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

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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 8 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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Showing 48 of 3473 books

Rating coming soon

Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte · 1847

Mr Lockwood takes a lease on Thrushcross Grange and rides over to meet his landlord at Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse on the moors where nobody seems pleased to see him. Snow forces him to stay the night, and what he sees and hears in the house sends him home to ask his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, what happened in that family. Nelly tells him about Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff, who grew up together on the moors as something between siblings and conspirators, and about the marriage, the grudge and the cruelty that separated them. Her account runs across two generations of two families.

Gothic horrorHistorical romance

Rating coming soon

Twisted Games

Ana Huang · 2021

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.

Contemporary romanceEnemies to lovers

Rating coming soon

Twisted Lies

Ana Huang · 2022

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.

Contemporary romanceEnemies to lovers

Rating coming soon

Punk 57

Penelope Douglas · 2016

Misha and Ryen were paired as pen pals in the fifth grade, and they have written to each other ever since, on paper, with three rules that kept the letters honest: no social media, no phone numbers, no photographs. Seven years on, they are the closest thing each of them has to a person who knows the truth, and neither knows the other's face. Then Misha transfers to Ryen's high school and decides not to say who he is, because the girl who writes to him is nothing like the girl who runs the corridors with the popular crowd. Keeping that secret becomes the whole plot.

Contemporary romanceNew adult romance

Rating coming soon

The Price of Salt

Patricia Highsmith · 1952

Therese Belivet is nineteen, working the toy counter of a Manhattan department store through a Christmas rush while she tries to find a way into stage design. A customer in a fur coat stops at her counter, and the two of them exchange only a few sentences and an address. Therese writes; Carol Aird writes back, and what starts as a courtesy becomes the centre of Therese's life. Carol is older, married and in the middle of a divorce she has not fully decided on, with a daughter and a husband who is watching her closely. The novel follows the two of them out of New York.

Queer romanceHistorical romance

Rating coming soon

A Thousand Boy Kisses

Tillie Cole · 2016

Rune Kristiansen and Poppy Litchfield met as small children in Blossom Grove, Georgia, and spent the next decade as each other's whole life, counting kisses the way other families count birthdays. When Rune was fifteen his family moved back to Norway; he kept writing, and then Poppy stopped answering. Two years later Rune comes back to Georgia, angry and determined to find out what changed. What he learns is a reason, not an answer he can argue with, and the rest of the novel is about the two of them deciding how to spend whatever time they have.

New adult romanceFriends to lovers

Rating coming soon

Corrupt

Penelope Douglas · 2015

Erika Fane, known to everyone as Rika, grew up in the orbit of the Crist family as the girlfriend of the younger son, while the older brother, Michael, was the person in that house she could never stop watching. Years later she arrives at the same university as Michael and his three closest friends, a group who hold parties nobody forgets. Michael has decided that Rika owes them something for a night years ago, and he is patient about collecting.

New adult romanceEnemies to lovers

Rating coming soon

The Wrong Bride

Catharina Maura · 2022

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.

Contemporary romanceEnemies to lovers

Rating coming soon

Million Kisses in Your Lifetime

Monica Murphy · 2022

Lancaster Prep is a school where money decides the seating plan, and Wren Beaumont sits at the top of it without seeming to try. She is pleasant to everyone, close to nobody, and as hard to get near as a person can be in a building with shared classes. Crew Lancaster has watched her long enough to decide that the version of Wren everyone else sees is not the whole story, and a class project gives him an excuse to find out.

New adult romanceEnemies to lovers

Rating coming soon

Black Ties and White Lies

Kat Singleton · 2023

A graphic designer in Los Angeles is finally getting used to being single when a man from a family she would rather forget offers her a job and an engagement at the same time. Beckham Sinclair needs the press to believe he has settled down, and the arrangement he proposes puts her in his New York apartment as his assistant and his fake fiancee. The catch is Beck's brother, who came first.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romance

Rating coming soon

God of Malice

Rina Kent · 2022

Killian Carson is the student everyone on campus wants to be near and nobody wants to cross, which suits him: the charm is the surface and the rest of him is worse. He notices a girl who has spent her life being overlooked, decides she is the only interesting thing in the building, and starts paying attention in a way she cannot report to anyone. She runs.

New adult romanceEnemies to lovers

Rating coming soon

Lights Out

Navessa Allen · 2024

The woman at the centre of Lights Out spends her evenings scrolling a feed that has decided she likes videos of masked men, and her imagination has gone along with it further than she would like to admit. Then she sends a message she would not have sent sober, and the fantasy takes up residence in her actual life: someone is watching her apartment and knows her routine. The novel is told from both sides.

Contemporary romanceFriends to lovers

Rating coming soon

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

J. K. Rowling · 1998

Harry Potter's second year at Hogwarts begins with a warning rather than a welcome: a house-elf called Dobby turns up in his bedroom to tell him that returning to school will put him in danger. Harry goes back anyway, and the castle starts producing whispers he cannot place and students who are found turned to stone. A message on a wall announces that the Chamber of Secrets has been opened, and the last time that happened a student died and another was expelled. Harry, Ron and Hermione spend the year working out who is behind the attacks, while the school wonders whether Harry is the culprit.

Young adult fantasyWitch and magic

Rating coming soon

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

J. K. Rowling · 1999

Sirius Black has escaped from the wizarding prison of Azkaban, and the Daily Prophet reports that he is coming for Harry Potter. Harry spends the summer at the Dursleys listening to the news, loses his temper badly enough to blow up his aunt, and takes the Knight Bus to London. Back at Hogwarts the school is guarded by Dementors, creatures who drain the warmth out of everything near them and who make Harry faint. Harry learns that Black was a friend of his parents, and what he was supposed to have done to them becomes the question that drives the year.

Young adult fantasyWitch and magic

Rating coming soon

Charlotte's Web

E. B. White · 1952

John Arable decides that the runt of a litter of eleven piglets is not worth raising and takes it outside to kill it. His daughter Fern argues with him until he gives her the pig, and she names him Wilbur and takes care of him herself until he grows too big for the house. Wilbur moves to the Zuckerman farm, where he is lonely until a barn spider called Charlotte decides to be his friend. When the farm starts planning for winter, Charlotte answers the problem the only way a spider can, by writing words in her web.

Cozy fantasyClassic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Lightning Thief

Rick Riordan · 2005

Percy Jackson is twelve, has dyslexia and attention problems, and has been thrown out of every school he has attended. On a trip to a museum, a teacher attacks him, and the friend who has been looking out for him turns out to be a satyr with instructions. Percy ends up at Camp Half-Blood on Long Island, where he learns that the Greek gods are still running their old business and that he is one of their children. Zeus's master bolt has been stolen, and the deadline for returning it has already started running.

Young adult fantasyMyth retelling

Rating coming soon

Matilda

Roald Dahl · 1988

Matilda Wormwood teaches herself to read at three and has finished the children's section of her local library by the time she is five, which makes her the strangest person in her own house. Her mother plays bingo, her father sells second-hand cars with the odometer wound back, and neither of them sees anything unusual in their daughter. School turns out to be worse: Crunchem Hall is run by Miss Trunchbull, a former athlete who keeps children in a cupboard as a punishment. Matilda also discovers that she can move objects without touching them.

Classic fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Roald Dahl · 1964

Charlie Bucket shares a small house with his parents and four grandparents, close enough to the largest chocolate factory in the world that he walks past it every day and smells what the family cannot afford. The owner, Willy Wonka, has hidden five golden tickets inside his chocolate bars and promised a tour of the factory to whoever finds them. Four of the tickets go to children with very determined parents, and Charlie finds the fifth almost by accident. The tour turns out to be something more than a tour, and the other children do not manage it well.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy

Rating coming soon

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut · 1969

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. An American soldier in the Second World War, he is captured during the Battle of the Bulge and taken to Dresden, where he survives the firebombing in a meat locker under a slaughterhouse. After the war he becomes an optometrist in Ilium, New York, and is abducted by the Tralfamadorians, aliens who see every moment of a life as existing at once and who teach him to think about death the way their books do. The novel moves between his life, the war and the planet Tralfamadore without warning and without apology.

Time travelClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

The Two Towers

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954

The Two Towers picks up with the Fellowship broken. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee have left the rest of the company and are crossing toward Mordor with the Ring and no plan beyond the next day, and the creature who has been following them catches up in the marshes. Meanwhile Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli pursue the orcs who took Merry and Pippin across Rohan, where the riders of the Mark are fighting their own war. The volume ends in two different places.

Epic fantasyClassic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll · 1865

Alice follows a waistcoated rabbit down a hole and falls for long enough to look at the shelves as she passes them. What she lands in is a country where the rules of size, manners and logic have come loose from the things they are meant to describe: a drink makes her ten inches tall, a cake makes her nine feet, and every creature she meets has an opinion about who she is. She is accused of things she did not do and invited to a tea party that will not end. Getting home means arguing her way past a queen.

Portal fantasyClassic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Coraline

Neil Gaiman · 2002

Coraline Jones moves into a large old house that has been divided into flats, with parents who are busy and neighbours who keep to themselves. There is a door in the drawing room that opens onto a bricked-up wall, and one day it does not. Behind it is a flat that looks like her own and is better in every way, with a mother and father who have buttons for eyes and who want Coraline to stay. They have been waiting for her, and the parents she left behind are still in the real house.

Dark fantasyGhost story

Rating coming soon

A Clash of Kings

George R. R. Martin · 1998

The seven kingdoms no longer agree about who rules them. With Robert Baratheon dead, three men have declared themselves king and a fourth is about to, and their war rolls across the Riverlands toward the capital. In the north, the Night's Watch rides beyond the Wall to find out what happened to the rangers who did not come back, and a girl being passed off as Arya Stark travels with a band of recruits the other way. Far off, Daenerys Targaryen is trying to keep her people alive in a desert city.

Epic fantasyGrimdark

Rating coming soon

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 1915

Gregor Samsa wakes up in his family's flat as an insect and immediately starts thinking about his job. He is a travelling salesman, his parents and sister depend on the money he brings home, and the first problem the book poses is not the transformation but the fact that he cannot get out of bed to catch the train. Nobody in the family can look at him without difficulty, his employer's clerk arrives to ask what has happened, and over the following weeks the household reorganises itself around the creature in the back bedroom. The family has to decide what to do about him, and it does.

Weird fictionClassic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough · 1977

The Cleary family leaves New Zealand for Drogheda, a sheep station in the Australian outback, where Paddy Cleary will work for his wealthy sister. Meggie Cleary is four years old when the family arrives and the youngest of seven, and the novel follows her from that arrival into adulthood against the running of the station, the drought, the sheep and the money. The other constant in her life is Father Ralph de Bricassart, a priest whose career in the church and feelings about Meggie grow at the same time and in opposite directions. The book runs from 1915 to 1969 and covers three generations.

Family sagaHistorical romance

Rating coming soon

The Things We Leave Unfinished

Rebecca Yarros · 2021

Georgia Stanton comes home to Colorado after a divorce with little left of her own life and finds that her late grandmother, the novelist Scarlett Stanton, left an unfinished book behind. The publisher sends a writer to complete it: Noah Harrison, the best-selling romance novelist of his generation and, in Georgia's opinion, a man with nothing underneath the charm. Working through Scarlett's drafts, the two of them uncover the second story inside the manuscript, about a woman and a pilot in wartime England.

Historical romanceContemporary romance

Rating coming soon

Montana Sky

Nora Roberts · 1996

Jack Mercy dies and leaves his Montana ranch to three daughters who have almost nothing in common except the father they each met on their own terms. Willa grew up on the land and knows how to run it; Tess arrives from Hollywood with debts; Lily comes out of a failed marriage and needs somewhere to be. The will requires all three to live at Mercy Ranch together for a year before anyone inherits, and someone with a grudge against the dead man does not intend to let that year pass quietly.

Small town romanceFamily saga

Rating coming soon

Animal Farm

George Orwell · 1945

Mr Jones of Manor Farm is a drunk farmer who forgets to feed his animals, and one night the pigs call a meeting in the barn to explain why. The animals organise, drive Jones off the property and rename it Animal Farm, then paint seven commandments on the barn wall to keep the arrangement honest, the first of which is that everything on four legs is a comrade. Two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, lead the farm afterwards, and the working animals find that the new arrangement has a way of rearranging itself around whoever is doing the explaining. The book is a fable about the betrayal of a revolution.

Classic fantasyFairytale retelling

Rating coming soon

The Giver

Lois Lowry · 1993

Jonas lives in a community where everything has been arranged so that nobody is frightened or uncomfortable. Food arrives, families are assigned by committee, jobs are handed out at the Ceremony of Twelve, and the whole system is described by a word the community uses for it: Sameness. Jonas is given the assignment nobody else wants, the Receiver of Memory, and the old man who trains him begins passing on the memories of what the world was like before the community decided to stop feeling things. He is also given the rule that he may lie. The rest of the novel is about what he does with that permission.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

Catching Fire

Suzanne Collins · 2009

Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark came out of the Hunger Games alive, which was not supposed to happen, and the Capitol is treating their survival as a political problem. Katniss is back in District 12 with a house, a stipend and a set of people who will not quite look at her, and the districts are beginning to move in ways the government notices. President Snow arrives in her mother's house to explain what she owes him. The second part of the trilogy turns on the Victory Tour, and on the decision the Capitol makes about how to deal with the girl who became a symbol it did not want.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

Shatter Me

Tahereh Mafi · 2011

Juliette Ferrars has been locked in a cell for two hundred and sixty-four days, and she has not touched another person in that time. Her skin kills: the one time it happened, the government body that now runs everything called it murder and shut her away, and nobody has explained what she is. Around her institution the world is failing, with plagues, shortages and clouds the wrong colour, and the Reestablishment has declared that its method is the only way to repair any of it. A boy is put into her cell, and the book follows what he was sent to find out.

DystopianYoung adult science fiction

Rating coming soon

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville · 1851

Ishmael goes to sea because he feels like it, signs aboard the whaling ship Pequod in Nantucket and only discovers once the voyage has begun what the captain intends. Captain Ahab lost a leg to a white whale on a previous trip and has come back to sea for one purpose, which is to kill that whale wherever it leads him. The crew is a working crew of harpooners, boat handlers and a ship's carpenter, they are paid on the profits of the oil they render, and their captain has quietly converted the voyage into a private hunt. Ishmael narrates the whole of it, including the parts he cannot have witnessed.

Naval adventureLiterary historical fiction

Rating coming soon

The Wise Man's Fear

Patrick Rothfuss · 2011

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.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

A Feast for Crows

George R. R. Martin · 2005

The kingdom is exhausted and the fighting has moved indoors. The boy on the throne is under the control of his mother and his grandfather's allies, the riverlands are ruined, and the survivors of the war are working out what to do with the oaths they swore to people who are dead. The Iron Islands and Dorne, both of which sat out the earlier campaigns, choose this moment to make their own claims. A young woman learns to serve a god she does not believe in, a knight wanders a country looking for a girl who does not want to be found, and the political business of holding a broken realm together is done in council chambers.

Epic fantasyGrimdark

Rating coming soon

The Well of Ascension

Brandon Sanderson · 2007

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.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Mort

Terry Pratchett · 1987

Mort is a gangly, well-meaning boy whose father cannot think of anything to do with him, so he is apprenticed to the first person who turns up at the hiring fair, and the first person who turns up is Death. The job comes with a scythe, a horse, a house full of hourglasses and a boss who is unexpectedly interested in the human customs he is supposed to be harvesting. Mort is left to collect a princess whose hourglass has a limited amount of sand left, and taking an interest in his work is the mistake that sets the plot going. Death, meanwhile, takes a holiday.

Classic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman · 1996

Richard Mayhew is a young Scottish man with a flat in London, a job in an office and a fiancee with firm opinions about both, and none of that survives the night he stops to help a girl bleeding on a pavement. Her name is Door, her family has been murdered, and the people who did it are looking for her; helping her also means becoming invisible to the city above, which closes over the space where Richard used to live. He has no way back except through Door's world, where the geography of the Underground has been turned into a place people live in.

Urban fantasyPortal fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick · 1962

The Axis powers won the Second World War, and by 1962 the United States has been divided between Imperial Japan on the west coast and Nazi Germany in the east, with a thin buffer of mountains in between. The novel follows a handful of people living inside that arrangement: a dealer in American antiques in San Francisco who trades with Japanese officials, his ex-wife, a Swiss businessman travelling on German papers, and a young woman who works for a Japanese trade mission. They are all reading the same banned book, a novel that imagines a world where the Allies won.

DystopianClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

Artemis

Andy Weir · 2017

Artemis is the first city on the Moon, built into a dome, and it runs on tourism, aluminium and the kind of municipal arrangements that grow up wherever people live in a confined space. Jasmine Bashara, known as Jazz, works as a porter and smuggles small items on the side, which pays for the one thing she actually wants, an apartment in a better part of the dome. A wealthy regular client offers her a job that would solve the money problem in a single night. The job is sabotage, it involves the city's oxygen supply, and she takes it.

Hard science fiction

Rating coming soon

Dune Messiah

Frank Herbert · 1969

Twelve years after Paul Atreides took control of the desert planet and the spice trade, his empire is run from the capital city and his name is used to justify a war that has killed billions of people across the galaxy. He is a prophet who does not want the future he can see, and he is married to a princess for political reasons while his concubine remains the person he actually lives with. A conspiracy made up of the guild of navigators, the sisterhood that trained him and a face from the first book's dead arrives in the city to end his rule. Paul lets it come.

Space operaClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

Foundation and Empire

Isaac Asimov · 1952

The Foundation has survived the collapse of the Galactic Empire by being small, technical and useful to its neighbours, and it has done so for two hundred years on the strength of a plan laid out by the mathematician Hari Seldon. Now the fight changes: a general of the dying Empire decides to restore its glory by crushing the Foundation and turns the Imperial fleet toward it, and the traders who have been the Foundation's real strength are not sure that Seldon's plan accounts for him. Then a second figure appears, a mutant called the Mule, and the plan stops working.

Classic science fictionSpace opera

Rating coming soon

Second Foundation

Isaac Asimov · 1953

The Mule has taken the Foundation apart and is now looking for the other one. Hari Seldon established a second colony of scholars at the opposite end of the galaxy, and it has been hidden for centuries, which is the only reason the plan still has a chance: the Mule's search for it becomes the whole plot of the first half of the book. The second half moves the question forward by some years and puts a young woman and her father at the centre of a hunt run from the other direction, where the people doing the looking are being looked at in turn. The novel closes the trilogy.

Classic science fictionSpace opera

Rating coming soon

The Silmarillion

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1977

The Silmarillion is the history that sits behind The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It begins with the making of the world by a group of powers Tolkien called the Valar and the arrival of the Elves, then follows the long wars of the First Age, when the great jewels called the Silmarils were stolen and the Noldor left the blessed realm to get them back. The middle of the book is a sequence of myths and narratives about that war, its oaths and its betrayals. The last part moves to the Second and Third Ages, including the drowning of Numenor and the making of the Rings.

Epic fantasyClassic fantasy

Rating coming soon

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens · 1843

Ebenezer Scrooge is a moneylender in London who does not give to charity, does not visit his nephew and does not see the point of Christmas, and the novella establishes him in a series of refusals on Christmas Eve. That night the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, arrives in his bedroom wearing the chains he made for himself in life, and warns him that he will be visited by three more spirits. They come one at a time, in the order of past, present and future, and they show Scrooge his own life rather than telling him anything about it.

Ghost storyClassic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman · 2008

A family is murdered in their house in the middle of the night, and the youngest child, a toddler, escapes by crawling out of the door and up the hill to the graveyard next to it. The ghosts who live there argue about what to do with him, and the argument is won by a couple who have been dead for centuries and who take him in. He is called Nobody Owens, Bod for short, and he is raised among the dead, the caretaker and a guardian who can leave the graveyard when the living cannot. The man who killed his family is still looking for him.

Young adult fantasyGhost story

Rating coming soon

Deception Point

Dan Brown · 2001

Rachel Sexton works as an intelligence analyst for the White House, and her father is running for president on a platform that has been attacking NASA for years. When the space agency announces that it has found a meteorite in the Arctic containing fossil evidence of extraterrestrial life, the administration sends Rachel to verify the find before the election. She joins a team of civilian scientists on the ice, and what they are shown is convincing enough to end the argument about whether life exists elsewhere. Rachel begins to notice details that the briefings did not cover.

Conspiracy thriller

Rating coming soon

Pet Sematary

Stephen King · 1983

Louis Creed takes a job as a doctor at the university in Maine and moves his family into a house beside a road where trucks run all night. Behind the house, down a path through the woods, the local children keep a pet cemetery for animals killed on that road. Their neighbour, an old man called Jud Crandall, shows Louis something further on, past a deadfall of branches, and explains what the ground there is for. When the family's cat is killed, Jud takes Louis up the path and the novel stops being about grief and starts being about what Louis does with it.

Modern horrorDomestic horror

Rating coming soon

The Green Mile

Stephen King · 1996

Paul Edgecombe runs E Block at Cold Mountain penitentiary, which is where the state keeps the men it intends to execute, and the walk from the cells to the chair is a green linoleum floor the guards call the Green Mile. In 1932 a new prisoner arrives: John Coffey, a very large man convicted of murdering two girls, who is quiet, frightened of the dark and able to heal the illnesses he touches. The guards on the block are ordinary men doing a job they have mostly made peace with, and Coffey's arrival changes what that job means to them.

Modern horrorHistorical horror

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

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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 books Primary genre

Fantasy

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

685 books Primary genre

Sci-Fi

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

536 books Primary genre

Horror

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

381 books Primary genre

Mystery & Thriller

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

599 books Primary genre

Historical Fiction

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

580 books Primary genre

Literary Fiction

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

575 books Primary 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 books Tag

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.