V4mp

Explore V4mp

Baby Bat’s library

Movies and TV are on the way. They are not open yet.

Find your next route. Get back to playing.

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 10 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.

Sort
Primary genre
Tag

Showing 48 of 3473 books

Cover of Hallowe'en Party by Agatha ChristieRating coming soon

Hallowe'en Party

Agatha Christie · 1969

Ariadne Oliver, the detective novelist who appears in several Poirot books, is staying with friends and is invited to a children's Hallowe'en party at a house in the village. One of the guests is a thirteen-year-old girl who is known for telling dramatic stories, and during the evening she announces to the room that she once witnessed a murder. Nobody takes it seriously. Later that night she is found drowned in the tub used for the apple-bobbing, and Mrs Oliver asks Poirot to come down because she is certain the two things are connected.

Golden age mysteryDetective fiction
Cover of Lolita by Vladimir NabokovRating coming soon

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov · 1955

Lolita is presented as a memoir written in prison by a middle-aged European man who publishes under the name Humbert Humbert and addresses his reader as a jury. He describes a childhood attachment on the French Riviera and the obsession it becomes, and then the journey he takes across the United States with his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, the girl he privately calls Lolita. The book is narrated entirely in his voice, and the reader is left to judge what that voice is doing. The novel was written in English and first published in Paris in 1955.

Literary fictionModern classics
Cover of American Psycho by Bret Easton EllisRating coming soon

American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis · 1991

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six, works in mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street, and spends his evenings in restaurants where the food and the reservations matter more than the people eating it. He is also a killer, and the novel gives both lives in the same flat, detailed register: the suits, the tapes, the grooming routine and the violence are described with identical care. The narration is his own and is not reliable. The book is a satire of a particular version of the 1980s, delivered in the voice of the man it is describing.

Literary fictionModern horror
Cover of Dubliners by James JoyceRating coming soon

Dubliners

James Joyce · 1914

Dubliners is fifteen stories about the same city, arranged in an order that runs from childhood to public life. A boy watches a priest's house and a market; a young woman stands at a window and decides whether to leave with a sailor; a canvasser spends an evening with friends while his career quietly ends; a Christmas party hears a singer and remembers. The stories avoid the climaxes a reader expects, and the moment that matters is usually an admission or an understanding that arrives late, in private.

Literary fictionModern classics
Cover of Normal People by Sally RooneyRating coming soon

Normal People

Sally Rooney · 2018

Connell and Marianne attend the same secondary school in County Sligo and pretend in public not to know each other. His mother cleans Marianne's house, which is how they met; in school he is popular and she is an outcast. They begin an affair and then a friendship that continues into Trinity College Dublin, where the balance between them changes. The novel follows them across a few years of misunderstanding, other relationships and the pull that keeps bringing them back to one another.

Literary fictionComing-of-age
Cover of The God of Small Things by Arundhati RoyRating coming soon

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy · 1997

Two-egg twins, Estha and Rahel, are seven years old in Ayemenem, Kerala, in 1969, living in their mother's family home with a grandmother, a grand-aunt and an uncle who has come back from England. Into this household arrives a nine-year-old English cousin, Sophie, whose visit sets off the events the adult twins are still circling twenty-four years later. The novel moves between the two periods in a jagged order, and its subject is the rules that decide who may be loved, and how much.

Literary fictionFamily novel
Cover of Angels & Demons by Dan BrownRating coming soon

Angels & Demons

Dan Brown · 2000

Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, is called to a research institute in Switzerland overnight after a physicist is found murdered with a symbol burned into his chest. The symbol belongs to the Illuminati, a society long thought extinct, and a canister of antimatter has gone missing from the dead man's laboratory. Langdon and the scientist's daughter, Vittoria Vetra, follow the trail to Rome and to the Vatican, where the cardinals are gathering to elect a pope and the Swiss Guard has only hours to find the canister. The novel runs on a single day.

Adventure fictionConspiracy thriller
Cover of The Sea of Monsters by Rick RiordanRating coming soon

The Sea of Monsters

Rick Riordan · 2006

Percy Jackson is thirteen and finishing a quiet seventh-grade year when the trouble starts: the magic border that protects Camp Half-Blood has been poisoned, and monsters are getting through. Percy's friend Grover is being held prisoner by the Cyclops Polyphemus on an island somewhere in the Sea of Monsters, and the only cure for the camp's dying tree is the Golden Fleece, which is on the same island. Percy, Annabeth and Tyson, a homeless boy who turns out to be more than he seems, set out to sea to find both.

Adventure fictionMyth retelling
Cover of Life of Pi by Yann MartelRating coming soon

Life of Pi

Yann Martel · 2001

Piscine Molitor Patel grows up in Pondicherry, the son of a zookeeper, and is named after a swimming pool; he shortens his name to Pi. He is interested in religion from an early age and practises three of them at once, to his family's exasperation. When the family sails for Canada with a cargo of zoo animals, the ship sinks, and Pi spends 227 days in a lifeboat in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. The novel is presented as a story being told to a writer, and it asks the reader to decide what kind of story it is.

Survival fictionSea adventure
Cover of Treasure by Clive CusslerRating coming soon

Treasure

Clive Cussler · 1988

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.

Adventure fictionTreasure hunt
Cover of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail HoneymanRating coming soon

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Gail Honeyman · 2017

Eleanor Oliphant is twenty-nine, lives in Glasgow and works as a finance clerk for a graphic design company. She is academically able, does the crossword in her lunch hour, and has no friends at all; her weekends run on frozen pizza, vodka and telephone calls with Mummy. Then she and Raymond, the office IT man, help an elderly stranger who has fallen in the street, and the three of them begin the slow work of rescuing one another from isolation. What changes for Eleanor is not her circumstances but her understanding of them.

Contemporary romanceLiterary fiction
Cover of A Man Possessed by Penny JordanRating coming soon

A Man Possessed

Penny Jordan · 1986

Dominic Harland once rejected Kate Hammond in the middle of a bleak marriage, and the humiliation stayed with her. After her husband's death she promised herself there would be no men in her life, and she was keeping that promise while she sold her house and started a business. Then Dominic comes back, still able to hurt her and still wanting her. As Kate begins to understand the man behind the rejection, her anger turns into something more frightening.

Contemporary romanceSecond chance romance
Cover of Kingfisher Morning by Charlotte LambRating coming soon

Kingfisher Morning

Charlotte Lamb · 1977

Emma went to Dorset to research Thomas Hardy and ended up looking after three young children while their mother was in hospital. She finds the work far more enjoyable than she expected, apart from the disapproving presence of the children's uncle Ross, who has been described to her as a male chauvinist of the worst sort. The description, she decides, is fair. Then there is the mystery of what is really going on in this apparently happy family, and its connection to a shadowy figure called Leon Daumaury.

Contemporary romance
Cover of Sarah's Child by Linda HowardRating coming soon

Sarah's Child

Linda Howard · 1985

A road accident took Rome Matthews's wife and their two sons, and it took Sarah Harper's best friend as well. For two years Sarah has stayed away from Rome, guarding a secret she kept from both of them: she was in love with her best friend's husband. Now Rome needs her, and Sarah agrees to marry him knowing that another woman will always hold his heart. Then something unexpected reopens the hope she had buried, that a marriage of convenience might become a marriage of love.

Contemporary romanceFriends to lovers
Cover of The Wade Dynasty by Carole MortimerRating coming soon

The Wade Dynasty

Carole Mortimer · 1986

Ten years ago Brenna's mother married Nathan Wade's father, which forced Brenna to accept her own parents' divorce as final. In time she made a home at the Wade ranch in Alberta and fell in love with Nathan, and she would have accepted his proposal if she had not learned that what he really wanted was control of the ranch. Now a family crisis pulls her back, and the desire she has tried to despise is still there, in both of them, waiting.

Contemporary romanceSecond chance romance
Cover of Late Harvest by Yvonne WhittalRating coming soon

Late Harvest

Yvonne Whittal · 1982

Kate's father has left a will she cannot believe: she and Rhyno van der Bijl will jointly inherit the whole estate only if they marry within thirty days of his death. She detests Rhyno, but refusing the condition means losing the home she loves, and he stands to lose his inheritance on the same terms. He suggests they treat it as a business arrangement, just for a year. Kate never expects to wish it were forever, but then he begins to talk about plans that do not include her.

Contemporary romance
Cover of An Elusive Mistress by Lindsay ArmstrongRating coming soon

An Elusive Mistress

Lindsay Armstrong · 1986

At nineteen Hillary was a girl trying to keep pace with a husband who was years ahead of her, and when the marriage ended she built a wall around the memory of Clive Eastman. Six years later she has grown up, made a name as Brisbane's foremost interior designer and found a man she thinks she could share her life with. Then Clive comes back, and a single chance meeting is enough to revive feelings she believed she had successfully hidden.

Contemporary romanceSecond chance romance
Cover of Memories of the Past by Carole MortimerRating coming soon

Memories of the Past

Carole Mortimer · 1991

Helen will not be taken in by Caleb Jones's charm, however much of it he has. Her father thinks the sun rises and sets on him; Helen finds him obnoxious. But Caleb does not behave like the tough, cynical businessman she had imagined, and she has to give him credit for raising his young nephew on his own. Despite the evidence accumulating in his favour, she is determined not to revise her opinion of him. Then she realises she is falling in love with the man.

Contemporary romanceEnemies to lovers
Cover of Dark Enchantment by Helen BianchinRating coming soon

Dark Enchantment

Helen Bianchin · 1986

Kris Laurensen has spent her life inside the silken prison of her family's enormous wealth, with decisions made for her by her stepmother and by Jared Chayse, the guardian who manages the family's interests. Now they have decided that she should marry Jared. The match would cement a financial empire, but Kris has feelings of her own that swing between attraction and resentment, and she wants freedom rather than a marriage to a man who might never love her.

Contemporary romance
Cover of Master of Moonrock by Anne HampsonRating coming soon

Master of Moonrock

Anne Hampson · 1972

Thane Benedict is the last person Loren Knight would have chosen as her guardian, but he is to have charge of her until she turns twenty, which means two years at Moonrock, his enormous station in the middle of the Australian outback. Loren expects a solitary life far from anywhere. Then her cousin Janet arrives to stay and falls in love with Thane, and something about their relationship does not add up. There is also the other girl, Felicity Bradon.

Contemporary romance
Cover of Hooked by Emily McIntireRating coming soon

Hooked

Emily McIntire · 2021

James has one agenda: to destroy his enemy, Peter Michaels. When Peter's twenty-year-old daughter Wendy walks into James's bar, he sees his way in. The plan is to seduce her and use her for his revenge, and it works until his own organisation begins to come apart and he has to find a traitor in his own ranks. Meanwhile Wendy, kept cloistered by a wealthy and cold father, finds a night out turning into an affair she cannot shake.

Contemporary romanceEnemies to lovers
Cover of Relative Strangers by Jessica SteeleRating coming soon

Relative Strangers

Jessica Steele · 1987

Zarah's reason for travelling to the little Norwegian village of Dalvik is entirely innocent: she wants to find out who her parents were. What she gets is an icy reception. Stein, the stepson of her late aunt, is convinced that only the scent of money has brought her to his door, and the inheritance he refers to is one Zarah had not even known about before she arrived. She tells herself that one man's opinion should not matter, and finds that it does.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romance
Cover of The Marriage War by Charlotte LambRating coming soon

The Marriage War

Charlotte Lamb · 1997

An anonymous letter arrives asking Sancha whether she knows who her husband will be with tonight. She has adored Mark since the day they married and never imagined that her tough, handsome husband might turn to another woman, but the letter leaves her with no choice except to confront him. His response is not the one she expected, and the fight that follows becomes a campaign rather than a conversation.

Contemporary romanceSecond chance romance
Cover of Mackenzie's Mountain by Linda HowardRating coming soon

Mackenzie's Mountain

Linda Howard · 1989

Mary Elizabeth Potter, a schoolteacher who has settled into the idea of being a spinster, arrives in a small Wyoming town with a straightforward request: she wants a boy who has dropped out to come back to school. The boy's father, Wolf Mackenzie, has no patience for the town or for her, and the confrontation between them changes her life. She sees a decent and honest man where the town has decided he is dangerous.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romance
Cover of The Waiting Man by Jeneth MurreyRating coming soon

The Waiting Man

Jeneth Murrey · 1986

Eden Nairn has been hiding from her tyrannical grandfather since the birth of her son, the only male heir to an estate in the Northumbrian hills. When his henchman Brett Allard tracks her down, she assumes he has orders to take the child back. Instead Brett offers a solution: marry him, and he will make sure the old man cannot ride roughshod over her. Eden needs protection, but she cannot risk marrying the kind of man she could love.

Contemporary romance
Cover of Carnal Innocence by Nora RobertsRating coming soon

Carnal Innocence

Nora Roberts · 1991

In the small Mississippi town of Innocence, days are long, nights are fragrant and secrets do not stay kept. When a killer begins taking the lives of the town's most attractive women, neighbours have to ask whether the culprit is a stranger hiding in the bayou or someone living next door. Into that summer comes Caroline Waverly, a concert violinist who wants only a quiet stay in her late grandmother's house.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romancePsychological thriller
Cover of Game Changer by Rachel ReidRating coming soon

Game Changer

Rachel Reid · 2018

Professional hockey player Scott Hunter is in a slump until a smoothie made by juice bar barista Kip Grady precedes a good game, and then he keeps coming back for the drink and for the man who makes it. What starts as a flirtation becomes something intense and frequent, but always on Scott's terms and always behind his closed apartment doors. With the playoffs approaching, Scott cannot afford anything that might derail his career, including telling the world who he is seeing.

Contemporary romanceSports romanceQueer romance
Cover of The Pumpkin Spice Café by Laurie GilmoreRating coming soon

The Pumpkin Spice Café

Laurie Gilmore · 2023

When Jeanie's aunt gives her the Pumpkin Spice Cafe in the small town of Dream Harbor, Jeanie takes the chance to leave a dull desk job behind. Logan is a local farmer who avoids the town's gossip wherever possible, and the arrival of the relentlessly cheerful new owner disrupts everything about his routine. He wants nothing to do with her, except that he finds himself drawn to her anyway, lattes and all.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romanceRomantic comedy
Cover of Marriage In Mind by Jessica SteeleRating coming soon

Marriage In Mind

Jessica Steele · 2000

When Sayre Baxendale summons Astra to his executive office, she knows before a word is spoken that her only option is to resign. He seems pleased to receive the resignation. What he has no intention of allowing is her disappearance from his life, and instead of accepting her departure he insists that she spend a weekend with him at his country house. Astra cannot tell whether the invitation is a business proposition or something more personal.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romance
Cover of Chesapeake Blue by Nora RobertsRating coming soon

Chesapeake Blue

Nora Roberts · 2002

Seth Quinn is finally home. His boyhood with a drug-addicted mother ended when the Quinn family took him in, and he grew up with three older brothers who watched over him. Now he returns from Europe as a successful painter to settle on Maryland's Eastern Shore among Cam, Ethan and Phillip, their wives and children. Much has changed in St. Christopher, and the most intriguing change is Dru Whitcomb Banks, a city woman with a new florist shop.

Contemporary romanceSmall town romance
Cover of Man's World by Charlotte LambRating coming soon

Man's World

Charlotte Lamb · 1980

Kate has decided that she is finished with love. Her new boss, the features editor Eliot Holman, may have devastating charm and an obvious interest in her, but she could not care less. Everyone, Eliot included, assumes she is grieving for her husband, Toby, and she lets them believe it, keeping a guarded secret about how cruelly Toby treated her and how frightened she now is of trusting any man. Eliot refuses to leave her alone.

Contemporary romanceWorkplace romance

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.

  • Goodreads — link coming soon
  • Social media — link coming soon

Goodreads and social links will be added soon.

Open the editor profile

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.