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 13 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 soonDarren Shan, now a Vampire Prince and a killer of vampaneze, is obliged to attend school. Homework turns out to be the least of his problems, because bodies are piling up, time is running out and the past is catching up with the hunters. The school is cover for an investigation into whether the vampaneze have taken territory in the town.
Rating coming soonVivian Gandillon relishes the change, the sweet and fierce ache that carries her from girl to wolf. At sixteen she is beautiful and strong, and the young wolves are all after her, but she still grieves for her dead father, her pack is leaderless and in disarray, and she feels lost in the Maryland suburbs. She longs for a normal life, and then falls in love with a human.
Rating coming soonPaul Edgecombe has been suffering from a bladder infection that will not clear, and in this instalment he discovers that John Coffey can heal with his touch. Meanwhile Eduard Delacroix has been teaching a mouse called Mr Jingles tricks and has become attached to it, almost as much as the guard Percy Wetmore despises it.
Rating coming soonShe is an aspiring interior designer who dreams of falling in love. He is an ex-football star who thinks love is a con. Blake and Farrah should not have fallen for each other the way they did, completely and irrevocably, because they are studying abroad in Shanghai and they have only one year, and because forces at home threaten to separate them before either is ready.
Rating coming soonJohnny Kavanagh has been living a different life since an injury sidelined him, and he has never known a life without his number 13 jersey. Shannon Lynch has always been good at keeping secrets, and after a traumatising trip to Dublin she is trying to protect her little brothers above all else. There is only one boy who can pull her out of the shadows she is retreating into, and secrets are about to be revealed.
Rating coming soonSpencer Atkins is certain that trapping, drinking and carousing leave him no time for settling down, and he changes his mind when he meets Gretchen Ames, a beautiful woman who has just come from the poorhouse. The novel sets his settled habits against the arrival of somebody with nothing and nobody, in a frontier setting where a woman on her own has very few options.
Rating coming soonA stranger comes to the veterinarian Tess Culver more dead than alive, a towering man in black riddled with bullets and losing blood fast. As she works to save him she does not know that the man calling himself Dante is not a man at all but one of the Breed, vampire warriors fighting a desperate war. In one charged moment she is pulled into his world, where bands of rogue vampires hunt at night.
Rating coming soonOlivia Devonshire's passionate nature and secretive past have made her one of the most notorious women in England, and Miles Warwick is a disreputable rogue and the black sheep of his family. He marries her for money, and does not expect to lose his heart to her. Their union begins with vows that mean nothing and develops into something no force can undo.
Rating coming soonHome on leave after destroying a Colombian drug cartel, the Navy SEAL Clint McIntire finds himself in serious trouble with Morganna Chavez, the younger sister of his best friend. She has been working secretly with the Drug Enforcement Administration to uncover a lucrative and deadly conspiracy involving a date-rape drug, and the operation has put her in danger that he is not prepared for.
Rating coming soonAfter her husband Afton, Lord of Langley, dies of plague, the Englishwoman Igrainia finds herself a captive in her own castle, held by the Scottish warrior Eric Graham, whose wife and son died as prisoners of Lord Langley. When the king refuses a trade, Graham forces Igrainia to marry him, though she would rather rot in her own dungeons than accept a kindness from her captor.
Rating coming soonDesperate to escape a loveless marriage and the constraints of society, the heiress Sophia Hathaway abandons her groom, packs her paints and sketchbook and takes on a new identity as a governess in order to secure passage on a ship called the Aphrodite. She wants a life of her own, but facing the libertine who would take both her virtue and her gold is another matter.
Rating coming soonRoman DeWinter arrives at a seaside inn with nothing but the clothes he is wearing and a loaded revolver. His orders are to expose a criminal organisation based at the holiday retreat, and the evidence points to the innkeeper, Charity Ford. It should be a routine assignment, and then he learns what it is to be welcomed into a home, and starts to care for his own suspect.
Rating coming soonLori Loveland knows her faith will help her reach her goals, and when she finishes a six-month stint as nanny to Drew McCashlin's daughters she intends to begin her own adventure. Once she has met the single father she realises she is in trouble, and she begins to wish that the six months could last a lifetime. Drew, after a tragedy, sees her as a source of light.
Rating coming soonFive young Ayrtons grow up at Amberwell, playing in its gardens and preparing themselves to go out into the world. To each of the children the house means something different, but they share the belief that Amberwell is more than where they live. It drives one of them into a reckless marriage and heals another of his wounds, and one child stays at home and gives up her life to keep it running.
Rating coming soonLynette and Dana have loved each other since childhood. Scholarly and handsome, Dana believes he can shape Lynette, who has never challenged his authority or his commitment to what is right, into the perfect minister's wife. Then a sophisticated young woman from New York comes to visit his family, Dana grows critical of Lynette, and Lynette leaves on a family trip to Europe full of doubt.
Rating coming soonIn fourteenth-century Aquitaine, under King Edward and his son the Black Prince, the English domains expand and the stronghold of De la Noye is taken from the French. Among those seized by the conquering Sir Hyatt is Lady Aurelie, the young widow of Giles de Pourvre. Recognising her courage and discretion, Hyatt marries her in an attempt to draw the English and French of the province together.
Rating coming soonJustine Campbell would gladly rewind her life a few months, to the time before it crumbled around her. Billy Tucker would take the same option, going back to the day before his vehicle was blown up in Iraq, injuring him and killing two of his friends. His bitterness and her humiliation make them a prickly pair when they first meet, and both have to let go of the past.
Rating coming soonAdelaide Proctor longs for a storybook hero of her own, and when a husband-hunting episode leaves her humiliated she vows to abandon her romantic notions. She interviews for a governess position on a remote Texas sheep ranch, where Gideon Wescott is raising a daughter who has not spoken since her mother died. When the child's uncle comes to claim her and her inheritance, the two of them have to work together.
Rating coming soonLibby Day was seven years old when she witnessed the murder of her mother and two sisters on the family farm in Kansas, and her older brother was convicted of the crime and sentenced to life. Twenty-four years later a group convinced of his innocence approaches her, and she begins to ask the questions she had never dared to ask, including whether the voice she heard that night was really his.
Rating coming soonMiss Marple comes up to London from the country for a holiday and finds what she was looking for at Bertram's Hotel: traditional decoration, impeccable service and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished surface. When an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day, a violent chain of events is set in motion that even she could not have foreseen.
Rating coming soonA man sprays bullets into a crowd of children leaving a San Francisco church, and only one person dies, which raises the question of whether the killing was intended. Then an elderly woman is found hanged. Homicide inspector Lindsay Boxer senses a connection, and with the medical examiner, an assistant district attorney and a reporter she finds a link that sends a chill through the country.
Rating coming soonSir Charles Cartwright should have known better than to allow thirteen guests to sit down to dinner, because by the end of the evening one of them is dead, choked by a cocktail that contained no trace of poison. Hercule Poirot calls the death predictable, and then finds that he can discover no motive for a murder at all.
Rating coming soonThree generations of the Leonides family live together in a large, somewhat crooked-looking house, and then the wealthy patriarch Aristide is murdered. Suspicion falls on the whole household, including his two sons, his widow fifty years his junior and even his three grandchildren. Charles Hayward, engaged to the dead man's granddaughter, tries to help the police find the killer.
Rating coming soonIn 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly occupied with the study of honeybees in Sussex when a young woman stumbles onto him on the Downs. Fifteen years old, awkward and recently orphaned, Mary Russell has an intellect that impresses even him, and under his reluctant teaching she proves a capable partner. They are soon called to Wales to help find a kidnapped American senator's daughter.
Rating coming soonWhen his sexton finds a corpse in the wrong grave, the rector of Fenchurch St Paul asks Lord Peter Wimsey to find out who the dead man was and how he came to be there. The lore of bell-ringing and a village in the remote fens of East Anglia form the background to a story of an old unsolved crime and its violent unravelling twenty years later.
Rating coming soonFriday Barnes is a genius girl detective who solves crimes at her exclusive boarding school, and this is the second case she takes on there. The mystery continues from the first book, with the same school setting and the same cast of students and staff around her investigations. The school has money, secrets and a long list of grudges, which is what keeps supplying her with cases.
Rating coming soonVirgil Flowers, an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, is summoned by Lucas Davenport to look into a pair of murders in which the victims were found with lemons in their mouths. He has to work out what connects them, because without that connection more killings will follow and there will be no way to anticipate them.
Rating coming soonAn archaeologist working on a dig in 1920s Palestine discovers a letter that purports to come from a woman who was an apostle of Christ, which would make it a sensational document. When she returns to England and is murdered, the detective Mary Russell sets out to establish why anybody would kill for it, and what the discovery would mean to the institutions with an interest in it.
Rating coming soonTom Sawyer is a boy growing up along the Mississippi River in the 1830s and 1840s, in the fictional town of St Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain lived as a child. He has a series of adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn, and the novel follows him through predicaments that include running away to an island, pursuing a treasure and being trapped in a cave.
Rating coming soonAmir grows up in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, the son of a wealthy man, and his closest friend is Hassan, the son of his father's servant. Their friendship is shaped by the inequality between them. The novel follows Amir into adulthood, through the Soviet invasion, the flight of Afghan refugees and the rise of the Taliban, as he reckons with an act of betrayal he committed as a boy.
Rating coming soonCharles Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames: an assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior, and a voyage up a river into the Congo Free State in search of a man. The man he is sent to find, an ivory trader named Kurtz, has gone native, and the pursuit becomes the whole of the book.
Rating coming soonHester Prynne conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and is punished by being made to wear a scarlet letter as a mark of adultery. Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1642 and 1649, the novel follows her attempt to build a life of repentance and dignity in a community that has decided what she is, and follows the two men connected to her secret.
Rating coming soonThe four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, grow up during the American Civil War, and the novel follows them from childhood towards adulthood through their work, their friendships and their losses. It is loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, and it was published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869, before being issued as a single novel in 1880.
Rating coming soonIt is 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter has returned home after graduating from university, and her mother will not be satisfied until she has a ring on her finger. Aibileen is a Black maid raising her seventeenth white child, changed by the death of her own son. Minny is her closest friend and the sassiest woman in the state, and cannot keep her opinions to herself. The three of them take one step together.
Rating coming soonThe Joads are a poor family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, changes in the agricultural industry and bank foreclosures. They take to the road in a battered truck and head for California to look for work, and find hundreds of others in the same position, forced to accept breadline wages. They begin as fruit pickers, and then as strikebreakers.
Rating coming soonTen-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think about life before the war, but it is now 1943 and life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages and Nazi soldiers in the streets. When the Jews of Denmark begin to be relocated, Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be part of the family, and Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous errand.
Rating coming soonA story of buccaneers and buried gold, originally serialised in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881 and 1882 under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola and credited to the pseudonym Captain George North. It is set in the eighteenth century, and it is traditionally read as a coming-of-age story known for its atmosphere, characters and action.
Rating coming soonA thriller set in Washington DC after the events of The Da Vinci Code, built on Freemasonry for both its recurring theme and its major characters. It centres on the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and a kidnapping that proceeds through the symbols and secret societies of the American capital, with a deadline attached to the search.
Rating coming soonThe novel details the lives of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and their interwoven stories, in the Salinas Valley of California. Its material includes identity, grief and the question of what it means to be human, and the book is tinged with biblical echoes of the fall of Adam and Eve and the rivalry of Cain and Abel across two generations.
Rating coming soonThe novel follows a Lithuanian immigrant family in the Chicago stockyards at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it exposes the conditions of their working lives. Sinclair set out to show the odds against immigrants and other working people who were trying to secure a share of the American dream, and the book instead became a national scandal about the meatpacking industry.
Rating coming soonFourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs has been unhappy since her mother's death, living like a servant on her father's farm near Lancaster under the thumb of her father and three sullen brothers, doing the cooking and cleaning. When her father tells her she can no longer go to school, she runs away, becomes a hired girl on six dollars a week, and sets out to become her own young woman.
Rating coming soonIn the hamlet of Wall, named for the high stone wall that runs along its eastern edge, the young Tristran Thorn has lost his heart to Victoria Forester. On a crisp October evening he makes her a promise, an impetuous vow that sends him through the only breach in the wall and into the land of Faerie beyond it, where the object of his quest is not what he expected.
Rating coming soonSome unnamed catastrophe has scoured the world to a burnt-out cinder inhabited by the last remnants of humanity and a few surviving animals. The sky is perpetually shrouded in dust, and the seasons are only variations in cold and dampness. Through this landscape a father and his young son travel on foot towards the southern coast, avoiding the bands of cannibals who control the roads.
Rating coming soonCarrie White is a friendless high school girl from an abusive religious household in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, and she has telekinetic powers she is only beginning to understand. Repressed at home and tormented at school, she tries to fit in, and the attempt leads to a confrontation on prom night after a cruel prank pushed by one of her bullies.
Rating coming soonThomas wakes up in a lift with no memory except his first name. When the doors open he finds himself among boys who welcome him to the Glade, an open expanse surrounded by stone walls. None of them knows why they are there. Every morning the doors to the surrounding maze open, every night they close, and every thirty days a new boy arrives. Then a girl is sent up, with a message.
Rating coming soonThe novelist Paul Sheldon intends to move from writing historical romances about a heroine called Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. After a car accident he is rescued by Annie Wilkes, who describes herself as his number one fan and is a former nurse. When she discovers that he has killed Misery off in his latest book, she becomes furious and keeps him prisoner in her isolated farmhouse until he writes a book that brings her back.
Rating coming soonThe third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequence continues the travels of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and the rest of the crew through a universe that keeps producing absurd explanations for itself. The title refers to the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, which the earlier books had already established as a number rather than a solution to anything.
Rating coming soonA mysterious signal broadcast over the global mobile phone network turns the majority of the people who hear it into mindless and vicious animals. The novel follows a New England artist who is in Boston when it happens and who has to make his way north to find his young son, through a country that is coming apart around him.
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.
