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 15 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 soonBorn illegitimate, Jane Howard inherits nothing but her mother's red hair and the spirit of the Blake family. When Anne Blake dies, it is Jane who sets out to restore the debt-ridden house in London, and she does it with the profits of smuggling along the Kent coast. Then Charles Blake returns, fleeing the French Revolution, to claim his inheritance.
Rating coming soonFrom an abusive and alcoholic father, to townspeople who treat him as though he were cut from the same cloth, to his own insecurities, nothing Alec does is ever good enough. He cannot see how he could let himself love the boss's daughter, or why she would have declared her love for him. Then Clara's life is threatened by cattle rustlers and he has to answer for both.
Rating coming soonThe ability to manipulate time has come in useful for Caleb Edge in his career as a T-FLAC operative, and his current assignment is to get close to Heather Shaw in order to find her banker father and forty-eight billion dollars of missing terrorist funds. The difficulty is that Heather has been in hiding for a year and does not know where he is.
Rating coming soonEden Black walks among humans, protecting them from other-worlders who abduct and enslave. She looks human but is an alien of a kind distinguished by golden hair and skin and gifted with the ability to kill without remorse and with total accuracy, until the night she has one shot at a human slaver and misses. Failure is not in her vocabulary, and neither is partner, but she is assigned one.
Rating coming soonReturning to Segundo, Colorado, was the last thing Tori Sandoval planned to do. She had overcome the odds facing a girl from a small coal-mining town to become a high-school principal in the city, but now her grandparents need her help. She cannot understand why the widower Steve Remington would move to a place like this with his children, and then he turns out to be her employee.
Rating coming soonIt is 1812 and Hannah Bonner has returned to her family's mountain home in Paradise, and her parents can see that she is not the woman who left. She has come back without her husband and without her son, and with a story of loss she cannot bring herself to tell. As she resumes work as a healer among the sick, she begins to heal herself, and then the war calls her away.
Rating coming soonOliver Twist is raised in a workhouse and escapes to London, where he falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin. He discovers the secrets of his parentage and reconnects with the family he has left. The novel portrays the lives of criminals without romance and exposes the treatment of the many orphans in England in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Rating coming soonBruno is a German boy whose father becomes the commandant of a concentration camp, and the novel follows his friendship with a Jewish detainee named Shmuel. Bruno's understanding of what is happening around him is deliberately limited by his age, and the book's plot develops from that gap rather than from adult comprehension of the situation.
Rating coming soonA five-year-old girl named Ayla, who readers come to understand is Cro-Magnon, is orphaned and left homeless by an earthquake. She is taken in by a group of Neanderthals, and the novel follows her upbringing among people unlike her, in a story that speculates about the interactions between Neanderthal and modern human populations in prehistoric Europe.
Rating coming soonWhite Fang is a wolf and dog cross who is raised among people and becomes a deadly fighter. The novel follows his journey in the opposite direction to the one Jack London had used in The Call of the Wild: it begins with a wild animal and traces his movement towards domestication, in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories during the Klondike gold rush.
Rating coming soonEmma Woodhouse is handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home, and she is also spoiled, headstrong and satisfied with herself. She overestimates her own abilities as a matchmaker, is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives, and her imagination frequently leads her astray. The novel is set in the village of Highbury and the estates around it.
Rating coming soonSiddhartha sets out on a spiritual journey of self-discovery during the lifetime of the Gautama Buddha, and the novel follows his search rather than his arrival. It is written in a simple, lyrical style, and it is a compact work that reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom rather than a biography of its subject.
Rating coming soonThe story follows Kino, a pearl diver, and explores questions of purpose as well as greed, defiance of social convention and evil. Steinbeck took the material from a Mexican folk tale he heard in La Paz in Baja California Sur, in a region that had once been rich in pearls, and the book is often described as a parable.
Rating coming soonA young girl named Karana is stranded alone for years on an island off the California coast after being left behind by her family and her village. She learns to do the work that only the men of her tribe did before, and she has to deal with the hunters who visit the island as well as her own loneliness.
Rating coming soonHeidi is a five-year-old orphan who goes to live with her grandfather and his goats on an Alpine pasture. She brings happiness to the people around her on the mountain, and when she is sent to Frankfurt to work in a wealthy household she dreams of returning to the mountains, her friend Peter and her grandfather.
Rating coming soonIn February 1975, Hà Kim and her family celebrate the new year in South Vietnam while the war continues. As the fall of Saigon approaches, she leaves school early, the search for her missing soldier father goes on, and the family prepares to evacuate. On 30 April they flee on a navy ship, and the novel follows the first year of their life in the United States.
Rating coming soonAs a young man, Jacob Jankowski was thrown by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early years of the Great Depression, and the circus he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just short of his degree, he was put in charge of the menagerie, where he met Marlena and an untrainable elephant named Rosie.
Rating coming soonNewland Archer is charming, tactful and thoroughly a product of the New York society of the 1870s. He accepts its standards and abides by its rules while recognising its limitations, and his engagement to May Welland promises him a safe and conventional future. Then May's cousin Ellen Olenska arrives, independent and separated from her husband, and Archer has to decide where his loyalty lies.
Rating coming soonAn alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the Roth family through the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families are persecuted on various levels. The narrator is the young Philip, whose confusion and terror are rendered closely.
Rating coming soonIvan has spent twenty-seven years behind the glass walls of an enclosure in a shopping mall and has grown used to humans watching him. He hardly thinks about his life in the jungle, and occupies himself with television, his friends Stella and Bob, and painting. Then he meets Ruby, a baby elephant taken from the wild, and is forced to see their home and his art through new eyes.
Rating coming soonLily Owens is fourteen, and her life has been shaped around a blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When her stand-in mother Rosaleen insults three of the town's most committed racists, Lily decides that the two of them should leave, and they travel to Tiburon, South Carolina, a town that holds the answer to her mother's past. There they are taken in by three beekeeping sisters.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are pursued by murderous strangers through the bazaars of Jerusalem in 1918. In Palestine they meet Mahmoud and Ali Hazr, two apparently Bedouin guides, and set out to counter a plot against the British administration under General Edmund Allenby, with Russell dressed as a young Bedouin man and learning Arabic as she goes.
Rating coming soonIn Providence, Rhode Island in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of an eleven-year-old boy named Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared. The boy's story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist, and the investigation places a real disappearance beside the kind of fiction its investigator writes. Edmund has almost no authority of his own, which is why he needs the writer.
Rating coming soonMary Russell continues as a student of Sherlock Holmes and an increasingly skilled investigator in her own right. Looking for rest in London after a stupefying visit from relatives, she meets a friend from Oxford who introduces her to a charismatic woman named Margery Childe, who leads the New Temple of God. Then a series of murders claims members of the movement.
Rating coming soonReturning home to Sussex one afternoon, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes find a stone in their garden that once belonged to the Imperial gardens in Kyoto. It brings back the spring of 1924, when on their way back from India they agreed to do a small but dangerous job for the emperor of Japan, and when Russell met a young Japanese woman who guided them into a secret meeting with the Prince Regent.
Rating coming soonThe shadows of war are drawing over the city of Fez, and Holmes badly wants the wisdom and courage of his wife, whom he has learned, to his horror, has gone missing. As Holmes searches for her, and Russell, suffering a temporary loss of memory, searches for herself, each of them tries to solve parallel puzzles before it is too late for them, for Africa and for the peace of Europe.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes travel to San Francisco to unlock a buried memory of a crime that has the power to kill again, lost somewhere in Russell's past. They go to close up the house and businesses she inherited after her family's death, and a puzzling codicil to the family will sets off an investigation.
Rating coming soonAfter exposing a suitor's dishonourable intentions toward the daughter of a client, Harry Cartwright is hired by a wealthy marquis to solve a murder that takes place at a house party. The case is complicated by the host's wish to keep the matter discreet, which limits what can be asked and of whom.
Rating coming soonHours after returning from solving the riddle of The Moor, Holmes and Russell are visited by a bloodied stranger who pleads for their help. Recovered, he tells them the story of Marsh Hughenfort, younger brother of the Duke of Beauville, who returned to England on his brother's death and wants the truth about the death of the hall's expected heir, Gabriel Hughenfort, which scandalised the family during the First World War.
Rating coming soonTravelling incognito, Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes head for India to search for a missing spy, the man whose story is said to have inspired a famous imperial adventure novel. They find themselves caught in an intrigue that involves more than one government's interests in the region, and the search has to be conducted behind cover.
Rating coming soonThe solar system stands on the brink of war, and on Ganymede a Martian marine watches her platoon slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth a politician tries to stop the fighting from restarting, and on Venus an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet and is making changes nobody understands. James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante agree to help search for a missing child.
Rating coming soonOne choice can transform a person or destroy them, and every choice has consequences. As unrest grows in the factions around her, Tris Prior tries to save the people she loves and herself while working through questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love. Her initiation day should have ended in celebration with her chosen faction, and instead it ended in horror.
Rating coming soonThe book chronicles the exploration and settlement of Mars, home to indigenous Martians, by Americans leaving a troubled Earth that is eventually devastated by nuclear war. The stories progress chronologically, describing the first human colonisation of the planet while a handful of Martians remain, and then the colony left to fend for itself when Earth is destroyed.
Rating coming soonLyra and Will are in severe danger in the final part of the trilogy. With help from Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear and two tiny Gallivespian spies, they have to journey to a dank, grey-lit world where no living soul has ever gone, while Dr Mary Malone builds the Amber Spyglass and Lord Asriel fights his rebellion with a troop of angels.
Rating coming soonEnder Wiggin, the young military genius, discovers that a second alien war is inevitable and that he must put aside his fears in order to make peace with humanity's strange new brothers. The novel places a former commander in the position of explaining a dead people to the living rather than of fighting them.
Rating coming soonThe novel introduces the Culture, a ubiquitous utopia whose Minds control events, and sets it against its mortal sentient enemies. The plot follows an enemy of the Culture through the Idiran-Culture War, presenting various small versions of that conflict rather than one decisive campaign, and its title is taken from a line in a T. S. Eliot poem.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden is Chicago's only professional wizard, and for his first case he is called in to consult on a grisly double murder committed with the blackest of magic. At first the less-than-solvent Harry sees only the fee, but where there is black magic there is a black mage, and that mage now knows Harry's name.
Rating coming soonDarrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the colour-coded society of the future, and like his fellow Reds he works all day believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars habitable for future generations. Then he learns that humanity reached the surface generations ago, and that he and the other Reds are slaves to a decadent ruling class.
Rating coming soonA square, who lives in the two-dimensional world of Flatland, dreams of the one-dimensional Lineland and tries to convince its monarch that another dimension exists, which the monarch cannot see because everything he knows lies on a single line. The square is then visited by a sphere from three-dimensional Spaceland, who has to show him that world before he can conceive of it.
Rating coming soonThe novel is part of Larry Niven's Known Space setting, and its backdrop is the Ringworld, a giant artifact six hundred million miles in circumference built around a sun. The story follows an expedition to the structure, and the book is the original award-winning title in a sequence of four novels. The remaining volumes followed in 1980, 1996 and 2004.
Rating coming soonOn Lusitania, Ender finds a world where humans, pequeninos and the Hive Queen could live together, but the planet also carries the descolada, a virus that kills every human it infects and that the pequeninos require in order to become adults. The Starways Congress, fearing what would happen if the virus escaped, has ordered the destruction of the whole planet.
Rating coming soonThe story of an engineer who creates a device for raising a girl capable of thinking for herself, and of what happens when a young girl from the poor underclass obtains that device. The novel is set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects every aspect of life, and it is to some extent a coming-of-age story focused on a girl named Nell.
Rating coming soonJason Dessen, a forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. He wakes to a man he has never met welcoming him back, in a life that is not his: his wife is not his wife, his son was never born, and he is not an ordinary professor.
Rating coming soonOne man escapes from a biological weapons facility after an accident, carrying with him a rapidly mutating influenza strain that kills most of the world's population within weeks. In the aftermath the survivors divide between those who follow an elderly woman to Boulder and those who follow Randall Flagg, who has established himself in Las Vegas, and the two factions prepare for a confrontation.
Rating coming soonA reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer in Belgium between the wars; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing the family of his star author; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation. The narrators hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history.
Rating coming soonCasey Singleton is a quality assurance vice president at the fictional aerospace manufacturer Norton Aircraft, and she is assigned to investigate an in-flight accident aboard one of the company's airliners that left three passengers dead and fifty-six injured. The inquiry has to establish what happened to the aircraft while the company's commercial interests are at stake.
Rating coming soonAfter the defeat of the Mule by the Second Foundation, Terminus enjoys a period of prosperity and stability attributed publicly to the Seldon Plan, though some believe the credit belongs to the Second Foundation. A search begins to establish whether that organisation still exists, while the Second Foundation itself investigates evidence of an independent force acting to protect the plan.
Rating coming soonEnsign Andrew Dahl is assigned to the Universal Union capital ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since 2456, a prestigious posting with the chance to serve on away missions alongside the ship's famous senior officers. Then he notices three things about those missions, and then he finds out something that changes what the crew understands the ship to be.
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.
