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 65 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.
Life on Mars is hard enough that the colonists depend on a drug which lets them share in a fantasy world built around a set of dolls and their house. Then Palmer Eldritch comes back from the outer system with something new, and the men who make their living from the old arrangement have to work out what he has brought with him.
A physicist is called to a secret military project during the Cultural Revolution, and the decision she makes there sends a signal that will not be answered for decades. Years later, a string of researchers dies and a nanotech engineer is recruited by police to work out why, following the trail to an online game set in a world with three suns, where civilisations have been destroyed and rebuilt over and over. The book moves between the physics problem at the centre of it and the same problem's human cost, and between the factions forming on Earth as the news spreads: the ones who want to welcome the visitors, and the ones who intend to fight them.
Carter and Sadie Kane have spent months training as magicians since the gods of ancient Egypt were released into the modern world, and the task in front of them is to wake the sun god Ra before the chaos serpent can rise. They have five days to find the three parts of the Book of Ra.
Four residents of a retirement village meet every Thursday to work through old unsolved murders, until the death of a local developer, found with a photograph beside the body, turns their hobby into a live case. The club decides to look into it themselves, on the grounds that they have nothing but time and the police are slow. Then somebody else dies.
Shannon Raine is drawn to Garth Sheridan from the moment she meets him, and he seems to feel the same pull. What he will not do is let her any further into his life than that, and the novel follows her attempts to find out what he is keeping back. He lives nearby and works in an industry he will not discuss with her.
In the autumn of 1881 a divorce affidavit arrives at Sally Lockhart's house, and it says that a commission agent named Arthur Parrish is her husband and the father of her daughter, Harriet. Sally has never been married. The affidavit also says that Harriet's father wants custody of the child, and Sally's lawyer has no sympathy at all to offer a woman with no power of her own.
A Victorian inventor explains over dinner that time is a fourth direction a body can travel along, then turns up at a later dinner looking wrecked and tells the guests where he has been. He has built a machine and ridden it forward past his own century to a warm, overgrown world of small, gentle people who live in apparent ease. He can see that something is missing from it well before he finds out what lives underneath. His journey goes much further, to the last days of the planet, where something is still moving, and he cannot stop himself going again.
The Time Traveller returns from the year 802,701 determined to go back and rescue Weena, the Eloi woman who died in the fire. The quartz of his machine contains a substance given to him years earlier, and the journey takes him much further into the future than he intends, to a sky that has gone permanently dark and to a version of the Morlocks nobody has met before.
Intelligence agents discover something that strains belief but cannot be argued with: the country's greatest adversary appears to be sending agents back through time. Worse still, someone outside recorded history is supplying those agents with weapons and machines far beyond anything either side has built, and the only answer is to go back and find the source.
Henry DeTamble has a genetic condition that throws him through time without warning or clothing, and Clare Abshire meets him for the first time when she is six and he is thirty-six. Their marriage is built around his disappearances, and the book follows the two of them out of order, from Clare's childhood to the end of Henry's life.
Percy Jackson gets an urgent call from his friend Grover and sets out at once, with his friends and his sword, to find out what has happened. What the demigods find is that a goddess and one of their own have been taken. The army they are up against is not a small one.
Tenar is taken from her family as a child and raised as the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, servant of nameless powers that have no name she can be given. Her closed life is interrupted by a wizard's thief who comes for a treasure in the dark, and she has to decide what she owes the place that made her.
Bobbi Anderson is a writer of westerns who lives outside the small town of Haven, Maine, and one afternoon while walking in the woods behind her house she trips over a piece of metal. It turns out to be part of something enormous buried under the ground, and once the object is uncovered the people of the town begin to change.
The battle for Camp Jupiter is over and New Rome is safe, but Apollo still has to face the last of the enemies he has been working towards, in a tower in New York. The novel is the final book of his time as a mortal, and it brings the series' threads together for one last fight.
A dying criminal confesses that his loot has been stored in the tower. Both towers of the looted mansion are searched without success, and it is left to the Hardy boys to make the discovery that clears up the mystery and clears the name of a friend's father. The official search has already failed twice, which is what gives the brothers their opening.
Every year a scoutmaster takes a group of boys camping in the Canadian wilderness for a weekend, and this year a stranger reaches their camp: emaciated, pale, starving and carrying a man-made parasite inside him. It spreads quickly and they are far from any help. Once they are hungry, frightened and infected, the boys turn on one another.
Alethea is desperate to leave home, where her mother, her sister and three young nieces are driving her to distraction, so the arrival of Trent de Havilland in her life is a relief. Then he suggests that she move in with him, which is more than she bargained for. She hardly knows him, and she is wary of a man who makes her feel the way he does. The arrangement is part of the deal if he is to help her sister.
In 1832 thirteen-year-old Charlotte Doyle sails from England to join her family in America as the only passenger on a merchant ship. Caught between a murderous captain and a crew preparing to mutiny, she has to decide who to believe, and the voyage changes what she thinks a young woman of her class is able to do.
Rowan Caine answers an advertisement for a live-in nanny and gets the job, at a salary far above what the work should pay. The house is a modernised Victorian in the Scottish Highlands with cameras, an app for everything and a family that seems pleased with her. By the end of the summer a child is dead and Rowan is in prison waiting to be tried for murder.
A young woman takes her first post as a governess at a remote country house, with two children to look after and instructions from an uncle who does not want to be bothered. She starts seeing the former governess on the stairs and in the garden, and a man who used to work on the estate. Certain that the dead are coming for the children, she takes on the job of protecting them alone.
The plague has already happened, and the survivors who can still organise are following a girl called Amy. Their target is the virals: the twelve original creatures, each of whom presides over a hive of its own. A raid on all twelve at once is what the book is building towards, and the weapon the survivors are counting on is a woman who is no longer entirely human.
Professor William Waterman Sherman sets out to cross the Pacific alone in a balloon, intending to spend a year by himself above the ocean. Three weeks later he is pulled out of the Atlantic surrounded by the wreckage of twenty balloons, and the account he gives of how he got there makes up the rest of the novel.
Kate Drake, a bestselling novelist and one of seven sisters with unusual powers, comes home for her northern California town's Christmas pageant and decides to open a bookshop in a rundown historic mill. The former Army Ranger who is restoring the building is drawn to her, and then an earthquake cracks the mill's foundation and uncovers a burial crypt.
In a world where twelve dragons of good fortune supply energy to the earth, each of them is linked to a human Dragoneye. Eon has studied the art of dragon magic for four years in the hope of being chosen as an apprentice, and Eon is also a girl living as a boy in a place where girls are forbidden to hold the position at all.
The Two Towers picks up with the Fellowship broken. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee have left the rest of the company and are crossing toward Mordor with the Ring and no plan beyond the next day, and the creature who has been following them catches up in the marshes. Meanwhile Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli pursue the orcs who took Merry and Pippin across Rohan, where the riders of the Mark are fighting their own war. The volume ends in two different places.
Apollo has been turned into a mortal teenager and is working his way through five dead oracles in the hope of getting back what he lost. His journey takes him to Camp Jupiter, where the Roman demigods are preparing for a last stand against three Roman emperors. The book is the fourth of the five volumes about his time on earth.
Ryder, a celebrated pianist, arrives in a European city to give a recital on Thursday night, and within an hour of checking in he is absorbed into other people's problems: a hotel porter who cannot speak to his daughter, a couple who treat him as a father, a conductor whose comeback the whole city is depending on, and a committee that wants him to heal a cultural crisis he knows nothing about. He also cannot remember agreeing to any of it.
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.
Under a fallen-down house in the bayou country where Texas meets Louisiana, a hound dog named Ranger is kept chained by a man who has no use for him. A cat who has lost her kittens comes to live in the space beneath the floorboards, and against every instinct Ranger lets her stay. Their safety depends on staying hidden, and on a very old snake called Grandmother Moccasin.
At Ever After High the students are expected to pledge on Legacy Day that they will follow in their fairy-tale parents' footsteps, and Raven Queen, the daughter of the Evil Queen, refuses to sign the Storybook of Legends. Her refusal puts everyone else's future in question and splits the school into Royals and Rebels.
Olive has bad luck with work, with love and with most other things, and her identical twin Ami has the opposite of that, down to the wedding she has funded entirely by winning internet contests. The wedding also means a day in the company of Ethan, Ami's best man and Olive's least favourite person. Then the reception meal makes everyone else ill and leaves Olive and Ethan as the only two guests unaffected, which means an all-expenses-paid honeymoon in Hawaii is going spare.
In a galaxy where no species becomes intelligent without being raised by a patron, humans are the youngest clan and are still suspected of having no patron at all. The planet Garth has been leased to them, and the avian Gubru have arrived to take it, holding the world hostage in order to learn what the dolphin-crewed ship Streaker found. Its uplifted inhabitants have to decide whether to fight.
Lestat is in one of his long sleeps, so the vampire David Talbot asks Armand to tell him the story of his life. Armand begins in the Kyivan Rus in the fifteenth century, where he was called Andrei and painted icons in a monastery. Slave traders take him out of that life and carry him to Constantinople and then to Venice, and what happens in Venice makes him what he is.
Lestat de Lioncourt has spent decades asleep under a New Orleans house, and he wakes in the 1980s to find that the vampire Louis has published an account of their lives together. His answer is to write his own version, and to form a rock band and play to crowds. He wants the attention of the vampires who have been avoiding him for centuries.
Branded a traitor, betrayed by a friend and hunted by the vampire clan, Darren Shan faces what looks like certain death. His initiation on Vampire Mountain is drawing to a bloody conclusion, and the question is whether he can reverse the odds and outwit a Vampire Prince, or whether thousands of years of vampire rule end in this book.
After travelling with Mr Crepsley, the vampire who made him into a half-vampire, Darren returns to the freak show known as the Cirque du Freak. There he continues to fight his need to drink human blood, and the book follows his attempt to live among the performers while managing what he has become.
In London, a wealthy young gentleman named Aubrey meets Lord Ruthven, a nobleman with a curious manner and a habit of attaching himself to people who are about to come to harm. Aubrey agrees to travel through Europe with him. He learns what Ruthven is slowly, and then has to watch what the discovery costs the people he loves.
Twin sisters Stella and Desiree Vignes run away from the small Louisiana town of Mallard as teenagers, and their lives separate completely. Desiree returns years later with a daughter, while Stella passes for white, marries and disappears into a life in California, and the novel follows the generation that comes after both of them.
Stevie Bell went to Ellingham Academy because of its most famous crime: the 1916 kidnapping and triple murder known as the Truly Devious case. Then a present-day classmate was murdered, and although Stevie identified the killer her parents took her home, which leaves her with a cold case and no way back into the school that holds it.
The Vast Fields of Ordinary is a young adult novel by Nick Burd, published in 2009 and his first book. It follows a closeted suburban teenager through the summer after he leaves high school, along with his openly lesbian new best friend and the two boys he is drawn to, and it was among the books that widened what the form could carry.
Yeong-hye is a part-time graphic artist and housewife in Seoul who stops eating meat and animal products after a nightmare about human cruelty. The decision is hers, but the people around her treat it as illness, betrayal or a problem to be managed. The novel is told in three parts and follows what her refusal does to her family and to the life they had planned around her.
Judith marries Gavin Montgomery at an altar decorated with flowers, and the ceremony is celebrated by everyone except the two people in it. She has decided that her husband will get nothing from her that he does not take, and Gavin, who has married her for reasons that have nothing to do with affection, is not prepared to be refused anything.
Tyr is a city on a world of dust and heat, ruled for a thousand years by the sorcerer-king Kalak, whose magic has reduced the place to fear and blood. He is preparing to make himself into something immortal, and the people who could stop him are a statesman with a bad reputation, a half-elf slave girl and a dwarf gladiator who have very little in common.
Mika Moon is a witch who has spent her life moving on, keeping her magic hidden and her distance intact, because the witches in her family have a habit of dying young. To share a little of what she loves she posts videos playing the owner of a magic teashop, and one of those videos reaches a man who needs exactly what she can do. Three young witches are being raised at a house called Nowhere House by adults with no magic between them, and a lawyer's visit in six weeks will expose all of it unless the children learn to control themselves. Mika takes the job. The household turns out to be warm in a way she has never experienced, with one exception: Jamie, the librarian, has no interest in a stranger living in his home.
Four men are playing golf at Paston Oatvile when one of them slices his drive from the third tee, and while they are looking for the ball they find a dead body in the ground below the railway viaduct. The dead man's hat is lying fifteen yards away from where he fell, which is enough for the four of them to conclude that there has been dirty work.
Rhiannon is King Alfred's favourite niece, and she is furious when he seals an alliance by promising her to Eric, a Norse prince with a cold manner and an army behind him. She fights the marriage and everything it stands for, and the fight itself is what draws the two of them together, in a country where the politics that made the match keep changing.
Kane was convicted of murdering his mate and sent to a prison camp, without ever being told the truth about the arrangement his family made for him. Centuries later he is badly burned while trying to save other prisoners, and the nurse who tends him, Nadya, has reasons of her own to understand what he is going through.
The Lisbon family lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where the father teaches mathematics at a private school and the mother keeps the house. They have five daughters, the eldest seventeen and the youngest thirteen. Over the course of a year all five die, and the novel is written from the point of view of the boys who grew up across the street, who spend the rest of their adult lives collecting the evidence and trying to work out what was happening inside the house. The neighbourhood watches, and does very little.
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.
