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 67 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.
Uther, High King of Britain, is dead, and his only heir is an infant. The king's illegitimate nephew Arthur takes charge of the country as its protector, holding together kingdoms that are ready to fall apart while enemies arrive from across the sea and the loyalties of the men who served the old king come into question.
Moscow has survived a fire and a siege and lies under fresh snow, and Father Konstantin, the priest who has hated Vasya for years, turns the grief of the city into a mob by accusing her of burning it with witchcraft. She tries to slip out of the city to draw them away from her family and loses her horse to his knife on the way. What is left of her is dragged off, and the winter king who has been part of her life all along is waiting at the far end of it.
The second day of Kvothe's account of his own life takes him further out into the world than the first. He is still at the University when the book begins, still feuding with a fellow student whose family has more influence than his, and the quarrel finally lands him in front of a tribunal on a charge that sounds absurd until the reader remembers what he can actually do. Then he leaves: for a court where the rules of hospitality are the plot, for a forest where a bandit has been stopping the King's roads, and for a country where he learns to fight and to keep secrets from people who are better at both.
Two children who hold a book of fairy tales are transported into the land the stories come from, where they find Red Riding Hood grown into a snippy warrior, the Frog Prince in hiding, and Snow White pregnant and ruling a troubled kingdom. To get home they have to travel between the territories to reach the Wishing Spell.
In 1687 sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler leaves Barbados after her grandfather dies and goes to live with her aunt's family in the Puritan community of Wethersfield, Connecticut. She finds the colony cold and narrow, and the only place she feels free is the meadow where she talks to an old Quaker woman the neighbours call a witch.
A young English boy and his Norwegian grandmother, who is an expert on the subject, set out to foil a witches' plot to destroy the world's children by turning them into mice. The witches operate secretly in every country, and they are ruled by the vicious Grand High Witch, who has come to England to put the plan into effect. The book is set partly in Norway and partly in England.
Reuben Golding is a journalist on assignment for the San Francisco Observer, sent to write about a grand historic mansion on a bluff above the Pacific that its owner is being forced to sell. A chance encounter there changes him: he is attacked and becomes a werewolf. He spends the rest of the book keeping ahead of the authorities, the media and the DNA analysts who would like to know what he is.
Arthur Kipps is a solicitor sent to settle the affairs of a woman who lived alone in a house on the edge of the marshes, and the work is not as straightforward as his firm assumed. Years later, asked for a ghost story at Christmas by his stepchildren, he writes out what happened to him when he was young rather than inventing anything, and the account is the book.
Walter Hartright is walking into London at night when a woman dressed all in white stops him to ask the way and tells him about a wrong that has been done to her. The next day he travels to a country house to teach drawing to Laura Fairlie, who looks exactly like the stranger. Laura's engagement to a baronet she dislikes pulls her into a scheme that Hartright has to unravel.
Maxine Hong Kingston grows up Chinese-American in California, living in two worlds at once: the America her parents emigrated to, and the China of her mother's talk stories. Her mother tells her traditional tales of strong, wily women warriors, and those stories clash with the expectations placed on a girl in the family and the neighbourhood. The book blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales.
Paula Spencer is thirty-nine and tells her own story: her childhood in Dublin, the courtship that turned into an eighteen-year marriage, the violence inside it, and the year her husband was shot by the Guards. The excuse she gave for a bruise he caused gives the novel its title, and she is the one deciding what to say now.
Frances McGrath is twenty and training as a nurse in Southern California when she is told that women can be heroes, and she joins the Army Nurse Corps to serve in Vietnam. Her family tells her that women do not go to war, and the country she comes home to tells her the same thing again, which leaves her with the years she lived through and nobody willing to hear about them.
Dorothy and three companions, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion, travel the Yellow Brick Road towards the Emerald City to ask an audience of the Great Oz, the mightiest wizard in the land and the only one who can send Dorothy home to Kansas. The road is long, the witch who rules much of the country is not friendly, and each of the travellers is missing something they believe the wizard can supply.
When Golden Walter's wife betrays him for another man, he leaves home on a trading voyage rather than stay for the feud that would follow with her family. Word reaches him on the way that her clan has killed his father. He has a vision of three figures, a stately Lady, her Maid and a Dwarf in a yellow hood, and then a storm drives his ship to an unknown country.
Grace Melbury comes home from school to the woodland village where she grew up and finds that she has risen above the man she was expected to marry. Giles Winterborne is an honest woodsman, and the education that was meant to improve her chances has made the two of them impossible for each other in the eyes of everyone around them.
A woman plans her own funeral in the morning and is found murdered six hours later. The ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne, who needs money after being dismissed from the Metropolitan Police, approaches the crime writer Anthony Horowitz with a proposal: Hawthorne will investigate, Horowitz will write a book about the case, and the two of them will split the proceeds. The only catch is that they also have to solve the crime.
In 2381 the Earth holds seventy-five billion people and almost all of them live indoors, inside three-kilometre towers called urban monads. The building this book is about is divided into stacked cities of forty floors each, with the administrators at the top. Life inside is orderly, and a few of the residents have begun to find it unbearable.
The Worst Journey in the World, published in 1922, is Apsley Cherry-Garrard's account of the Antarctic expedition that Robert Falcon Scott led between 1910 and 1913. The title refers not to the march on the South Pole but to a winter journey the author made in July 1911 to collect emperor penguin eggs, and the book is known for its unsparing account of what the expedition cost the men who were on it.
Every dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night and has her executed at sunrise. Sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry him, with a plan to stay alive and take revenge on the boy who killed her best friend and countless other girls.
Raven has spent years being useful to a family that never quite made room for her, and the man she has loved since childhood is engaged to her older sister. When the bride does not appear on the wedding day, the contract the two families signed years earlier still has to be honoured, and Raven is the one who can honour it. So she marries Ares Windsor, a media executive who keeps his face out of the press and has never once looked at her the way she wanted.
Jakarta, 1965. An Australian journalist, a Chinese-Australian photographer and a British diplomat are thrown together in the Indonesian capital in the summer and autumn of a year that ends in a coup attempt. Each of them is in the country for his own reasons, and each of them is being used for somebody else's.
A woman whose physician husband has taken a country house for the summer is installed in an upstairs nursery, and told to rest. She is forbidden to work and forbidden to write, so she writes anyway, in secret, and the entries record her days in the room and the pattern in the wallpaper she has begun to study more closely than anything else in the house.
The novel is set in an alternative present in which a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in 1941 and the State of Israel did not survive its first years. The settlement is about to be dissolved, which means the people living there are waiting to find out where they will be sent. A homicide detective works a murder in a run-down hotel while his own future is being decided by a committee in Washington. The case looks like a small death and turns out to be connected to the community's politics.
A young Wiradjuri woman returns home to Australia from the United Kingdom for a funeral and discovers that her ancestral lands are threatened by mining. The novel is concerned with language, colonialism, environmental damage and the things that are passed down between generations. It is built around strands that meet in the same place, including a dictionary of the Wiradjuri language.
The narrator is a bestselling novelist living in Paris with the money and freedom that success has brought him. His wife Esther is a war correspondent, and one day she simply does not come back, and does not explain. The police conclude nothing, and he begins asking where she has gone and what kind of man he has been.
Derek Vandeveer is a pioneering expert in computer and network security with a traditional hacker personality, and his life changes irrevocably after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Within months his fortune is gone to a scandal of the kind that ruined Enron, and he is recruited into a new wing of the government.
Janie Crawford grows up in Florida in the early twentieth century and tells her own story to a friend after she returns to the town she left. The novel follows her through three marriages: a farmer chosen for her, a mayor who wants a wife he can display, and a man who takes her to the Everglades to work the bean fields.
Felix is ten years old and hiding in occupied Poland when he and his friend Zelda escape from a train bound for the death camps. They are alone, and being Jewish and on the run is a matter of daily invention. A farmer named Genia takes them in, and she has her own reasons for hating Germans.
Tony Miglione is thirteen and lives in Jersey City with his family until his father sells an invention and makes them rich, at which point they move to a prosperous town on Long Island. Everything about the new life is difficult: his mother's ambitions, his grandmother's unhappiness, and the stomach pains that arrive when he cannot say what is wrong.
Ellie Mack was fifteen, the youngest of three, and she left the house one afternoon and did not come back. Ten years later her remains are found and buried, and her mother Laurel has begun to put her life back together. Then she meets a man and is introduced to his young daughter, and the child looks and behaves exactly like the girl who disappeared.
Theodosia Throckmorton is eleven and spends her time in the London museum where her parents work, removing curses from the Egyptian objects that come into the collection. When her mother sends a crate home from Egypt containing a statue with a dangerous curse on it, Theodosia finds herself hunted by two secret societies, one that wants the statue protected and one that wants to use it.
At a dinner party in Greenwich, a guest named Miles Garth goes upstairs, locks himself in a spare bedroom and does not come out. Over the months that follow, the household, the neighbours and the people who knew him have to decide what his refusal means, and the novel follows their reactions rather than his reasons.
Simoni knows she will never get on with Kent Travers. He is a pilot and so holds authority over her, and he is tyrannical and unreasonable about it. Worse, competent as she generally is, every time she comes near Captain Travers she manages to make some particularly stupid mistake. She is relieved that they will both soon be leaving the airline, except that their paths keep crossing.
Laura Ingalls is fifteen and begins taking teaching posts to earn money so her sister Mary can stay at a college for the blind. The first school is twelve miles from De Smet and the family she boards with is bleak, but the drives back to town in Almanzo Wilder's sleigh begin to change her plans for the future.
A little after midnight on 5 September, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to tell them both that they will die that day. The two are strangers, and for different reasons each wants to make a new friend on his End Day. An app called Last Friend exists for exactly that purpose, and through it the two of them meet and set out to live a lifetime in a single day.
In a country where an industrial revolution runs on magic, a student of archaeology finds a book that is awake and aware, and that has been gathering information for a very long time. In another land, a dyer's daughter discovers she has a talent that her religion tells her is a form of theft.
Okonkwo is a wrestler and farmer in Umuofia, a village in southeastern Nigeria, who has built his standing by refusing to resemble his father. The first part of the novel describes his household, the customs and gatherings of the Igbo and the fear of weakness that drives him. The later parts bring the arrival of British missionaries and administrators, who introduce a church and a court and a version of order that the clan's own structures cannot hold against.
Nash Morgan was the good Morgan brother, with a smile and a wink for everybody, until he was shot in the line of duty. Now the chief of police is having panic attacks and nightmares, and he is hiding both from everyone he knows. His new next-door neighbour sees right through him, and she is keeping secrets of her own.
Lucian Rollins is a mogul built entirely out of revenge, working to erase his father's mark on the family name. Sloane Walton is a small-town librarian determined to finish her father's pursuit of justice. An old, dark secret binds them, and the dislike they share now does not stop them from arguing their way into something else.
Naomi rides into Knockemout, Virginia, to rescue her estranged twin sister, and finds that Tina has taken her car and her money and left her with an eleven-year-old niece she did not know she had. With no job, no transport and no plan, she is stuck in a small town where disputes are settled with fists and beer, and where the first person she meets is Knox, the local barber and a man who does not tolerate drama. Knox prefers his own company and his dog, and the town has firm ideas about the two of them.
Billy Halleck, a lawyer who is far overweight, is driving carelessly when he kills an old Romani woman, and the case against him is dismissed. Afterwards a man he meets at the courthouse touches his cheek and says one word, and Billy begins to lose weight no matter how much he eats.
Agatha Christie's Third Girl, first published in November 1966, brings back Hercule Poirot and the novelist Ariadne Oliver. It begins with a young woman who comes to Poirot to ask for help and then runs away because she thinks he is too old to be worth troubling, and it is among the later novels in which the detective works his way towards a crime rather than away from one.
Darrell Rivers is going back to Malory Towers for her third year, but her best friend Sally Hope is in quarantine with mumps and will be late. On the way the girls collect a new pupil, Zerelda Brass, an American who has been staying with her grandmother and who at fifteen looks several years older with her make-up and extravagant hair. The other girls are shocked by her.
Victor Frankenstein is sixteen and his twin brother Konrad is dying in the family chateau in the republic of Geneva in the eighteenth century, and the doctors can do nothing for him. In the family's secret library Victor finds an account of the Elixir of Life, and decides that he will make it himself, whatever the ingredients demand.
When Casey first arrived in the off-the-grid town, an isolated community built as a haven for people running from their pasts, she had no idea what to expect: no mobile phones, no internet, no post and no way in or out without the town council's approval. She did not expect to be the homicide detective on two cases, or for the council to drop a dangerous criminal into their midst without a plan to hold him.
Most of the survivors of Earth have gone to the worlds of the Vega Confederation, and the planet they left behind is a shrunken, half-ruined place with a thin population of people who chose to stay. Conrad Nomikos, an ageless Greek who keeps the old ruins and the old stories, is ordered to guide a Vega official around what is left of it, and neither of them is safe.
Two agents are fighting a war across every version of history, one working for a technological Agency and one for a biological Garden, and they are both very good at it. Red razes worlds to keep the timeline her employers prefer; Blue prunes branches to keep hers. Then Red finds a letter left in the ash, written to her by name, and answers it. Each message is hidden somewhere only the other will think to look, and each one is a small act of treason that gets harder to hide as the correspondence goes on. The two of them write to each other in secret while their agencies continue to fight.
Briseis can grow plants from seed to full bloom with a single touch, and her parents have spent years keeping her and her gift hidden. When an aunt she never met dies and leaves her a run-down estate in rural New York, the family goes there hoping the garden will teach Bri control, and finds a walled garden of deadly plants, a set of instructions and generations of family secrets.
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.
