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 66 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.
The bells are ringing for Elizabeth in the autumn of 1558, and the country she inherits is bankrupt and divided. Her adviser tells her she can only hold it by marrying a strong prince, but the man she wants is Robert Dudley, who is already married, and Amy, his wife, has no intention of setting him free. Around the queen, a court of ambitious men watches to see which way her favour will fall.
Two women who knew Jack Reacher are dead. Sergeant Amy Callan and Lieutenant Caroline Cook were both high-flying soldiers who had been forced to resign from the service, and both were found in their own homes, naked, in a bath full of paint. Both deaths look like the work of an army man, a loner with a score to settle, and Reacher fits the description.
Miles Vorkosigan has just graduated from the Imperial Academy and is posted to a winter infantry training base on an island in the far north, a test of whether he can be an ordinary officer. He finds the base commander giving orders he considers criminal, refuses to obey them, and is arrested for mutiny within weeks.
Lucy and Edmund are staying with their unpleasant cousin Eustace when a painting of a ship comes to life and takes all three of them into the sea off Narnia. The ship is the Dawn Treader, and its captain is Caspian, now king, who is sailing east to find the seven lords his uncle banished and to see what lies at the edge of the world. The voyage visits islands where the water turns things to gold, where dreams come true and where a man keeps a table set for a feast. Eustace is the character who changes most.
A huge rounded ship called the Space Beagle carries almost a thousand men on a long scientific mission into interstellar space. Each stage of the voyage brings the crew up against a different alien species, and each one has to be survived in a different way. The book is an account of those encounters and of what they do to the expedition's own politics.
Tommy Stubbins finds an injured squirrel and is told that the only man who can help is a doctor who speaks the language of animals. Dolittle takes him on as an assistant, and the two of them, with a parrot, a dog and the rest of the doctor's household of creatures, sail to find a missing naturalist on a floating island in the tropics.
Ten years ago Brenna's mother married Nathan Wade's father, which forced Brenna to accept her own parents' divorce as final. In time she made a home at the Wade ranch in Alberta and fell in love with Nathan, and she would have accepted his proposal if she had not learned that what he really wanted was control of the ranch. Now a family crisis pulls her back, and the desire she has tried to despise is still there, in both of them, waiting.
Eden Nairn has been hiding from her tyrannical grandfather since the birth of her son, the only male heir to an estate in the Northumbrian hills. When his henchman Brett Allard tracks her down, she assumes he has orders to take the child back. Instead Brett offers a solution: marry him, and he will make sure the old man cannot ride roughshod over her. Eden needs protection, but she cannot risk marrying the kind of man she could love.
Ada's clubfoot has finally been operated on, and the operation settles one question for her: she is not what her mother told her she was, damaged and deranged as well as crippled. It leaves another question open, because if she is not her mother's daughter any more, what is she instead? The war is still going on all around her.
Ada has never been allowed outside: her mother is ashamed of her club foot and keeps her shut in a London flat while she cares for her younger brother Jamie. When the city's children are evacuated in September 1939, Ada slips away with Jamie and is billeted in the countryside with Susan Smith, a woman who did not ask for either of them.
Every night the corelings rise out of the ground and take on form: sand demons, wood demons, wind demons, flame demons. The only thing that keeps people alive is the ancient and half-forgotten system of wards, and the time has come to stand against the night. The first of the five books is where the story begins.
The Warden is the first of the Chronicles of Barsetshire. Septimus Harding, a gentle widower, is warden of Hiram's Hospital, an almshouse funded by a medieval bequest, and lives comfortably on its income with his younger daughter Eleanor. Then a young reformer starts asking who the charity really serves, and how much of it reaches the twelve old men it was meant for.
John Carter is on Mars with the woman he loves imprisoned in a place he cannot reach, held there by a religion's rules rather than by walls. He has a year to find a way in, and the planet's politics, its warring nations and its strange temples all stand between him and her.
When Yance Sackett's sister-in-law is taken from her home, the family has one response. Yance and his brother Kin leave their Carolina settlement and ride north into country they do not know, following the men who took her and expecting to be welcome nowhere along the way. They are travelling towards a frontier where kidnapping, the slave trade and the claims of the nations whose land they cross all have to be answered.
Frank lives with his father in a remote part of Scotland, where the household runs on the older man's inventions and on Frank's own rituals, which are not like other people's. His mother is long gone and his older brother Eric is locked up in a psychiatric hospital. When Eric escapes and starts heading home, Frank has to get ready for a visit he knows is coming.
Tom is a climbing boy who goes up chimneys for a master who beats him, and after a fall and a chase he drowns in a river and wakes as a water-baby. What follows is his life under the water, where he is set lessons and given a moral education, all of it written as a fairy tale for a child who lives on land.
A history teacher at a California high school cannot answer his students when they ask why ordinary Germans went along with the Nazi party, so he sets out to show them. The experiment he runs gives the class a slogan, a salute and a uniform way of behaving, and it does not stay inside his classroom.
Six friends speak in turn, from childhood to middle age, and the reader hears only their voices and their thoughts. Bernard tells stories, Susan wants a house and children, Rhoda cannot hold on to a self, Neville loves one man, Jinny lives in her body, and Louis measures himself against everyone. Between their soliloquies the sea moves through a single day.
The Pontifex family rises over four generations from a small English village to wealth and respectability, and the novel is hardest on the version of that success that is built on piety and pretence. Ernest Pontifex, brought up by a clergyman father and a mother who watches appearances, is the one who has to work out how much of it he can live inside.
Roshar is a world where highstorms sweep the land with hurricane force, and everything alive has adapted to survive them: animals hide in shells, plants pull back into the ground, and cities are built only where the rock offers shelter. Kaladin is a surgeon's son who joined the army, lost his brother and ended up carrying bridges for a war that does not want him; Dalinar Kholin is a highprince and a legendary soldier whose visions during the storms will not stop; Shallan Davar is a young woman trying to steal from a heretic scholar because her family's estate is failing. All three are moving towards a history older than the Knights Radiant the world has forgotten.
Madeleine McCarthy is eight years old when her father's posting takes the family to a quiet air force station near the Canadian border in the early 1960s. The base is friendly and orderly, the Cold War is being watched from the other side of the fence, and then a child goes missing from the neighbourhood and the local investigation reaches into her own household.
When Rory O'Fallon finds a baby girl on his front porch, he is determined to find her mother, and that means calling his sons home to O'Fallon's Landing. Keefe O'Fallon is the newest face on a soap opera, but family comes first, and escaping the press to the backwaters of the Mississippi seems like a good answer until he meets the woman caring for the baby and discovers she is not the nanny at all.
Augustus Melmotte arrives in London with a foreign accent and an enormous fortune, and London society decides to take him at his own valuation. He buys a seat in Parliament, entertains an emperor and arranges marriages for his daughter among families who need money more than they will admit. The question the novel keeps asking is how much of what he claims to own actually exists.
Wilson Lewis has been married to Jane for thirty years and has spent most of them at the office, leaving the raising of their children to her. Their daughter is about to be married, and Jane has begun to think about leaving him, which he recognises as his own fault. His wife's parents, Noah and Allie Calhoun, had a marriage the whole family measured itself against.
Alexa Monroe gets stuck in a hotel elevator with a stranger during a wedding weekend, and by the time the doors open she has agreed to be his date for the events: he is a groomsman without a plus-one, and she is dressed and hungry. Drew Nichols is a paediatric surgeon from Los Angeles and Alexa is the mayor's chief of staff in Berkeley, which is a long way from his life. What begins as a favour for one weekend continues at a distance, while both of them insist it is casual.
Holling Hoodhood is the only Presbyterian in his seventh-grade class, which means that every Wednesday afternoon, while his classmates go off to religious instruction elsewhere, he stays behind with Mrs Baker, a teacher he is convinced dislikes him. Over the school year of 1967 and 1968 the two of them read Shakespeare together, while the war in Vietnam and Holling's father's expectations close in on him.
Tiffany Aching is nine, and she thinks her grandmother, a shepherd, may have been a witch. When something begins taking children from the countryside, Tiffany has to deal with it, with the help of a very small and very violent people. She has never been taught anything about witchcraft, and she has to begin somewhere.
Roman DeWinter arrives at a seaside inn with nothing but the clothes he is wearing and a loaded revolver. His orders are to expose a criminal organisation based at the holiday retreat, and the evidence points to the innkeeper, Charity Ford. It should be a routine assignment, and then he learns what it is to be welcomed into a home, and starts to care for his own suspect.
The Lord Ruler is dead, and the empire he held together for a thousand years is coming apart in the hands of the people who killed him. Kelsier did not survive the revolution he planned, so the work of holding the capital has fallen to Vin, the street thief he recruited and made into the strongest Mistborn alive, and to Elend Venture, the nobleman she chose. Three armies are converging on their city, the nobles are deciding which side to be on, and something older than the empire is stirring underneath it. The second Mistborn novel is about what a revolution costs the people who win it.
It begins with strange howling at night, and then a rabbit is found torn to shreds. Everyone assumes Grady's new dog is responsible, since the animal looks like a wolf and behaves as though it is partly wild. Grady is certain his dog is an ordinary pet, and most dogs do not howl at the moon or change into something else when it is full.
The Western Lands is the final book of the trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night and continues with The Place of Dead Roads. Its title refers to the western bank of the Nile, which in Egyptian mythology is the land of the dead. The book takes its inspiration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Sixteen people are summoned to the reading of the will of Samuel W. Westing, a paper manufacturer who has died and left a fortune with strings attached. The heirs are paired off, each pair is given ten thousand dollars and a set of clues that no other pair has, and the first pair to solve the puzzle inherits everything. One of the heirs is also the person responsible for Westing's death, and the will says so. The contestants move into a building where they can watch each other, and the game begins.
Jemmy is an orphan kept in a palace for one purpose: whenever Prince Horace misbehaves, Jemmy is punished in his place. He has learned to read, write and do mathematics while living in the castle, he is beaten several times a day, and he would rather be back out on the streets that he came from.
Lockwood & Co. is the smallest agency in the ghost-haunting trade, and the larger firm run by Quill Kipps keeps taking its cases. When a job to seal a coffin goes wrong and something powerful is released, the small agency is left with the task of recovering it before it does damage across London, with its reputation and its rivals both working against it.
Jaxom is the young Lord of Ruatha Hold and also the rider of Ruth, an unusual white dragon, and the two roles do not sit together comfortably. He wants to fight Thread the way the other dragonriders do, and he has to deal with the group of riders out of Pern's past who are making trouble for the Weyrs.
In the 1960s, in the Australian country town of Deane, Odette Brown cares for her granddaughter Sissy, who was conceived after Odette's daughter Lily was raped by a local white pastoralist. Lily has fled Deane for the city, and Odette has to keep Sissy out of the hands of the new local policeman. Deane is a small town, and the people in it have known Odette her whole life.
Elizabeth Woodville is a young widow with two sons when she puts herself in the path of King Edward IV to ask for her late husband's estate back. The two of them marry in secret, and the match makes enemies of the men who had believed they controlled the king, since the family she brings with her becomes a political problem for the crown.
Centuries ago the Dominator and his wife the Lady founded an empire famous for its evil, and they were overthrown by a rebellion led by the White Rose. They could not be killed, only imprisoned in the Barrowland, and in time the Lady escaped and rebuilt the empire, leaving her husband where he was. The Black Company, an elite mercenary unit, has spent years working for the Lady, and the third book of the series brings the first White Rose back into the story.
Nicolas Creel runs the largest defence contractor in the world, and he decides that his business would do better with a war. He hires a man whose profession is the management of public perception and gives him an unlimited budget. Against them are a woman journalist who has just been handed the interview of her career and a man with no first name.
Jude has bound Cardan to her and installed herself behind the throne, which means she now has to hold a court that would happily see her removed from it. Cardan makes the job as difficult as he can, humiliating her in public while being unable to leave her alone in private. Somewhere close to her is somebody working against her, and working out who it is means trusting almost nobody in Faerie. The second Folk of the Air novel is a court thriller in which the mortal in the room is the one giving the orders, and is starting to enjoy it more than is good for her.
Prudence Bosworth has supported herself as a seamstress and has always wanted to be loved, and then she inherits a fortune from a father she never met, on the condition that she marries within a year. Having decided that only one man will do, she has to find out whether the duke she has in mind wants her or the money.
The three Baudelaire orphans are placed with their aunt Josephine, who lives in a house on a hill above Lake Lachrymose and is frightened of almost everything, from the stove to her own doormat. She is fearless only about grammar, and her library is full of books on it. At the grocery store the children meet a sailor calling himself Captain Sham, whom they recognise at once.
Princess Annie is the younger sister of the princess who is destined to be Sleeping Beauty, and when the whole castle falls asleep it is Annie who stays awake. She is the only person who can go beyond the hedge to look for help, because magic does not work on her. Being immune to magic has its uses.
A robot called Roz opens her eyes for the first time on a wild island and finds herself alone there, with no idea how she arrived or what she is for. She survives a storm and a bear, and works out that her only chance is to learn from the animals who see her as a dangerous stranger. Then her past catches up with her.
Mole leaves his burrow one spring morning and discovers the river, where Ratty teaches him to boat and the two become friends. Through Badger and the reckless Mr Toad, who is obsessed with motorcars, they are drawn into adventures, a court case and a plan to take Toad Hall back from the animals that have occupied it.
Journalist John Easley goes north to Alaska to investigate the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands, a story the American government has censored, leaving his wife Helen behind. His plane is shot down over Attu and he survives only to face the wind, the cold and starvation while evading the Japanese, as Helen at home has to work out who she is without him.
In twenty-third-century Thailand, the sea has risen, the oil is gone, and energy comes from springs that have to be wound by hand. Biotechnology is the dominant industry, controlled by the companies that own the calorie supply, and the people at the bottom of the arrangement include a manufactured woman who works in a club and is owned by the business that made her.
The chase of the Franklin has taken the Surprise across the Pacific to the coast of Peru, where an undercover mission that has waited for years is finally within reach. Stephen Maturin has to cross the Andes to rejoin his ship, while Jack Aubrey, out on the ocean, finds the weather and the sea itself turning against him.
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.
