place is not expected to leave it. John Shefford, who wants to marry her, goes looking for her through the canyon country. He does it without a gun.
Blue Sargent comes from a family of clairvoyants, and the only ability she has is that other people's talents become stronger when she is near. She has been told all her life that she will cause her true love to die, and she has a rule about staying away from the boys of the local private school.
Gansey has spent years searching for a lost king, and one by one he has drawn other people into the hunt: Ronan, who steals things out of dreams; Adam, whose life is no longer his own; Noah, whose life is no longer a life; and Blue, who loves Gansey and is certain that she is destined to kill him. Now the endgame has begun, and dreams and nightmares are converging.
Larry Darrell comes back from the First World War a different man. He had been a pilot, and a friend died beside him, and the experience has taken away his interest in the life of comfortable Chicago that his fiancee and his friends expect him to settle into. He goes looking instead for an answer to a question he cannot state plainly.
Kid McCoy was a championship boxer, a jewellery thief and a confidence man, and he was married often enough for the count to become part of his legend. The novel follows him from his boyhood in Indiana through the fights, the swindles and the smart company of the years around 1900, and lets him tell much of it himself.
Tristan Caine has spent his adult life keeping a promise, and he broke it on a rainy night for Morana Vitalio, whose safety he considers his own business. She is in enemy territory with both her freedom and her survival at stake, and the two of them join forces to find out what happened to a group of missing girls.
Judy did not want to marry Chris Voulis, and she had wanted to marry somebody else entirely. She had been brought up on Cyprus, where the marriage was arranged for her in the traditional way, so the decision had already been made for her; what she has to decide now is how she is going to live inside it.
Chloe Saunders and her friends Tori, Simon and Derek are on the run from the corporation that altered them, hiding in a safe house belonging to a former employee of the Edison Group. They have powers that keep outgrowing the adults around them, and one of the people sheltering them may be working for the people they are running from.
Henry Fleming leaves his mother's farm to enlist in the Union Army, imagining battle as a parade of glory. In his first engagement he runs from the firing line, then wanders behind the lines among the wounded and the dying, ashamed of himself and longing for a wound of his own before he can face his regiment again.
Mark Ablett is holding a house party at his English country house when his long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia. Shortly afterwards Robert is found dead, shot through the head, and Mark has disappeared. Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has come to call on his friend Bill Beverley, decides to investigate.
Jody Tiflin is ten years old and lives on his father's ranch, where the work is hard, the grown men are mostly busy and the days have a shape he has grown used to. Then he is given a red pony of his own, and looking after it teaches him things about birth, illness and death that the ranch hands could not have explained to him.
Carter and Sadie Kane barely know each other: he travels the world with their Egyptologist father, while she lives in London with their grandparents. When their father attempts a ritual in the British Museum and releases five imprisoned gods, the two discover they are magicians and have to work together.
A pawnbroker with very red hair is recruited into a society that pays its members to sit in an office copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and when the league is suddenly dissolved he asks Sherlock Holmes about it. Holmes listens, takes three pipefuls of tobacco and goes to look at the street outside the shop. The answer is not about red hair at all.
In 1950 in Florida, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys for six months after he kicks the son of the town's biggest landowner, who was threatening his sister. Robbie sees the dead, or haints as his mother called them, and the ones at the school show him what happens to boys who are sent out to work and never come back.
In an outdoor cafe in Lahore, a Pakistani man called Changez introduces himself to an American stranger and starts to talk. He tells the man about his education, about the job he took at a valuation firm in New York, about the woman he loved there, and about the year he decided to leave the United States. The American has to wait for his tea and for the end of the story.
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.
The three unluckiest children in the world return for another unfortunate adventure. The Baudelaire children survived their first encounter with the scheming Count Olaf, but the Count does not give up easily, and the Baudelaire luck does not improve, whatever arrangements are made for their care. This volume puts them in a new guardian's house, where a room full of reptiles becomes the setting for the next catastrophe.
Denise Holton has moved to Edenton, North Carolina, with her four-year-old son Kyle, who has severe learning disabilities and cannot yet speak. On a wet night her car leaves the road, and in the search that follows her son is found by Taylor McAden, a volunteer firefighter who works as a carpenter. Taylor is brave in an emergency and unable to stay in a relationship afterwards.
Arthur Dent and his companions, having escaped the destruction of the Earth, need somewhere to eat, and the universe offers a restaurant that survives to the end of time. The journey there involves a stolen spaceship, a planet of people nobody wants, and the story of what happened to the rulers of the galaxy.
Holmes is dead at the start of the collection and back by the end of the first story, and the thirteen cases that follow take him from a reopened tomb to a school, a university, an actress's house and a train. Watson is married and practising medicine, and the cases are fitted around his diary rather than the other way round. The volume includes the investigation of the empty house where Holmes returns and the mystery of a young woman who cannot stop laughing, and it is the collection that re-established the character after the author had killed him off.
The last volume of The Lord of the Rings begins with the war arriving at Gondor. Sauron's armies march on the city while its own leadership is divided, and the beacons that call Rohan for help are lit in the first chapters. Far away in Mordor, Frodo and Sam are still walking, with the Ring getting heavier and their guide less reliable every day. The book contains the battle at the Black Gate, the destruction of the Ring, the crowning of a king and several endings in succession, which is the structure readers either love or find hard to leave.
The Surprise comes home from the far side of the world with prisoners aboard and a captain who has never met his grown son. Ashore in England, Jack Aubrey is drawn into a different kind of battle, fought on dry land and in the market, where his name and his fortune are no longer safe from the people who wish him harm.
Ivy Westfall was married to the President's son as part of the settlement between the winning and losing sides of a war, and given a mission: to kill her new husband. She fell in love with him instead, and now she has been exiled beyond the fence, into the country outside the settlement where nothing is provided for her.
Carruthers is a junior diplomat in London with a dull summer ahead of him when a friend invites him to spend a holiday sailing in the Baltic. The invitation is really a request for help: Davies has found something in the German sands that suggests a plan for an invasion of England, and he needs someone who can read a chart and understand the politics.
Ryan has just been made captain of a Chicago basketball team and cannot afford distractions, which is what his sister's best friend, Indy Ivers, becomes when she moves into his apartment. When the team's general manager questions whether Ryan has a life outside basketball, Ryan decides the simplest answer is to pretend that he and Indy are together. The arrangement is meant to be professional and temporary, and it suits Indy as well, until the two of them are sharing a flat, a calendar of family events and a story that neither of them can keep track of.
Bartimaeus is a mid-ranking djinn with a long memory and no patience left for magicians, and in this prequel to the Bartimaeus trilogy he is serving in King Solomon's Jerusalem, where a magic ring commands spirits a great deal more powerful than he is. His master there is a cruel magician with a grudge, and the assignment is the Temple Mount. Into the same city comes Asmira, captain of the guard of the Queen of Sheba, sent to kill the king. Her mission and the djinn's servitude are on a collision course.
The Ringworld Engineers is a science fiction novel by Larry Niven, published in 1979 as the first sequel to Ringworld. Niven had not intended to write a second book about the enormous ring, but readers kept pointing out problems with his engineering, and the novel is partly an answer to them.
The four nations have settled on Yun as the next Avatar after years of searching, and then a demonstration of bending by Kyoshi, who is Yun's friend and servant, throws the whole identification into doubt. With the identity of the true Avatar at stake, Kyoshi and her friend Rangi flee the mansion where they have been living and go on the run together.
Four friends from university go walking in the far north to get away from their lives for a week, and find they have almost nothing left to say to each other. A shortcut meant to make the hike easier leaves them lost in forest that has been left alone for a very long time. They take shelter in a building they find there and work out that the rites once performed in it were meant to feed something that has not gone away.
Brian Robeson survived fifty-four days alone in the Canadian wilderness, and the experience has left him different in ways he cannot explain to anyone who was not there. Now a government team wants him to do it again, deliberately and with observers and supplies close by, so that they can study what living that way does to a person.
Winifred Allen is in need of a holiday. Her job has drained her, her brother has died and a long marriage has ended, so when her three closest friends propose their annual trip, she agrees to a hiking and white-water rafting expedition in the Maine wilderness, despite misgivings she does not voice. It is the most demanding trip the four of them have ever attempted together.
Some unnamed catastrophe has scoured the world to a burnt-out cinder inhabited by the last remnants of humanity and a few surviving animals. The sky is perpetually shrouded in dust, and the seasons are only variations in cold and dampness. Through this landscape a father and his young son travel on foot towards the southern coast, avoiding the bands of cannibals who control the roads.
Elijah Baley, a detective from overcrowded Earth, is sent to the Spacer world of Aurora to investigate the destruction of a humanoid robot. The man who could have done it has the means, the motive and the opportunity, and the politics of the situation require that he be proved innocent. Baley works with two robots, one his old partner and one far older.
Samantha Willan is a workaholic lawyer who has taken a break in cottage country, and after a recent breakup she wants to stay as far away from romance as possible. Then she meets her new neighbour and notices something strange and mysterious about his eyes, which seem to be fixed on her neck.
The Stone family live on the Moon, where the twins Castor and Pollux have decided that life is too dull. They buy a used spaceship to go into business for themselves, and their father, mother and grandmother Hazel come along for the ride. The tour takes them from Mars to the asteroid belt and further out, with a cargo of bicycles, a doctor's house calls and one Martian pet that nobody thought through.
Four months after the Garden was broken up, the FBI agents who freed the women held there are still dealing with the aftermath. The thaw is coming, and it brings a guarantee: somewhere in the country a young woman will be found dead in a church, her throat cut and her body surrounded by flowers. The sister of one of the killer's earlier victims has been moving from town to town with her mother ever since.
Don Tillman is a professor of genetics who has decided that the time has come to find a wife, and being a scientist he approaches the problem the way he approaches everything else: with a sixteen-page questionnaire designed to screen out drinkers, smokers and anyone who arrives late. Then he meets Rosie Jarman, who fails every item on the list.
Rebecca Porter was never the sister who dreamed of being a princess; that was her twin. But it is Bex who goes to Oxford and meets a boy across the hall, and Bex who finds herself in love with the eventual heir to the British throne, along with everything that comes with him. The novel follows several years of courtship under public scrutiny.
Will is an orphan at the castle and is chosen, on the day the wards are assigned to their trades, to be apprenticed to the Rangers rather than to the warriors he admires. His training takes him out of the castle and into the forest, and his first task turns out to involve the mountains.
One ordinary afternoon, every machine in sixteen-year-old Adam's school computer lab stops working, and the problem turns out to be far larger than an outage: cars will not start, phones are dead, and the blackout spreads. Only Adam's ancient car still runs, and the drive home shows him how quickly an ordinary suburb can turn dangerous once the power, the traffic and the information all stop at once.
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.
