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 69 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.
White Folks is the son of a Black woman working the streets and a white man, and his complexion is light enough to pass. Blue Howard, an older hustler, raises him and teaches him the con, and together the two of them work the gap between Black and white Philadelphia for everything the marks are willing to hand over.
An experimental memory-modification device goes wrong and affects the President of the United States, and the race begins to establish whether somebody has obtained his memories, including secret military plans. The novel opens with a war veteran arriving at a Washington hospital for memory treatment. The device was built to edit memories rather than to share them, and what happened was not planned.
Two species older than humanity have been fighting a war across the galaxy for longer than humans have existed, and one of them has been quietly breeding human genetic lines for generations to produce a weapon. The novel opens with the end of Atlantis, passes through imperial Rome, and follows the families whose descendants will have to take part in the fight.
Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is lying low in Key West, digging swimming pools by hand, and he is not pleased when a private detective starts asking questions about him. When the detective, Costello, turns up dead with his fingertips sliced off, Reacher decides it is time to move on, and the case he had been avoiding follows him.
A poverty-stricken young American is living in Paris and writing about it, and the book is his own account of the streets, the rooms and the people he is getting through the days with. There is very little plot and a great deal of the narrator. It is as much about the voice as about what happens.
This is Henry Miller's own account of his years in New York, of the people he worked alongside, of the family he lived with and of the marriage that eventually took him to Paris. It is written as autobiography rather than as fiction, and it stands as a kind of prequel to Tropic of Cancer even though it appeared afterwards. It was banned in the United States for years.
Seven characters, most of them in Los Angeles and one of them in Mexico, are followed through a single week in which the city's freeways seize up, a package arrives at the airport and a man who used to be a doctor conducts the traffic from an overpass as though it were music.
Mattie Ross is fourteen when a hired hand named Tom Chaney kills her father in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and rides off with his horse and his money. She does not intend to leave the matter to the courts. She hires Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed deputy marshal with a taste for drink and a reputation for shooting first, and a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf attaches himself to the pursuit. The three of them follow Chaney into Indian Territory, and Mattie is the one keeping the expedition pointed at what she came for.
Ned Kelly writes the story of his own life for the child he will never meet, beginning with his father, an Irishman transported to Van Diemen's Land and settled in the colony of Victoria. From the family's farm at Avenel to the years on the run, the account is Kelly's own, and it is written for a country that never stopped arguing about him.
A group of hackers spend their time inside a full-immersion virtual world they call the Other Plane, breaking into computers for money or curiosity. None of them ever uses a real name there, because anyone who learns a warlock's true name can make him work for them or have him killed in the world outside. Then the government finds out who one of them is.
Everyone in 1920s New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a Wall Street tycoon and she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats, and together they have risen to the top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth as a decade of speculation ends. The mystery of what their fortune cost is the centre of a successful 1937 novel called Bonds.
Trevor Mann is a lawyer who has finally found a life he likes, with a journalist girlfriend called Claire Parker who is always chasing the next story. Then one of her investigations leads to violence, and Trevor finds himself following her notes. What she was working on is a secret that governments and terrorist groups would both like to have.
Ten-year-old Winnie Foster runs away from her fenced garden and finds a spring in the wood, where she meets a boy named Jesse Tuck drinking from it. His family take her home to explain why nobody should ever drink from that spring, and the Tucks have to decide what to do about a child who now knows their secret.
Tuf Voyaging is a science fiction book by George R. R. Martin, published in hardcover in 1986, and it is a fix-up of stories that had appeared separately over the decade before. Its central figure is Haviland Tuf, a solitary space trader who comes into possession of an ancient seedship with vast powers of ecological engineering and then travels from world to world offering to solve their problems.
Tunnel in the Sky is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein for younger readers, published in 1955. A class of students is dropped on an uninhabited planet for a survival test that is supposed to last a few days, and the test turns into something much longer when nobody comes to collect them.
Lara Lington has always had an overactive imagination, and suddenly it seems to be working overtime, because normal professional women in their twenties do not get visited by ghosts. The spirit of her great-aunt Sadie appears with one request: Lara has to find a necklace that was in Sadie's possession for more than seventy-five years, because Sadie cannot rest without it. The search leads to intrigue and to a new romance.
Twenty children are living at a boarding school in the French countryside during the German occupation, and they agree to hide ten Jewish children among them. When soldiers come to the school with questions, the arithmetic of the arrangement becomes a matter of life and death for everybody in the building, and the youngest of them are the ones who have to keep their answers straight.
Anne Marie Roche is thirty-eight, widowed and childless, and owns a bookshop on Blossom Street in Seattle that she took on after her husband died. On Valentine's Day she and three other women each write a list of twenty wishes, and the lists begin to change what all four of them do with the year ahead.
Bella Swan moves to Forks to live with her father and expects rain, not the Cullens. Edward is strange in ways she cannot stop cataloguing: the cold skin, the speed, the eyes that change colour, the fact that the entire family keeps to itself. Working out what he is turns out to be the easier problem. The harder one is that being close to him puts everyone else in Bella's life in danger, and that neither of them seems capable of walking away from the other. Twilight is the book that made the modern vampire romance unavoidable, and underneath the folklore it is a small-town love story with something genuinely hungry in it.
Bridget von Ascheberg is the spare heir of a European kingdom, raised to behave and to be useful at ribbon-cuttings, until her older brother gives up the throne and the crown arrives on her head along with a security detail she did not ask for. That detail is led by Rhys Larsen, a bodyguard with two rules he has never broken: protect the client, and stay out of her life. Bridget has no intention of being managed, and Rhys has no intention of liking her. The novel follows a princess who wants a life of her own and the man paid to stand between her and the world.
Josh Chen is a hospital resident heading for a surgical career, and Jules Ambrose is the law student who has been a thorn in his side since they met. When their dislike finally boils over, Josh proposes a way of getting her out of his system: an arrangement with three rules. No jealousy, no strings, and no falling in love. Jules has one goal, passing the bar exam, and no intention of being derailed.
Christian Harper is the friend in the group who arranges other people's disasters and never explains his own, and the woman who has just moved into the apartment below his is the only puzzle he has not solved. Stella Alonso models for a living, writes quietly for herself and has a past following her across the city. When a threat she cannot handle alone forces her to accept help, Christian offers a deal with rules he has no intention of keeping. The fourth Twisted novel is the one about the patient, dangerous man and the woman who learns what he has been doing behind the scenes.
Alex Volkov has spent most of his life working, and the tragedy he carries has left him with little patience for anything else. When he is obliged to keep an eye on the younger sister of his closest friend, he finds himself feeling something he had not planned on. Ava Chen is a photographer with nightmares about a childhood she cannot fully recall and a habit of finding the good in people, including the man she has been told not to want: her brother's best friend and her next-door neighbour.
Stephanie Plum is still new to bounty hunting, so her boss and cousin Vinnie hands her what should be a simple job: bring in Kenny Mancuso, a local man accused of shooting his best friend in the knee and then skipping bail. Kenny is the black sheep cousin of the vice cop Joe Morelli, which puts Morelli on the same trail. A second case competes for Stephanie's time, involving twenty-four coffins that have gone missing from a funeral home, and the friend Kenny shot is shot again.
The Chemin, also known as the Camino de Santiago, is a pilgrimage route centuries old that ends at Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain, and thousands of walkers follow it every year, some devout and many of them not. Zoe, an artist from California whose husband has just died, decides on impulse to walk it. Martin, an engineer from England, is testing a cart of his own design.
Captain MacWhirr takes the steamer Nan-Shan out of port with a cargo and a crew who do not much like him, and runs her straight into a tropical cyclone. He is a dull man with no imagination, his first mate has already advised him to change course, and MacWhirr sees no reason to alter any of his arrangements.
Glen Runciter runs a business deploying teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy from psychic spies. When he and his best team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in half-life, a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Then the surviving members of the team begin experiencing strange phenomena, including his face appearing on coins and a world running backwards.
Tally Youngblood is about to turn sixteen, when an operation will make her Pretty and move her across the river to live with the other new Pretties. Her friend Shay does not want the operation and disappears before the date, and Tally is given a choice by the authorities: find her, or never be made pretty herself.
Tate Collins moves in with her brother and finds his friend Miles Archer, an airline pilot, asleep in front of the door. There is no instant romance in it; what they do have is an attraction neither of them is willing to leave alone. Miles has one condition, that they never discuss his past, and Tate has no room for a relationship between shifts and study, so the arrangement appears to suit them both. It holds until the parts of Miles's life he has kept out of the room start to matter.
The novel covers a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, and follows three people through it: Stephen Dedalus, a young man with literary ambitions, Leopold Bloom, who sells advertising space, and Bloom's wife Molly. Almost nothing of consequence happens, and everything is in it. Much of the book is spent inside the heads of the three of them.
Maud Ruthyn is seventeen and an orphan, and her father's will leaves her in the care of her uncle Silas, a man the family has spent years not talking about. His house at Bartram-Haugh is run down, his household is unsettling, and the fortune Maud brings with her is the only thing standing between her guardian and ruin.
Carolyn Connor has come to St Lucia to get away from a marriage she has just escaped, and she has made a vow not to think about men while she is there. Then she meets a woman who is famous in her family for arranging matches, and the holiday stops going according to plan.
Tomi Nakaji is thirteen and mostly worried about baseball, school and a local bully, until the bombing of Pearl Harbor upends his family's life on Oahu. His father and grandfather are taken away to a camp on the mainland, neighbours start treating the Nakajis as enemies, and Tomi has to work out what loyalty means in a country that no longer trusts him.
At 11.44 on the morning of 21 October, the small Maine town of Chester's Mill is separated from the outside world by an invisible, semipermeable barrier of unknown origin that appears out of the sky without warning. The novel follows the town's inhabitants over the eight days that follow, as the community becomes a domed city.
On Christmas Eve the fiddlers and singers of the Mellstock parish choir make their rounds of the village, and the youngest of them, Dick Dewy, catches sight of the new schoolmistress at her window. Fancy Day has other suitors and a gift for the organ, and an incoming vicar's plans for church music threaten the choir Dick was born into.
Under the Net is a novel by Iris Murdoch, published in 1954 and the first of her books to appear. It is set in London and follows a struggling young writer, Jake Donaghue, through a series of comic mishaps, and its mixture of philosophy with a picaresque plot has kept it among her most popular novels.
D. J. Holden is a private investigator who has lived by one rule since her boss and foster father taught it to her, which is never to go undercover. When she discovers that his agency is in trouble she breaks the rule and takes a job investigating Maxwell Lotorto, the heir to a grocery fortune and the despair of his formidable grandmother.
Understanding Comics is a book about comics by the American cartoonist Scott McCloud, published in 1993, and it is itself drawn as a comic. It examines how the medium works, where it came from and what its basic vocabulary is, and it argues for comics as an art form and a way of communicating that is worth taking seriously.
Meeting Torr Latime is the last thing Abby Lyndon expected from a Japanese flower-arranging class, and he is dynamic, good-looking and better at arrangements than she is. He is also the distraction she needs, because someone is stalking her. Once Torr understands her situation he offers to protect her, taking her to his secluded cabin, where the atmosphere is intimate and safe and, it turns out, conducive to seduction.
Retta Winters is a writer and translator in her mid-forties whose eldest daughter has left home to sit on a street corner with a sign that reads Goodness. The novel follows Retta through a year of trying to understand the decision, and through the ordinary apparatus of her working life.
Ruth Kauffman is shy, and she is delighted when Charles Polk asks her out: he is handsome, hard-working and genuinely interested in her. There is one complication, which is that Charles and his parents are not Mennonite, though they are seriously considering joining her church in Sarasota and taking up a simple life. Some members of the congregation refuse to accept them, and then disaster strikes Charles's family.
This is an extra instalment of the Keeper of the Lost Cities series, picking up from the cliffhanger that closed Legacy, with chapters alternating between Sophie's perspective and Keefe's. In the series numbering it sits between the eighth and ninth novels. It also includes a complete series guide with colour and black-and-white illustrations, and other bonus material for readers already following the series.
A doctor tells Lord Peter Wimsey about an elderly patient of his, a woman dying of cancer who died suddenly and without any immediate cause, and who had refused to make a will because she believed her great-niece would inherit everything anyway. There is no evidence that a crime took place, but Wimsey cannot leave the story alone.
Juliette has escaped to Omega Point, where the resistance keeps a refuge for people whose abilities make them dangerous to the government that wants to use them. She is free of the Reestablishment's plans for her, but Warner, the man who held her captive, has not finished with her, and she has to decide what she is willing to become in order to stay out of his reach.
Grace Paget is kidnapped and taken to a remote country house, where she is told that she is to give the man holding her whatever he asks for, or die. She has no intention of agreeing to that and plans an escape, and while she is planning it she begins to suspect that the man in the house is not the one in charge of what is happening.
Caryn married a man she had barely met because an inheritance required it, and then did not see him again until she had no home and no job left. She goes to Australia to the cattle station that made the marriage necessary, and finds that her husband has told nobody he is married. His reasons for keeping it quiet are his own, and he does not share them with her.
Unwinding is legal: difficult teenagers can be taken apart, and their organs and limbs given to other people. The revolt at a harvest camp made the practice impossible to ignore, and the three young people who escaped it are now the most wanted fugitives in the country, with a movement growing behind them and a system that needs them caught.
After a war over abortion, a compromise called the Bill of Life allows a child between thirteen and eighteen to be unwound, with every part of the body transplanted rather than the child being killed. Three young people run before their turn comes, and the novel follows them towards a harvest camp where the process is carried out.
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.
