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 63 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.
Clarice Starling is still an FBI trainee when the head of the bureau's profiling unit sends her to a hospital for the criminally insane with a questionnaire. Her assignment is to interview Dr Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist who ate several of his patients. The bureau wants his help with a killer called Buffalo Bill, and Lecter is willing to talk, but only in exchange for something.
Drizzt Do'Urden sets out to destroy the evil Crystal Shard at last and looks for the scholar-priest Cadderly to help him do it. Instead his worst fears come true: Crenshinibon falls into the hands of the dark elf mercenary Jarlaxle and his unlikely ally Artemis Entreri, and the weapon Drizzt wanted unmade is loose in the world again.
Elsie Bainbridge expected a wealthy marriage and got a husband who died within weeks of the wedding, a crumbling estate called The Bridge, resentful servants and a hostile village. Sent there to see out her pregnancy, her only company is her husband's awkward cousin. Then she finds a locked door, and behind it a painted wooden figure carved to look like a person, with Elsie's own face.
Alicia Berenson is a painter whose apparently happy marriage ends one evening when her husband comes home late from a shoot and she shoots him in the face, five times, and then stops speaking. She never explains and never defends herself, and the silence turns her into a public mystery and her paintings into expensive ones. Years later a psychotherapist takes a job at the secure unit where she is kept so that he can try to get her talking.
The Silmarillion is the history that sits behind The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It begins with the making of the world by a group of powers Tolkien called the Valar and the arrival of the Elves, then follows the long wars of the First Age, when the great jewels called the Silmarils were stolen and the Noldor left the blessed realm to get them back. The middle of the book is a sequence of myths and narratives about that war, its oaths and its betrayals. The last part moves to the Second and Third Ages, including the drowning of Numenor and the making of the Rings.
Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole are sent into Narnia by Aslan and given four signs to follow in a search for the prince who disappeared ten years earlier. They are joined by a gloomy marsh-wiggle named Puddleglum, and their journey takes them into the far north and then under the earth.
Ten years after the murders at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, Charlie returns to the town where her father owned the restaurant and meets her childhood friends again. On the anniversary of the tragedy they find a way inside the abandoned pizzeria, and the four animatronic mascots that once entertained children have changed in ways nobody can explain.
In Rome in the year 70, an informer called Marcus Didius Falco meets a frightened young woman in the Forum and makes the rash decision to help her. She is carrying a burden that turns out to be connected to a pile of silver ingots stolen from Britain, and to the people who want them back.
The Dominator was a wizard his enemies could not kill, so they imprisoned what was left of him in a silver spike instead. The object is enormously powerful, some people are willing to steal it and others are determined that nobody should have it, and the men who have to decide what to do with it have all left the Black Company behind.
In Warsaw in 1942 the war is raging and people live in fear from day to day. Ruth, Bronia and Edek have to fend for themselves when both of their parents are taken by the Nazis, and the novel follows their attempt to survive and to find each other again across a continent that has been broken up by the fighting.
Carol has spent five years fighting alone for Teri, and the offer of marriage comes as a shock. The man making it is Rudolph Falcone, a barone used to being obeyed, and Carol cannot work out whether he wants a wife or a way of settling an old score with her. She has learned to distrust help that arrives without a reason.
Syn has kept his work as a mercenary hidden from the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and his latest assignment puts him in the path of an enemy of the vampire race and of a woman who does not know what she is. Jo Early is in danger of dying during a transition she was not expecting and cannot explain, and the man who appears out of the dark to help her is not reassuring.
Kahlen belongs to a sisterhood of sirens, and the same speech has been given to every girl who joins it: she must never do anything that might expose the secret, she cannot form close bonds with humans because she is deadly to them, and she pays for her eventual freedom with obedience and time. She has kept those rules for years, and then Akinli, a human, enters her world.
Malachi Constant is the richest man in America and believes he is the luckiest, and a message from a chrono-synclastic infundibulum tells him that his future has been arranged. He ends up on Mars, then on Mercury, then on Titan, and everything that happens to him turns out to be part of a chain of events he was never meant to understand.
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die, because the man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and the hired killers are Eli and Charlie Sisters. Eli does not share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, and on the road to a gold-mining claim he begins to wonder what he does for a living.
On a snowy winter evening in Dartmoor, Mrs Willett and her daughter hold a table-turning session for their guests, and the spirit that answers tells them Captain Trevelyan is dead. Major Burnaby walks through the snow to check on his friend, and Emily Trefusis, who is engaged to the captain's nephew, joins the police in working out what has happened.
Golgotha is a cattle town in Nevada in 1869, out beyond the Forty-Mile Desert, and it keeps more than its share of unnatural secrets: a sheriff who bears the mark of the noose, a half-human deputy, a mayor guarding mythical treasures and a banker's wife in a secret order of assassins. Now something far older than the town is stirring in the silver mine above it.
The Baudelaire orphans are separated on a mountain road, with Violet and Klaus left behind while Sunny is carried off by Count Olaf and his troupe. To get their sister back they have to climb the Mortmain Mountains in the cold, follow the marks left by a vanished organisation, and work out who among the people they meet can be trusted.
Deep below the University is a dark place that few people know about: a broken web of ancient passages and abandoned rooms. A young woman called Auri lives down there, settled in among the sprawling tunnels of the Underthing, and she is full of mysteries. The book is a short account of her life in that forgotten place, and the small adventure that belongs to her alone.
Squire Dale is an embittered old bachelor established in the Great House at Allington, and his sister-in-law lives with her two daughters in the Small House next door. The novel concerns the relations between the two houses and the courtship of Lily and Bell Dale, one of whom is loved by a man she does not want.
Marnus Erasmus is eleven years old, and he lives in Cape Town in the early 1970s with his family: his father, who is an Army general, his mother and his younger sister. He narrates what he sees of the Afrikaner world around him, and the book gradually shows the reader a good deal more of it than the boy himself understands. It was first published in Afrikaans.
Sharon Rabbitte is twenty and pregnant, and she will not name the father. Her family in Barrytown reacts the way a large working-class household does, with argument, gossip and a certain amount of sympathy, and Sharon has to get through the pregnancy and the birth while the neighbourhood works out what it thinks of her, in a place where everyone knows everyone's business.
In 1920 Jack and Mabel have left Pennsylvania for a homestead in the Alaskan wilderness, and the work is harder and the isolation longer than either of them expected. Mabel is still grieving the baby they lost. The night of the first snow they build a girl out of snow, and in the morning she is gone, and there are small human tracks at the edge of the property.
Tiamat is an ocean world linked to the rest of the galaxy by a wormhole that closes for a century and a half at a time, and the gate is about to shut. The planet rules itself through a hereditary queen whose successor is chosen when she dies, and this time the choice has gone wrong in a way that matters to the Hegemony as much as to Tiamat.
The first snow of winter falls on Oslo, and a small boy discovers that his mother is not in the house. In the garden stands a snowman that somebody built overnight, wearing her scarf. Inspector Harry Hole, who was sent a letter months before that he could make nothing of, begins treating the disappearance as the work of a man who has done this before.
Percy Jackson wakes with no memory of his life, hunted by monsters, and follows a wolf's training until he reaches a camp of Roman demigods who have never heard of him. There he meets Hazel, who is supposed to be dead, and Frank, whose family has secrets of its own. The three are sent north to Alaska to free the god of death.
Patroclus is a prince who is exiled after he kills a boy by accident, and he ends up in the household where Achilles is being raised to be a hero. Achilles is golden, fast and destined for glory, and his mother is a sea goddess who does not want a mortal anywhere near her son. The two of them grow up together, train together and fall in love, and then the oath that binds every Greek king drags them to Troy, where glory means something different up close. The siege lasts ten years, the leaders argue over a woman neither of them will give up, and the half of the story everyone knows is coming.
Thea Kronborg grows up in Moonstone, a small town on the Colorado rail line, the daughter of a minister and one of a large family, and it is clear early that she is not like the others. A piano teacher who drinks too much tells her she has something worth protecting, the town doctor takes her side, and a young man who hauls freight for the railroad leaves her the money to study music in Chicago. What follows is the long process by which a girl with a voice becomes an artist.
The Songs of Distant Earth is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1986 and built out of a short story he had written nearly thirty years earlier. It is set in the far future, after the Sun has destroyed the Earth, and it follows a ship of sleeping colonists who stop for repairs at a world that was settled seven hundred years before and has long since lost touch with its origins.
Will has finished his apprenticeship and is now a Ranger with a fief of his own, which turns out to be less peaceful than it looked. When the Skandians appear he has to deal with them, and then he is sent on a secret mission with his friend Alyss, into a country frightened of sorcery. Nobody there is sure who can be trusted.
The Compsons of Mississippi owned land once, and the family has been living on the reputation of it for a generation. There are four children, and the slow collapse of their household reaches the reader in four separate accounts that disagree with each other, most of them tangled around a single weekend in 1928 and the loss of a sister called Caddy.
In New Orleans in 1891, the Morningstar children, each of them named by their father after a disease, are growing up in a city of voodoo, race and class, and of a music that is only just being invented. Something older and angrier than any of them is loose in their lives, and the family will have to reckon with it.
A team of archaeologists opens a tell in Israel, the mound left behind by one settlement built on top of another across thousands of years. Each layer they cut through releases the story of the people who lived on that ground, from a Canaanite town to a family in the twentieth century.
Patricia Campbell's days belong to her husband, her teenagers and her mother-in-law, and the one evening she keeps for herself is book club, where a group of Charleston women talk about true crime. After an elderly neighbour attacks her, the neighbour's charming nephew James Harris arrives and makes himself useful. Then children begin disappearing on the other side of town, and Patricia starts to suspect him.
Catalina Martin has told her family that she is bringing an American boyfriend to a wedding in Spain, and the invention has now been promised to everybody. She has four weeks, an ocean to cross and relatives who will spot a fake immediately. Aaron Blackford, the colleague she finds most infuriating, offers to play the part, which is the last thing she wants and the only workable answer she has. The wedding gets closer and the performance becomes harder to maintain.
A radio signal from another world gives the Jesuit order a reason to send a mission, and a small group of linguists, doctors and priests makes the journey. Years later the mission's surviving priest is brought back to Earth, and the novel works out what happened to the people who went with him.
Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who describes himself as killing time until time gets around to killing him. His parents and his only son are dead, and he goes through life as a spectator rather than a participant. A postcard from an old friend sends him back to the journals of a journey he once made to his mother's birthplace.
A single day in the torture chambers of the Abyss would be enough to break most people, and the barbarian Wulfgar spent years there. When he returns to his friends they find him a changed man, and not changed for the better. His road to redemption is one he has to travel on his own, even if it leads him to the bottle, and the penultimate chapter of the Legend of Drizzt follows him along it.
Old Gregory has been the Spook for the county for years, clearing the villages of boggarts, ghosts and witches, and his time is coming to an end. Twenty-nine apprentices have tried and none has lasted; the last hope is a twelve-year-old farm boy who can see the things other people cannot.
The Spook and his apprentice, Thomas Ward, are the people a county calls when it needs a witch, a ghost or a boggart dealt with. Their work takes them to the cathedral town of Priestown, where something the Spook has never been able to defeat is waiting in the catacombs, and where the arrival of a witch-hunting Quisitor gives them a second enemy.
During the American Revolution, the strip of New York country between the British and Continental lines is nobody's ground, and both armies move through it at night. At a house called The Locusts, a Loyalist family shelters a stranger from a storm, and a peddler named Harvey Birch arrives behind him. Nobody in the house can agree on whether the peddler is a patriot, a thief or a British agent, and the fighting that follows is as much about who deserves to be trusted as it is about which army wins.
Alec Leamas runs British intelligence operations in Berlin, and when his network is destroyed he is brought home and offered a job that suits a man with nothing left: to present himself in East Germany as an officer who has turned against his own side. The false defection is designed to damage one particular East German, and it depends on people on both sides believing a story that is only partly true.
One man escapes from a biological weapons facility after an accident, carrying with him a rapidly mutating influenza strain that kills most of the world's population within weeks. In the aftermath the survivors divide between those who follow an elderly woman to Boulder and those who follow Randall Flagg, who has established himself in Las Vegas, and the two factions prepare for a confrontation.
John Thomas Stuart XI is a high school senior in a small Rocky Mountain town who looks after Lummox, an extraterrestrial animal his great-grandfather brought home. Lummox has learned to speak, was once small enough to carry and is now large enough to ride, and after eating a used car and flattening a good deal of the neighbourhood, the creature has become the town's problem. The argument over what to do with it then stops being a local one.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a graduate student, finds a book in his university library that describes an episode from his own childhood, and follows it to a hidden world below the earth. There he meets people who belong to a story about the Starless Sea, and has to decide which part of it he is in.
Biron Farrell is a student at the University of Earth when a radiation bomb is planted in his dormitory room, which turns him from an innocent young man into a marked one, running from an assassin he cannot identify. He then learns that his father, the Rancher of Widemos, has been murdered light-years away. Finding out why draws him into a rebellion.
In rural Oregon in the 1920s, Hanalee Denney is sixteen, biracial and trying to find the truth about her father's death. The official account says a drunk driver hit him, and nobody in town wants to discuss it further. The Ku Klux Klan is active nearby, and a ghost has begun telling her a different story.
Joanna Eberhart moves with her husband and children from New York to the town of Stepford, where the wives are devoted, cheerful and entirely occupied with their houses. Joanna, a photographer used to having a career and opinions, finds the difference hard to explain, and the explanation is worse than she imagines.
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.
