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 68 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.
Marion Lafournier is a gay Ojibwe man living on a reservation in northern Minnesota, in a town he cannot seem to leave. One night he brings to life a dog from underneath the elementary school playground, and the animal leads him to the grave of a murdered Ojibwe basketball player. The town knows more about the dead boy than it says.
Alizeh is a servant, treated as disposable by everyone around her, and that is exactly how she has stayed alive. She is also the last heir of an ancient Jinn kingdom, hiding in plain sight because the people who destroyed her family would finish the job if they found her. Crown Prince Kamran has spent his life hearing prophecies about the death of his king and has never imagined they could involve the strange-eyed girl working in his palace, the one he cannot stop thinking about. The first This Woven Kingdom novel follows a girl with almost nothing left to protect and a prince who works out far too late what he has been looking at.
Geillis Ramsey has had a lonely childhood, made lonelier by a mother's cousin who taught her to see the world in an unusual way. When she grows up she inherits her cousin's house, along with her reputation in the neighbourhood as a white witch and an herbalist, and finds both the house and the community stranger than she expected.
Between 1979 and 1981 more than forty black children were taken and killed in Atlanta, in a city that had elected its first black mayor and liked to describe itself as too busy to hate. Zala Spencer holds down several jobs and is raising three children on her own. One Sunday morning in July 1980 she wakes to find her teenage son Sonny gone.
The Earl of Devenham returns after ten years to marry Mary Anstey as he promised, and finds that neither of them feels what they once did, though both keep up appearances for the family. Mary's younger sister Emily sees through the pretence and decides to prevent the wedding with a sleeping draught and a scheme to take her place.
Jace Wilson, a teenager from Indiana, witnesses a murder, and his parents cannot put him into witness protection because the killers have contacts inside law enforcement. They hand him to a couple who run a wilderness survival programme for troubled children in Montana, and the two murderers follow him there. The boy is given a new name for the summer, and the men who want him dead work it out.
Gail Baines has lost her job, or left it, depending on who is telling the truth, and her daughter is getting married tomorrow. She has not been invited to the spa day the groom's mother has arranged, her ex-husband Max has arrived on her doorstep with a cat and nowhere to stay, and then her daughter tells her parents something that puts the wedding in question.
Aveline Stoddard's father loses everything at the card table, and she agrees to submit to the winner for three nights in settlement of the debt. The three nights pass too quickly, and the man the town calls Lucifer vanishes. Five years later he returns to London looking for his enemy, and finds her instead.
Moses Bedemier runs a sweet shop and ice-cream parlour in the Burg, and everyone in Trenton knows him as Uncle Mo. He is ticketed by a newly qualified policeman for carrying a concealed weapon and then fails to appear for his court date, so the bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is sent to bring him in. Nobody in the neighbourhood is willing to help her, because nobody believes that Uncle Mo could have done anything wrong.
Celaena Sardothien is pulled out of a salt mine to compete for a job she does not want. Win the king's tournament, and she serves as his champion for four years before earning her freedom. Lose, and she goes back to the mines, or dies on the way. The castle comes with its own problems, among them the crown prince who need not be provoked and the captain of the guard who keeps interfering on her behalf. Then the other competitors begin dying, one at a time, and Celaena's road out of Endovier becomes a matter of finding whatever is hunting in the palace before it reaches her.
Alice climbs through a large looking-glass into a world she can see beyond it, and finds that things are reversed there, including logic. Running keeps a person in the same place and walking away brings them closer. The book is built on chess rather than cards, and it opens indoors on a snowy November night exactly six months after the earlier book.
Humanity has handed its government to an artificial intelligence that runs the world so well that nobody dies of accident, illness or want. The one thing the Thunderhead cannot control is the scythedom, the order of human beings who decide who has to die. A year after going missing, Rowan has become a vigilante killing people he considers disgraces to that order.
Several years after the events of the previous volume, the elderly politician Chrisjen Avasarala dies and is given a state funeral on Laconia, where James Holden, still a captive, pays his respects. Holden is allowed to move around the grounds of the High Consul's residence, and the situation he is in is one of comfortable detention rather than escape.
Betsy Bobbin and Hank the mule are shipwrecked on the coast of Oz and fall in with an army on the march. Ann Soforth, the Queen of Oogaboo, has decided to conquer the Nome King, and she has the clockwork man Tik-Tok to help her do it. He can think, speak and act, but only while his springs are wound.
A young war hero returns home to recover from serious injury and rediscovers a childhood friend. Their renewed friendship becomes love, and their common background and shared faith bind them together. The soldier then sets about returning to the fighting in order to help rescue the man who had encouraged his faith and saved his life.
A group of history students travel to fourteenth-century France in order to rescue their professor, who has become stranded there during an archaeological project. The technology that sends them is based on quantum and multiverse theory, and the novel follows the consequences of putting people who study a period into the period itself. Their research becomes field experience.
Phillip Enright survived being blinded and shipwrecked on a small island in the Caribbean with an old sailor called Timothy, and he has been rescued. Now there is an operation that might give him back his sight. Between the chapters about what Phillip does with the rest of his life are the chapters about Timothy's, beginning with his childhood on St. Thomas and ending with how he came to be on that island.
George Smiley is brought out of retirement and given one job: there is a Soviet agent near the top of British intelligence, and he has to find out which of his senior colleagues it is. He is given almost nothing else, and the people he is asked to investigate understand the operation better than he does. The work is done through old files and long conversations rather than a chase.
Nan King works in her family's oyster house in Whitstable until she sees Kitty Butler perform as a male impersonator and follows her to London. Nan becomes part of the act, and then has to make her own way through the music halls, the streets and the households of 1890s London.
Titan is a science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter, published in 1997 and shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award the following year. It describes a crewed mission to Titan, the moon of Saturn, whose thick atmosphere and chemistry have led some people to think it may hold the building blocks of life.
Kaye has grown up travelling with her mother's band and has never had a place to call home. She comes back to the New Jersey shore where she spent summers as a child, and finds that the faeries she used to play with are real, that one of them has a claim on her, and that she is not entirely human herself.
Lara Jean Covey writes letters to the boys she has loved, and she never intended any of them to be read. When her older sister leaves for Scotland, Lara Jean is left looking after their younger sister and their father, and the letters stop being private: every boy she has written to receives one. To deal with the person she minds most, she agrees to pretend to be going out with one of the others, which means keeping up the story for her family, her friends and the whole school.
Four scientists travel fifteen light years from Earth to study four worlds that might support life, sleeping through the decades between them and waking in bodies their own DNA has been prepared for. Ariadne, the crew's engineer and leader, records their work in a series of letters home. The mission is designed as a gift to the people who sent it, on the understanding that whatever the crew discovers belongs to everybody. What they cannot plan is what is happening on Earth while they sleep.
Sir Alistair Munroe came home from the colonies scarred inside and out, and has lived shut up in a Scottish castle ever since. Helen Fitzwilliam arrives at his door to take a position as his housekeeper, running from mistakes that have taken her from the luxury of London society to the edge of the map, and neither of them wants company.
Lira is siren royalty and the most dangerous of her kind, with the hearts of seventeen princes to prove it. When she kills one of her own, the Sea Queen punishes her by turning her human and stripping away her song, then sets the terms: bring back Prince Elian's heart by the winter solstice, or stay like this forever. Elian spends as little time on land as he can and hunts sirens for a living. When he pulls Lira out of the water, neither of them says who they are, and both of them start wanting to. To Kill a Kingdom is a standalone retelling of the little mermaid with a great deal more killing in it.
Scout Finch is six and growing up in a small Alabama town in the thirties, where the summers are long and every neighbour is known to her. Her father Atticus is a lawyer, and when he agrees to defend a Black man accused of attacking a white woman, the town turns on the family. Scout watches the trial from the gallery and reports what she sees, understanding only part of it.
Campbell Sinclair intervenes when he sees a young lad set upon by bandits, and takes a wound for his trouble. While he recovers, the boy nurses him, and it is only later, when he comes upon the lad bathing in a river, that he discovers that Jo is Joan, and that she is carrying something her mother made her promise to deliver.
Ned Henry is a historian at Oxford in the twenty-first century who does his research by travelling into the past, and he has been sent to the middle of the twentieth century far too many times. His assignment is to establish where an ugly ornament called the bishop's bird stump was during the Coventry Blitz, and he is too exhausted to be sure what he is doing.
A correspondence that began as an exchange of letters has continued long enough for Sir Phillip Crane to feel that he knows Miss Bridgerton, although the two of them have never met. He writes to invite her to visit him, on the understanding that they may find they suit, and the visit is not what either of them had pictured from the letters.
Kira Navarez is a xenobiologist on a survey contract on an uncolonised planet, with plans to settle down with her fiance once the work is done. Investigating a crashed drone, she finds a structure left behind by a civilisation that no longer exists, and wakes something inside it that fastens itself to her body and changes what she is.
Barnabas Sackett is leaving England for good to make his fortune in the New World, but a warrant sworn against him by Queen Elizabeth sends him into hiding instead. What put the crown on his trail was a handful of rare gold coins he found and sold, believed to be part of a treasure King John lost.
The Ramsay family spend their summers in a house on the coast of Scotland, and the question of whether the weather will allow a trip to the lighthouse nearby is the small argument the book begins with. Around that unhurried plan, the family, its guests and its eight children are seen through their own thoughts, and then through the years that follow.
Everyone who has ever lived wakes on the banks of a river that seems to have no end, naked, hairless and alive again, on a world nobody can name. Each of them finds a grailstone and a container that supplies food, and no explanation at all. Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian explorer, is among the resurrected, and he wants to know who is responsible.
It is said that Hood waits at the end of every plot, every scheme and every ambition, and in this eighth Malazan novel the Lord of Death is there at the beginning. Darujhistan swelters in the summer heat and seethes with rumours and whispers: strangers have arrived, a murderer is abroad, tyrannies that were thought finished are stirring, and assassins are at work. The book turns on the legacy of Anomander Rake, Son of Darkness and Lord of the Tiste Andii.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are on their way downriver when a strange man asks them to carry a message to a relative in Arkansas. By the time they arrive there has been a murder, a stolen diamond and a confession nobody believes, and Tom decides to solve the case the way the detective stories he has read say it should be done.
Tom is twelve and staying with his aunt and uncle in a converted house while his brother recovers from measles, and his days are made of boredom and rules about noise. At midnight the grandfather clock in the hall strikes thirteen, the back door opens onto a garden that should not be there, and a girl named Hatty is playing in it.
Tool is a half-man, half-beast creature designed for combat, and he is capable of far more than the people who made him ever intended. He has gone rogue from his pack of bioengineered augments and has emerged as the victorious leader of a pack of human soldier boys, and he is being hunted by somebody who knows a secret about him.
Tomas de Torquemada and the Spanish knight Don Alvaro de Rafel have been friends for many years. When the king names Torquemada Grand Inquisitor of Spain and whispers begin about Alvaro's secret Jewish past, the friendship becomes the first casualty of the new office. Nothing in the novel is settled by argument, because the Inquisition has other methods.
Ryan Price plays professional hockey as an enforcer and struggles with anxiety when he is off the ice. He has just been traded to Toronto and is starting over in the city's LGBTQ Village, where he runs into a man he knew in high school and has not forgotten. Fabian loathes the sport Ryan plays for a living.
Chaol Westfall was captain of the Guard until the glass castle shattered, his men were killed and his body was broken. The only chance he has of recovering is with the healers of the Torre Cesme, and while he is there the war at home waits on whether he and Nesryn can persuade an empire to join it.
A nurse has married a violent man and is living with the consequences of it. She also develops feelings for an inmate at the prison where she works, who is the only person who notices the marks on her, and when she finds out what he is in prison for and tries to get away, he comes after her. What she knows about him is not the whole of it.
On a rescue mission in the Indonesian jungle, Dr Draden Freeman and his GhostWalker team are extracting the wounded from an outbreak of a virus released by a terrorist cell. When Draden is infected he sends the others away, intending to hunt down those responsible, and the woman tracking the virus decides to save his life without knowing what that will cost her.
Waiting in Malta while the Surprise is repaired, Stephen Maturin finds that the island is also home to a network of French agents, and that one of them is using a woman's troubles to buy her services. A new admiral takes command of the station and sends Jack Aubrey out on a series of errands, some of which are not what they seem.
Dirk Pitt is in Greenland when a shipwreck is found in the ice, and what is recovered from it is only the first piece of a much larger puzzle. The trail runs to the treasures of the library at Alexandria, to charts of hidden oil and mineral deposits, and to a group of zealots with a plan to destabilise the governments of Egypt and Mexico. Other people are following the same trail, including a professional assassin. The book is at once a hunt for a lost collection and a race to stop a conspiracy.
Mark Treasure goes with his actress wife to a West Country town while she is filming, and is asked by the local bishop to look into the finances of a convent with three nuns left and assets of eleven million pounds. One of the people already handling the convent's money has died in suspicious circumstances, and a second is strangled after a dinner party.
A story of buccaneers and buried gold, originally serialised in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881 and 1882 under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola and credited to the pseudonym Captain George North. It is set in the eighteenth century, and it is traditionally read as a coming-of-age story known for its atmosphere, characters and action.
Trek of the Mountain Man is a western by William W. Johnstone, published in 2002. A bounty hunter who still believes there is money in an old warrant takes the wrong person when he cannot find Smoke Jensen, and Jensen goes up into the Rocky Mountains after him. Most of the book is the pursuit itself, across country that both the hunter and the hunted know.
Cilla McGowan was a child star and now restores old houses, and she comes to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia to save the farmhouse her grandmother, a legendary actress, left behind. The house brings back dreams of the grandmother, who died of a suspected overdose more than thirty years earlier.
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.
