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 12 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.
Rating coming soonIn the pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of unemployed people are queuing for a place at a job fair when a lone driver ploughs a stolen Mercedes through the crowd, reverses and charges again. Eight are killed and fifteen wounded, and the killer gets away. Months later a retired detective named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved case, until a letter arrives from someone who claims to be the driver and threatens worse.
Rating coming soonFour lifelong friends reunite for their annual hunting trip at an isolated lodge in the Jefferson Tract, and there they find themselves caught between an alien invasion and an insane retired Air Force colonel. The four men share something they have kept since childhood, when they saved an older boy from a group of bullies: telepathy, shared dreaming and the ability to see a trace left behind by human movement.
Rating coming soonGerald and Jessie Burlingame have gone to their summer house on a warm weekday in October for a romantic interlude. Handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband's games; when Gerald refuses to stop, she lashes out with deadly consequences. Still cuffed, she is trapped and alone, with painful memories from her childhood for company and her only living visitor a hungry stray dog. The novel stays inside one room for most of its length, and Jessie's company is a stray dog and the voices in her own head.
Rating coming soonRosie Daniels leaves her husband after fourteen years of an abusive marriage. A beating while she was four months pregnant had caused her to miscarry their only child, and the man she is running from is a police officer who specialises in finding missing people. She escapes to a distant city to build a new life and new relationships, while Norman Daniels uses his professional contacts to track her down.
Rating coming soonA new shop opens in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine, and its proprietor, Leland Gaunt, always seems to have exactly the object any customer wants, at a price that looks like a bargain. The price is not only money. Each customer is asked to play a prank on somebody else in town, and as the pranks accumulate the townspeople turn on one another with increasing aggression. The escalation is deliberate and cumulative, and the town's own long-running grudges supply the material the shopkeeper works with.
Rating coming soonThad Beaumont is a novelist and recovering alcoholic whose own books, cerebral literary fiction, have not sold well. Under the pen name George Stark he writes successful crime novels about a psychopathic killer. When his authorship of the Stark books becomes public, he and his wife stage a mock burial for the alter ego, and the figure they bury does not stay in the ground. The dead author behaves exactly as Thad wrote him, which leaves Thad responsible for acts he did not commit and cannot explain to anyone.
Rating coming soonIn Pennsylvania in 1979, a stranger drives into a petrol station in a 1954 Buick in perfect condition, goes to the bathroom and never reappears. The state police take charge of the car, which no longer runs, and store it in a shed behind the barracks. The car turns out to have a life of its own, and it begins to intervene: radios and telephones fail, the car moves, and the boot opens to expel things that cannot be described.
Rating coming soonRetired detective Bill Hodges and his partner Holly Gibney run a private investigation agency, and Hodges has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given months to live. He is drawn instead into a spree of suicides, all of them connected to the same source. Brady Hartsfield, the Mercedes killer, has found a new way to reach his victims and drive them to kill themselves.
Rating coming soonIt begins with strange howling at night, and then a rabbit is found torn to shreds. Everyone assumes Grady's new dog is responsible, since the animal looks like a wolf and behaves as though it is partly wild. Grady is certain his dog is an ordinary pet, and most dogs do not howl at the moon or change into something else when it is full.
Rating coming soonFreddy Martinez and his friend Cara find an empty coffin in Freddy's basement, and beside it a small blue bottle labelled Vampire Breath. They open it, and quickly discover that this was a mistake, since the contents of the bottle are a good deal more consequential than the label suggests. Neither child knows what the bottle is for, and the story follows what they have released.
Rating coming soonThe novel takes place seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs and follows the intended revenge of one of Hannibal Lecter's victims. It is the third book in the series featuring Lecter and the second to feature the FBI agent Clarice Starling, and it centres on a pursuit rather than on a single investigation. It follows The Silence of the Lambs as a direct sequel.
Rating coming soonThe novel travels back to meet Malcolm Foxworth as a young and ambitious man. On a trip to Connecticut he meets Olivia Winfield, who is tall, stern and bookish and has resigned herself to remaining unmarried, until he proposes. Soon after she arrives at Foxworth Hall the shadows gather and his darker side appears, and the children born to the house include one beautiful girl who will change everything. The house itself becomes the explanation for everything the series later describes.
Rating coming soonIfemelu is a young Nigerian woman who emigrates to the United States to attend university, and the novel follows her life in both countries. It is threaded through with her love story with Obinze, a classmate from her Lagos secondary school, and with the blog she writes about race in America, a subject she encounters directly only after arriving. The novel moves between Lagos, the United States and Britain, which lets it compare what each country demands of the people who arrive in it.
Rating coming soonEmma Bovary, the wife of a country doctor, lives beyond her means in an attempt to escape the dullness of provincial life. Her first affair introduces her to luxury and the prospect of a shared future, and then she is abandoned. She continues to spend recklessly, and the debts accumulate until they carry her towards ruin and disgrace.
Rating coming soonSaleem Sinai tells his own story against the transition of India from British colonial rule to independence and the partition of the subcontinent. Born at the moment of the country's independence, he is one of the children of that hour, and the novel keeps his private account and the national record running alongside each other so that they cannot be separated.
Rating coming soonMae Holland, a recent college graduate, lands a job at a powerful technology company called the Circle, mainly through the help of her college friend Annie, who is one of the most influential people in the firm. Mae is impressed by the campus with its housing, gyms and parties. Her initially rewarding experience turns darker as the company's reach expands.
Rating coming soonThe novel begins with two men falling out of a hijacked aircraft above the English Channel and surviving the fall. It was inspired in part by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and its title refers to a group of Quranic verses about three pagan Meccan goddesses. Rushdie builds the story from contemporary events and figures and keeps the plane's survivors at the centre.
Rating coming soonMarion Stone and his conjoined twin Shiva are born at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa in September 1954. Their mother, an Indian nun, dies in childbirth and their father disappears, leaving the boys to be raised by the doctors and staff around them. The novel follows the twins through a childhood inside medicine and then along separate paths.
Rating coming soonThirty-one-year-old Maria Wyeth's story begins while she is recovering from an implied mental breakdown in a psychiatric hospital in the Los Angeles area. Her journey moves between the dizzying and the domestic as her acting career slows and her personal life collapses, and her history is revealed through fragments rather than in sequence. The story is told in short, dislocated scenes rather than in sequence, so the reader assembles Maria's situation from what she is willing to look at.
Rating coming soonCyrus Shams has been grappling with his mother's death since he was a baby, when her plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf. Newly sober, he sets out to learn the truth of her life. An encounter with a dying artist leads him towards the mysteries of his own past, including an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields and a painting by an exiled artist.
Rating coming soonIn the north of England, far from the cities, Silvie and her family spend two weeks living as though they were ancient Britons, using the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. They have joined an anthropology course that re-enacts life in simpler times, and while the students are there for their coursework, Silvie's father is pursuing a lifelong obsession he has raised her inside. The course puts that obsession within reach of the present.
Rating coming soonIn early March 1964, Dr David Henry is forced to deliver his wife Norah's twins himself, with the help of a nurse named Caroline Gill. Their first child, Paul, is born healthy; the second, Phoebe, is born with Down syndrome. David hands the baby to the nurse and asks her to take the child to an institution, and the novel follows what happens next.
Rating coming soonAside from being brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek appear to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties, successful and apparently unassailable, and since their father's death he has been medicating himself to sleep while managing relationships with two very different women. Ivan is twenty-two, a competitive chess player who sees himself as socially awkward, and he meets an older woman in the early weeks of his bereavement.
Rating coming soonElantris was a city of radiant beings who used their powers for the good of Arelon, and each of them had been an ordinary person until the transforming power called the Shaod touched them. Then, ten years ago, the magic failed without warning. The Elantrians became wizened and leper-like, the city turned dark and crumbling, and the Shaod became a curse that no one survives publicly.
Rating coming soonArea X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades, and nature has reclaimed the last traces of human civilisation there. The twelfth expedition crosses the border expecting the unexpected, and Area X provides it: a massive topographic anomaly and life forms beyond understanding. The surprises that matter most are the ones the members brought with them.
Rating coming soonA young domestic cat called Rusty leaves his human owners to join a group of forest-dwelling feral cats known as ThunderClan, and takes a new name, Firepaw. He is trained to hunt and defend the clan, and is drawn into a murder and a betrayal inside it. At the end of the book he receives his warrior name after a battle with another clan.
Rating coming soonIn an effort to bring peace to a troubled Narnia, Prince Caspian blows his magic horn to summon Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund to help him with the task. The four children return to a country that has changed almost beyond recognition since their last visit, and the book is the only one in the series in which human beings dominate Narnia and the talking animals and mythical creatures have been oppressed.
Rating coming soonThe seven demigods of the prophecy set out on their final journey to defeat Gaea, while Nico di Angelo, Reyna and Coach Hedge attempt to carry the Athena Parthenos to Camp Half-Blood before war breaks out between the Roman and Greek demigods. Nico has warned that passing through the House of Hades will stir the demigods' worst memories, and their ghosts will not stay quiet.
Rating coming soonFor centuries gleemen have told the tales of the Great Hunt of the Horn, and there have been as many Hunters as there are stories about them. Now the Horn of Valere itself has been found, the horn long thought to be only legend, the one that will raise the dead heroes of the ages. And it is stolen. The hunt that follows covers a continent and cannot be abandoned.
Rating coming soonThe fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequence, which its own publisher describes as a trilogy of four, follows Arthur Dent after his return to a version of Earth. Its title is the message the dolphins left when they departed the planet shortly before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and the book treats that joke as the starting point for a much quieter story.
Rating coming soonA boy and a talking horse share a dangerous journey north towards Narnia in order to warn of an invading army. The story is set during the period covered by the last chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while the four Pevensie children rule as kings and queens, and the travellers are two children and two talking horses escaping from Calormen.
Rating coming soonEragon and his dragon Saphira have saved the rebel state from the forces of King Galbatorix, the ruler of the Empire, and Eragon must now travel to Ellesmera, the land of the elves, for further training as a Dragon Rider in magic and swordsmanship. The journey opens his eyes to new places, and chaos and betrayal follow him until he no longer knows whom to trust.
Rating coming soonMare Barrow's world is divided by blood, into those with red blood and those with silver. Mare's family are Reds, conscripted into service for the Silver elite, whose supernatural abilities make them close to gods. When her best friend is conscripted into the army she gambles everything to win his freedom, and a twist of fate takes her to the royal palace, where she discovers she has a power of her own.
Rating coming soonRoland the gunslinger and his followers must contend with a sentient monorail that wants to kill itself and take them with it. While they try to return to the Path of the Beam that leads to the Dark Tower, Roland tells his companions the story of his first love, Susan Delgado, and of how he lost her.
Rating coming soonThe last days of Narnia arrive, and all hope appears lost as lies and treachery threaten to destroy everything. Battle lines are drawn and old friends are summoned back to Narnia, though none of them can predict how the story will end. The novel is set some two hundred Narnian years after The Silver Chair and ends the sequence with the world's conclusion.
Rating coming soonBranded a traitor, betrayed by a friend and hunted by the vampire clan, Darren Shan faces what looks like certain death. His initiation on Vampire Mountain is drawing to a bloody conclusion, and the question is whether he can reverse the odds and outwit a Vampire Prince, or whether thousands of years of vampire rule end in this book.
Rating coming soonOf all the families in the mountain shacks, the Casteels were the lowest, and Heaven Leigh Casteel was the prettiest and cleverest girl in the backwoods despite ragged clothes and a father meaner than ten vipers. Then her stepmother ran off, and her father devised a scheme that threatened to destroy everything Heaven had been holding on to for her brothers and sisters.
Rating coming soonIn an old toy shop near his great-aunt's house, twelve-year-old Evan buys a dusty can of Monster Blood, which he thinks will be fun to play with. The can is not what it appears to be, and the book follows what happens once the contents are out of it, and how far the consequences spread beyond the boy who bought it.
Rating coming soonAmy's ventriloquist dummy, Dennis, keeps losing his head, so she asks her family for a new one. Her father finds Slappy in a local pawnshop. Slappy is ugly, but Amy has fun practising her new routine, and then horrible things begin to happen, just as they did the first time, because there is something odd about Slappy.
Rating coming soonTrina's father used to be a ventriloquist, and his dummies are stored in the attic of the family house. Trina and her brother Dan hear voices coming from up there, and they begin to wonder whether the dummies are alive, and what they would want if they were, and what happens to a family that keeps them in the house.
Rating coming soonRoland's group remains intact but scattered across different places and times. Susannah has been carried from the Dixie Pig to a chamber in Thunderclap; Jake and Father Callahan have entered a restaurant on Lexington and Sixty-first with weapons drawn, not knowing how many enemies are waiting; Roland and Eddie are in Maine in 1977, looking for where the walk-ins have been seen. They want to get back to each other.
Rating coming soonScotty has what looks like the perfect girlfriend: Lora is smart, beautiful and popular. When Lora leaves town, Scotty spends a secret weekend with Shannon, a girl he has just met. On Monday he wants to go back to Lora, but Shannon intends to keep him whatever it takes, and some of the ways she has in mind are not survivable.
Rating coming soonDarren Shan and Mr Crepsley set out on a dangerous trek to the heart of the vampire world, and they face more than the cold on the way, because the vampaneze have been there before them. A meeting with the Vampire Princes may restore Darren's human side or push him further towards the darkness, and his initiation into the clan is more deadly than he imagined.
Rating coming soonMark and Cara Burroughs' parents do not come home, do not call and leave no note. At first the children are not badly alarmed, because their parents have stayed out late before. Then other things begin going wrong: Mark's girlfriend breaks up with him and disappears, the police show no interest in finding the adults, and the cousin boarding with them seems to be watching.
Rating coming soonJanie and her friends make bets about which of them will be the first to date Ross, the mysterious new boy in town. He is good looking, he is interesting, and nobody knows anything about where he came from. Then the murders begin, and the competition between the girls stops being a game and starts being a question about who is safe to be near.
Rating coming soonTerri and Jerry try to solve a mystery about a ghost with their friends, in a story set near a cave where the ghosts are said to live. The question the book keeps returning to is whether their friends will turn against them. The legend is local and the children investigate it themselves, without much adult help.
Rating coming soonOn a classified dive into the deepest canyon of the Pacific, Jonas Taylor comes face to face with the largest predator in the history of the animal kingdom. He survives, and is haunted by what he is certain he saw but cannot prove: a megalodon, twenty tons of prehistoric shark. Written off as a casualty of post-traumatic stress, he spends years arguing that it still exists.
Rating coming soonAfter travelling with Mr Crepsley, the vampire who made him into a half-vampire, Darren returns to the freak show known as the Cirque du Freak. There he continues to fight his need to drink human blood, and the book follows his attempt to live among the performers while managing what he has become.
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.
