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Book library

Stories for the midnight shelf

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.

RomanceFantasySci-FiHorrorMystery & ThrillerHistorical FictionLiterary FictionAdventureRomantasy tagContemporary Romance tag3473 booksEdited by Baby Bat
Browse the shelfBack to the first page
Cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

The shelf

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 73 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.

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Primary genre
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Showing 17 of 3473 books

Cover of The Song of the Lark by Willa CatherRating coming soon

The Song of the Lark

Willa Cather · 1915

Thea Kronborg grows up in Moonstone, a small town on the Colorado rail line, the daughter of a minister and one of a large family, and it is clear early that she is not like the others. A piano teacher who drinks too much tells her she has something worth protecting, the town doctor takes her side, and a young man who hauls freight for the railroad leaves her the money to study music in Chicago. What follows is the long process by which a girl with a voice becomes an artist.

Coming-of-ageModern classics
Cover of The Longest Journey by E. M. ForsterRating coming soon

The Longest Journey

E. M. Forster · 1907

Rickie Elliot arrives at Cambridge from a miserable boarding school and finds, for the first time, a place where he is not simply the sum of his lameness and his shyness. He falls in with Stewart Ansell and a circle of argumentative undergraduates. Then his old friends from home appear: Agnes Pembroke, whom he half loves, and her brother. When Agnes's fiance is killed, Rickie takes on the role of consoler, which leads him into a marriage and a family secret that will not stay buried.

Modern classicsComing-of-age
Cover of The Unconsoled by Kazuo IshiguroRating coming soon

The Unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro · 1995

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.

Experimental fictionModern classics
Cover of Hornblower and the Atropos by C. S. ForesterRating coming soon

Hornblower and the Atropos

C. S. Forester · 1953

Hornblower's promotion to post-captain brings him the Atropos, a sloop of twenty-two guns and barely enough work to justify a captain at all. Before he can sail, he is handed one of the strangest assignments in the Royal Navy, which is arranging the funeral of Lord Nelson, whose death at Trafalgar has left the country in mourning. Then come the pearl divers, the salvage master with a temper, and a wreck full of British army pay.

Naval adventureHistorical adventure
Cover of Hornblower and the Hotspur by C. S. ForesterRating coming soon

Hornblower and the Hotspur

C. S. Forester · 1962

In the spring of 1803, with the Peace of Amiens collapsing, Horatio Hornblower is newly promoted to commander and given a small sloop along with a task that suits it: to watch the French fleet at Brest and report what Napoleon is preparing. He has just married a woman he does not love, and the mission becomes complicated almost at once, because the war restarts while he is close inshore and nobody has thought to tell him.

Naval adventureHistorical adventure
Cover of The Passion by Jeanette WintersonRating coming soon

The Passion

Jeanette Winterson · 1987

Henri is a French soldier who follows Napoleon out of a village that expected nothing of him, and he ends up running the Emperor's larder, cooking for the man who has become the reason for his life. Villanelle is the daughter of a Venetian boatman, married to a gambler who has wagered away her heart. The novel follows the two of them through the Russian campaign and back toward Venice, where the news of the war has not entirely arrived.

Literary historical fictionMagical realism
Cover of Crispin at the Edge of the World by AviRating coming soon

Crispin at the Edge of the World

Avi · 2006

Crispin and Bear have just won their freedom in the first book of the trilogy, and they set out to find somewhere to live. Bear's old comrades from the Peasants' Revolt find them almost at once, and an arrow leaves him too badly hurt to travel. A healer living in the woods takes them in, along with a girl called Troth, and when the healer is killed, Bear finds himself responsible for two children instead of one.

Historical adventureComing-of-age
Cover of Noor by Nnedi OkoraforRating coming soon

Noor

Nnedi Okorafor · 2021

Anwuli Okwudili calls herself AO, for Autobionic Organism, and she has spent her life being told that her body is wrong: born with limbs that needed rebuilding, and rebuilt again with cybernetic prosthetics after a car accident. She works as a mechanic in Abuja, in a Nigeria where everything is streamed and a permanent sandstorm is eating the north. Then a trip to a market goes catastrophically wrong, and AO is a fugitive running north with a herdsman who is also wanted for murder.

CyberpunkSurvival fiction
Cover of Empire of the Sun by J. G. BallardRating coming soon

Empire of the Sun

J. G. Ballard · 1984

Jim Graham is a young English boy living in Shanghai when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and in the chaos that follows the occupation of the international settlement he loses his parents. For a while he lives alone in abandoned houses, eating whatever is left in the cupboards, until he decides that his best chance of surviving is to give himself up to the Japanese army. The camp at Lunghua turns out to be safer than starving, and stranger than anything he expected.

World War II fictionAutofiction
Cover of Deadeye Dick by Kurt VonnegutRating coming soon

Deadeye Dick

Kurt Vonnegut · 1982

Rudy Waltz is twelve years old when he fires a rifle out of an upstairs window in Midland City, Ohio, and kills a pregnant woman walking past the hotel his father runs. Nothing is ever the same afterwards: the family business fades, his brother goes into television, and Rudy grows up thinking of himself as a neuter. He tells the story years later from Haiti, where he manages a hotel and waits for the past to catch up with him.

Experimental fictionSocial realism
Cover of Election by Tom PerrottaRating coming soon

Election

Tom Perrotta · 1998

Winwood High is electing a student president in 1992, and Tracy Flick intends to win. She is the kind of student who runs everything and is resented for it, and her history teacher, Jim McAllister, decides that her victory would be bad for the school, so he recruits the local golden boy to stand against her. What he sets off involves the candidate's sister, an old grudge, an affair the staff would rather forget and a ballot count he decides to manage himself.

Social realismComing-of-age
Cover of Reef by Romesh GunesekeraRating coming soon

Reef

Romesh Gunesekera · 1994

Triton leaves his father's house as a boy to work for Mr. Salgado, a marine biologist whose interests run to swamps, sea currents and a reef that is slowly disappearing off the Sri Lankan coast. Triton's answer to his master's obsessions is to cook: he learns to make curries and delicacies that will hold a distracted man at the table, and builds a life out of a kitchen. Neither of them pays much attention to the political violence gathering around them, and that is the novel's quiet danger.

Coming-of-ageImmigrant fiction
Cover of Skin Game by Jim ButcherRating coming soon

Skin Game

Jim Butcher · 2014

Harry Dresden is living on an island in Lake Michigan with a spirit growing inside his head and a headache that keeps getting worse, which is when Queen Mab informs him that he has a job to do. The job is to help Nicodemus Archleone, one of the people Harry would least like to help, break into a vault belonging to Hades. Harry agrees because of what Mab offers in return, and then spends the rest of the book waiting for the betrayal he knows is coming.

Urban fantasyDark fantasy
Cover of The Black Unicorn by Terry BrooksRating coming soon

The Black Unicorn

Terry Brooks · 1987

Ben Holiday bought a magic kingdom the way other men buy a farm, and in the second Landover novel the man who sold it to him comes back for it. Meeks returns with a glamour that makes him look exactly like Ben, so that Ben's own friends turn him out of his castle as an impostor. Winning it back means crossing a kingdom where nobody recognises him, while a black unicorn and a golden bridle draw everyone else into the same hunt.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy
Cover of In the Hand of the Goddess by Tamora PierceRating coming soon

In the Hand of the Goddess

Tamora Pierce · 1984

Alanna of Trebond is still pretending to be a boy, and she has become squire to the heir of the realm, which means her secret has grown rather than shrunk. Between her training and the first war with neighbouring Tusaine, she is learning how to use the magic she has mostly kept hidden, and how to live with the fact that the two men closest to her are both in love with a person she has decided she cannot be.

Young adult fantasySword and sorcery
Cover of The Light We Lost by Jill SantopoloRating coming soon

The Light We Lost

Jill Santopolo · 2017

Lucy and Gabe meet in their final year at Columbia, on an afternoon that neither of them forgets, and they agree that the years ahead should count for something. A year later they meet again, and it looks as though they might find that purpose in each other. Then Gabe takes a job as a photojournalist in the Middle East and Lucy builds a career in New York, and the next thirteen years are spent in different countries, in other relationships, and in a conversation neither of them finishes.

Contemporary romanceSecond chance romance
Cover of Roadmarks by Roger ZelaznyRating coming soon

Roadmarks

Roger Zelazny · 1979

There is a road that runs through time, with an exit at every year and at every history that might have been, and only a small number of people can find it. Red Dorakeen has been travelling it for a long time, supplying weapons to the Athenians at Marathon and trying to restore a version of the past he half remembers, because somewhere off the road is a place he can no longer reach. He is also being hunted by a series of assassins, each of them with reasons of their own.

Science fantasyTime travel

About the book library

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.

From our books editor

Books editor

Baby Bat

Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.

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Browse by genre

Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.

Primary genre

Romance

The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.

676 booksPrimary genre

Fantasy

Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.

685 booksPrimary genre

Sci-Fi

Generation ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.

536 booksPrimary genre

Horror

Haunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.

381 booksPrimary genre

Mystery & Thriller

Detectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.

599 booksPrimary genre

Historical Fiction

Cathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.

580 booksPrimary genre

Literary Fiction

Novels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.

575 booksPrimary genre

Adventure

Shipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.

324 books

One 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.

Browse by tag

Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.

Tag

Romantasy

Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.

70 booksTag

Contemporary Romance

Modern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.

155 books

Romantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.