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 64 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.
Emily wants to like the stepsister who has just moved into her house, and it is not easy: Jessie takes over her room, borrows her clothes without asking and lies about all of it. Then Emily reads Jessie's diary and finds something worse than rudeness in it, and when she tries to warn her parents nobody believes her.
Eight years after the Battle of the Serpent, Lady Nore of the Court of Teeth has taken back the Ice Needle Citadel, where she is using an ancient relic to make monsters of stick and snow that will carry out her revenge. Suren, the child queen of the Court of Teeth and the only person with power over her mother, has fled into the human world and lives wild in the woods, until the storm hag Bogdana hunts her through the night streets.
Daisy Goodwill Flett is born in Canada in 1905, and her mother dies a few hours later. What follows is an ordinary twentieth-century life told in ten chapters, through marriage, motherhood, work and widowhood, and through the accounts of other people who think they know what happened to her. The voice telling the story is not always her own.
The Moon is coming back, and whether that means the end of humanity or something worse depends on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring and hopes to find her daughter and make a world in which orogene children can grow up safe. Nassun has seen what the world does and has drawn her own conclusions about it.
With their parents away, four children are left in a London boarding house where the only other lodger is an Egyptologist with a room full of antiquities. They meet the Psammead again, and with it an amulet that can carry them through time. Half of the charm is missing, and until they find the other half they cannot wish themselves home.
At Ever After High, the children of fairy-tale characters are trained to take up their parents' roles, whether they want to or not. Every year on Legacy Day the students sign the Storybook of Legends and seal their destinies, and the village of Book End has always said that refusing to sign means the end of the story and of the life. Raven Queen is the daughter of the Evil Queen.
In a faraway kingdom a king has been betrayed, and the hurt and anger have made him vow never to be deceived again. His plan to protect himself endangers every young woman in the realm, unless one of them volunteers to marry him and surrender her life for it. The volunteer is the daughter of a storyteller, and telling stories is the only defence she has.
A Boeing 777 arrives at John F. Kennedy International Airport and stops while it is taxiing, with all its window shades closed except one, its lights out and its communication channels silent. Dr Ephraim Goodweather, who runs the CDC's rapid-response team for biological threats, boards the plane and finds everybody aboard dead except four people.
A stranger approaches people in bars and car parks with information that ruins their lives: a fact about a spouse, offered quietly and without explanation, after which he walks away. Adam Price has a comfortable marriage, two sons and a good job, until he meets the stranger and is told something about his wife.
On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of the infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham, whose household invites other artists to live and work at the family home in order to escape the conservatism of 1930s Australia. Lily becomes infatuated with the makeshift family. Lily is looking back from old age, so the reader knows from the start that the experiment did not last.
Michael Brock is a young antitrust lawyer at a large Washington firm, billing his hours and one step away from partnership, and he has lost sight of why he does any of it. Then a homeless man takes hostages in the firm's offices, and when the siege ends Brock begins to ask what the man was actually angry about.
Lyra Belacqua walks out of her own world and into a city on a coast she does not recognise, following the trail of the thing she has been told is called Dust. There she meets Will Parry, a boy from our own version of Oxford who is looking for his father and who has killed a man on the way out of his house. Between them they find a knife with an edge that cuts openings between worlds, which is the most dangerous object either of them has handled. The trilogy's second volume is where the two stories join.
Jack Ryan, now deputy director of central intelligence, is working on a plan that might finally settle the long conflict in the Middle East. A group of terrorists has one card left to play, and what they do with it is designed to make two superpowers believe the worst of each other at the worst possible moment, with a president who cannot cope with the crisis.
In the late summer, a financier named Harry Wainwright arrives at a fishing camp in a remote part of Maine, near the end of his life. He has come for one more day on the water in a place that has comforted him for thirty years, and he brings with him a bequest that will change the lives of everyone who works there.
Five students at the University of Toronto are singled out of a lecture by a visiting professor and offered a journey to another world. Their host is Loren Silvercloak, a mage from Fionavar who has come to this world for five guests to mark the fiftieth year of a High King's reign. Four of them reach the kingdom of Brennin; a fifth breaks free during the crossing and arrives somewhere nobody planned. Fionavar, they learn, is the first of all worlds, where the old stories are still being played out, and each of the five turns out to have a part in what is coming.
Chloe Saunders is fifteen, wants to be a film director, and has just learned what it feels like to be looked at by a ghost. After the incident at her art school she is labelled schizophrenic and sent to Lyle House, a group home for troubled teenagers where the other residents are not what their files say either.
Jake Barnes lives in Paris in the 1920s among American and British expatriates, and he is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, an attachment that cannot be consummated. The group travels south to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermín, where the drinking, the bullfights and the tensions between them come to a head.
Nico di Angelo, son of Hades, has lost his mother, his sister and his friend Jason, and he has been outed against his will. His boyfriend Will Solace, son of Apollo, is the one bright thing in his life. Then a voice begins calling to Nico from Tartarus, and he is sure he knows who it is. Will insists on going with him.
Julia and Victor became the most famous astronauts alive on their mission to Mars. Decades later the Consortium sends them to Pluto, where a starship under the brilliant and arrogant Captain Shanna Axelrod has found intelligent creatures living in a methane sea at three hundred degrees below zero. The two crews have to work together.
A killer is stalking the streets of Boston, entering the apartments of women who live alone and torturing them before he kills, with a level of surgical skill that suggests a doctor. Detective Jane Rizzoli and her colleague Thomas Moore work the case, and their enquiries lead them to a surgeon who survived an attack of the same kind.
A mail packet running for England is chased across the Atlantic for the papers in Stephen Maturin's hands, and for the woman travelling with him. Safely ashore, Jack Aubrey is given a small ship and a mission on the Danish coast, and the two friends find that the war has another kind of danger waiting for them.
An airliner comes down near a town and everyone aboard is killed except one man, and he is left with the question of why he lived when the others did not. As he starts looking for an answer, through the inquiry and the newspapers, a man who claims to be able to speak with the dead becomes interested in him and in what happened on board.
Identical twins Melina and Gillian Lloyd have not switched places since they were children, and Gillian refuses when Melina suggests that she take her place as a media escort to a NASA astronaut. The following morning Melina is told that her sister has been brutally murdered, and that the astronaut, though innocent, is the prime suspect. He and Melina set out to find the killer, whose plans require Gillian's replacement.
The Wart is a boy being raised in the household of Sir Ector, with no idea that he is anyone important. When the magician Merlyn arrives to tutor him and Sir Ector's son Kay, the lessons turn into a series of transformations into fish, hawks, badgers and snakes, none of which quite explain what the magician is preparing him for.
On a mountainside at the edge of the empire live warriors who are said to be the most powerful in the world, able to raise the sea and make blades out of ice. For centuries the families of the Kusanagi Peninsula have held the empire's enemies at the coast, and the world they were trained for is no longer the one they are living in.
Magnus Chase has lived alone on the streets of Boston since the night two years ago when his mother told him to run, surviving by his wits and staying ahead of the police and truant officers. Then his uncle Randolph begins looking for him, and Magnus falls into his clutches. Randolph talks about Norse history and about a weapon lost for thousands of years, and then a fire giant attacks the city.
A North Vietnamese agent is embedded in the South Vietnamese army and goes into exile with the community he has been sent to watch. The novel is his own account, told years later, of what he did and of the two halves of himself that he could not bring together. He is both a mole and an immigrant.
Despereaux Tilling is a small mouse who reads books instead of eating them, and he falls in love with the human princess he is supposed to fear. When the mice sentence him for breaking their rules he is sent to the dungeon, where a rat who wants a princess of his own is already making plans.
Lestat de Lioncourt has been a vampire for two hundred years and has decided that he is bored of it. He is rich, powerful, protected and miserable, and when a man who claims to be able to move a consciousness from one body to another offers him a trade, he takes it. The body he gets is human, mortal and unwell, and the man who took his body has plans of his own that do not involve giving it back. The novel follows Lestat through the consequences of the most careless decision he has made in a long career of them.
A wealthy businessman hires Tom Ripley to go to Italy and talk his son Dickie into coming home. Ripley finds the young man living comfortably on his father's money, makes himself useful, and then decides he would rather have the life than the fee. The plan he builds is to become Dickie, and it involves the name, the money and what happens to the man himself.
Rukshana is a young journalist in Kabul, looking after her widowed mother and her younger brother Jahan. She is summoned to the ministry that enforces the Taliban's rules and told that the regime has found a new way of earning the diplomatic respect it has been denied: cricket, with a tournament whose winner will train abroad and then represent Afghanistan.
Lale Sokolov is a Slovak Jew deported to Auschwitz in 1942, and because he speaks several languages he is given work the guards want done: marking newly arrived prisoners with the numbers that stand in for their names. The position keeps him fed and keeps him watched, and it is while he is doing it that he meets a young woman called Gita. The novel follows the two of them through the camp.
The Knights Templar once held untold wealth and power over kings and popes, until the Inquisition destroyed the order and its hidden riches were lost. Now two rival groups have learned that the treasure is not what they assumed it to be, and that its real nature could change the modern world. Cotton Malone is pulled back from his Copenhagen bookshop into that search.
A young widow called Helen Graham arrives at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion that has stood empty for years, with her small son and one servant. She keeps to herself, sells her paintings for money and refuses to explain her past, and the village decides that a woman living like that must be hiding something, until the man who falls in love with her learns the truth.
Trixie Stone is a freshman at a small college when she accuses her former boyfriend of raping her at a party, and the town decides that it does not believe her. Her father is a comic book artist with a violent childhood behind him, her mother is having an affair with one of her students, and neither of them is in a position to give her what she needs.
Peter Hobson invents a device that detects a pattern leaving a body at the moment of death, and he wants to know what the pattern is. With his friend Sarkar Muhammed he makes three electronic copies of his own personality, two of them altered and one left as a control. Then the copies escape into the networks, and people Hobson dislikes begin to die.
Harry Benson has had psychomotor epilepsy since a car crash two years ago, and during his seizures he has beaten three people and remembered none of it. As an alternative to prison he is admitted to a university hospital for an experimental operation: electrodes are implanted in his brain to interrupt the seizures before they begin. The day after the surgery he works out how the machine can be made to please him.
Two Royal Navy ships sail north in 1845 looking for a passage across the top of the world, and two years later they are still there, frozen in with the coal running low and the food behind it. The novel follows the officers and crews of the Terror and the Erebus as cold, scurvy and each other wear them down, and as something out on the ice starts picking them off.
Troy Phelan has spent his life making a fortune and hating his family, and the will he signs shortly before his death leaves eleven billion dollars to a daughter nobody has heard of. His children contest it, and the firm executing the estate sends a lawyer to find the woman named in the paper. She is living in the interior of Brazil with no interest in money.
Fifteen years after the regime that took over the United States established Gilead, the republic is still standing and the story is told by three women. One is a girl being raised inside the system, one is a young woman living on the outside in Canada, and one is a woman who has been part of the regime from the beginning and has kept a record of it.
Two Texas families, the Blackthornes and the Creeds, have been feuding for generations. Owen Blackthorne is a loner who wants nothing from anyone until Bayleigh Creed turns up at his door asking for help in finding her missing brother, and the two of them ride into the wilderness of west Texas together as mortal enemies obliged to cooperate.
Texas Ranger Marc Brannon is back on duty and the case he is given puts him opposite Josette Langley, the junior investigator he once loved. Their relationship ended years earlier when she accused him of something that broke them apart, and now the person threatening her is a political figure with a great deal to hide.
Gen is a thief in the king's prison when the king's magus offers him a bargain: his freedom if he steals something that belongs to the gods. The journey to the temple takes him and the magus's party across the country, and Gen's account of it turns out to be less straightforward than it sounds.
Nick Charles gave up detective work when he married Nora's money, and the couple are in New York for the holiday season when a murder lands in his lap. He would rather drink and trade jokes; Nora rather enjoys watching him work. The book is a murder investigation conducted in bars, hotels and parties by a man who refuses to look like he is taking it seriously.
Georgia Stanton comes home to Colorado after a divorce with little left of her own life and finds that her late grandmother, the novelist Scarlett Stanton, left an unfinished book behind. The publisher sends a writer to complete it: Noah Harrison, the best-selling romance novelist of his generation and, in Georgia's opinion, a man with nothing underneath the charm. Working through Scarlett's drafts, the two of them uncover the second story inside the manuscript, about a woman and a pilot in wartime England.
News that England may be encouraging the Spanish colonies to break away changes the Surprise's orders, and Jack Aubrey's commission is restored to him along with a ship to carry an envoy to the Malay states. Stephen Maturin goes along for the treaty, the natural history, and the chance to work on a problem of his own.
Richard Hannay comes back to London from Rhodesia with a modest fortune and nothing to do, and a neighbour in his building tells him about a plot to throw Europe into war. Days later Hannay finds the man dead in his flat and becomes both the obvious suspect and the next target. He goes on the run across Scotland with the police behind him and the conspirators ahead, knowing only a set of numbers.
The Cleary family leaves New Zealand for Drogheda, a sheep station in the Australian outback, where Paddy Cleary will work for his wealthy sister. Meggie Cleary is four years old when the family arrives and the youngest of seven, and the novel follows her from that arrival into adulthood against the running of the station, the drought, the sheep and the money. The other constant in her life is Father Ralph de Bricassart, a priest whose career in the church and feelings about Meggie grow at the same time and in opposite directions. The book runs from 1915 to 1969 and covers three generations.
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.
