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 16 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 soonBetween life and death there is a library whose shelves go on forever, and every book in it offers the chance to try another life that might have been lived. Nora Seed reaches a breaking point in her own life and finds herself in that library, where the clocks are frozen at midnight and where she can explore the infinite versions of her life.
Rating coming soonThe faction-based society Tris Prior once believed in has been shattered by violence, power struggles and loss. Offered a chance to explore the world beyond the limits she has known, she takes it, hoping that she and Tobias will find a simpler life free of lies and tangled loyalties. What they find is more alarming than what they left, and Tris has to face impossible choices.
Rating coming soonThe fourth book of the Dune series takes place three thousand five hundred years after the events of the original trilogy and tells the story of Leto, the son of Paul Atreides, who has traded his humanity to become an immortal sandworm. Leto has ruled as a tyrant for that entire period, and his control rests on the spice and on the sandworms he has replaced.
Rating coming soonNew York City detective Barry Sutton investigates a phenomenon the media call False Memory Syndrome, an affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived. The neuroscientist Helena Smith has dedicated her career to a technology that would let people preserve their most precious memories. When the two of them confront what is causing it, they find a force that attacks the past itself.
Rating coming soonGlen Runciter runs a business deploying teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy from psychic spies. When he and his best team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in half-life, a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Then the surviving members of the team begin experiencing strange phenomena, including his face appearing on coins and a world running backwards.
Rating coming soonThe first novel of the Mars trilogy follows the beginnings of the colonisation of Mars, from the arrival of the group known as the First Hundred to the first Martian revolution. The book covers the early decades of settlement and the political consequences of the settlers' decisions about how the planet should be changed.
Rating coming soonFraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists and philosophers protected from the corrupting influences of the outside secular world by stone, tradition and ritual. Beyond the concent's walls cities and governments have risen and fallen, and three times violence has invaded the community and devastated it. The avout are banned from most advanced technology.
Rating coming soonIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was an interruption. For Brutha the novice, who is the Chosen One, that means wanting peace and justice and brotherly love while also wanting the Inquisition to stop torturing him. The novel tells the origin of the god Om and his relations with Brutha, and it satirises philosophy, religious institutions and the role of religion in political life.
Rating coming soonGranny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick have fairy godmotherhood thrust upon them. King Verence of Lancre is murdered by his cousin Duke Felmet after the Duke's ambitious wife persuades him to do it, and the King's crown and child are given by an escaping servant to the three witches, who have to decide what to do with both.
Rating coming soonKilgore Trout, an aging and widely published but mostly unknown science fiction writer, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The novel follows the events leading to the chance encounter between the two men, and it uses pictures drawn by the author alongside the text. The dealer's mistake is the book's subject rather than its joke.
Rating coming soonSet in a near-future society with a youth subculture of extreme violence, the novel is narrated by a teenage protagonist named Alex, who describes his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. Part of the book is written in a Russian-influenced slang of the author's invention, taking its name from the Russian suffix equivalent to the English ending of the teenage years.
Rating coming soonSeveral centuries after the events of Second Foundation, two citizens of the Foundation search for Earth, the legendary planet where human beings are said to have originated. The novel follows the journey of a councilman, a historian and a visitor from a world called Gaia as they look for humanity's ancestral home, and their search is a matter of evidence as much as of navigation.
Rating coming soonSixty-five thousand alien objects have burned in the atmosphere, there has been a brief moment of surveillance by agents unknown, and then two months of silence while the world holds its breath. A half-derelict probe past Neptune's orbit hears a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam, and it is not addressed to humanity. A crew is sent to force an introduction.
Rating coming soonGeorge and Harold hypnotise their school principal into believing that he is the superhero Captain Underpants, and the result leads them to the lair of the villainous Dr Diaper, where they have to deal with his robot henchmen. The two fourth-graders are the creators of the Captain Underpants comics within the book as well as its protagonists.
Rating coming soonBorn a lowly Red in the mines of Mars, Darrow lost his wife to the Gold overlords and joined a secret revolutionary group, which remade him as a Gold so that he could infiltrate the ruling class and bring it down from within. After years of hiding among the Golds he is ready to declare open revolution, and the final fight is the hardest of them all.
Rating coming soonThe Free Navy, a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships, has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the new worlds beyond the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy is strong enough to protect them, so the remnants of the old powers ask the Rocinante for help.
Rating coming soonSet during an interstellar war between the Terran Federation of Earth and the Arachnids of Klendathu, the novel is narrated as a series of flashbacks by Juan Rico, a capsule trooper in the Mobile Infantry. It opens with him aboard a corvette preparing to raid a planet held by allies of the Arachnids, and then returns to his decision to enlist against his father's objections.
Rating coming soonSusannah, now pregnant, has another personality taking control of her. The demon-mother Mia uses her and Black Thirteen to travel to New York City in 1999, and Jake, Oy and Pere Callahan have to rescue her while Eddie and Roland travel to Maine in 1977. A vacant lot in New York becomes the object that has to be saved.
Rating coming soonThe first book of the Interdependency sequence is set in a human interstellar empire whose settlements depend on a network of routes through space. When those routes begin to change, the arrangement that keeps the empire's worlds supplied and connected starts to fail, and the people who understand the problem have to convince an establishment that does not want to hear it.
Rating coming soonThe second novel featuring the private detective Dirk Gently is a humorous fantasy detective story. Its plot involves a Norse deity in difficulties, an advertising agency, a contract that cannot be broken and a client who is found dead in a locked room, and the investigation proceeds by the detective's own methods rather than by deduction in the ordinary sense.
Rating coming soonA group of history students travel to fourteenth-century France in order to rescue their professor, who has become stranded there during an archaeological project. The technology that sends them is based on quantum and multiverse theory, and the novel follows the consequences of putting people who study a period into the period itself. Their research becomes field experience.
Rating coming soonSet in a future where interstellar travel and relative immortality are made possible by transferring consciousness between bodies, the novel follows Takeshi Kovacs, a former elite soldier turned private investigator, as he investigates a rich man's death. The case puts him inside a society where death is negotiable and where the powerful can afford to survive almost anything.
Rating coming soonThomas was sure that escaping from the Maze would mean freedom for him and the other Gladers, but the organisation that built it is not finished. Phase Two is the Scorch, and the Gladers have two weeks to cross the most burned-out section of the world, with the odds deliberately stacked against them and other survivors whose own survival depends on theirs failing.
Rating coming soonBreq is a soldier who used to be a warship: once a weapon of conquest controlling thousands of minds, she now has a single body and serves the emperor. With a new ship and a troublesome crew she is ordered to Athoek Station to protect the family of a lieutenant she once knew.
Rating coming soonSet in a dystopian Orange County, California in the then-future of June 1994, the novel includes an extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use, both recreational and abusive. The protagonist is Bob Arctor, a member of a household of drug users who is also living a double life as an undercover police agent assigned to spy on that same household.
Rating coming soonHumans and androids crowd the streets of New Beijing while a deadly plague ravages the population and a ruthless lunar people watch from space waiting to make their move. Cinder is a gifted mechanic and a cyborg, a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister's illness. Then her life becomes entangled with the crown prince's.
Rating coming soonAn old enemy returns home with more power and technology than anyone thought possible, and the crew of the aging gunship Rocinante try to rally forces against the new invasion. In the thousand-sun network of humanity's expansion, new colony worlds are struggling, and in the space between Earth and Jupiter the inner planets and the belt have formed a tentative and uncertain alliance.
Rating coming soonTaking up where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory leaves off, Charlie, his family and Mr Wonka find themselves launched into space in the great glass elevator. Their journey takes them out of the factory and into orbit, where they encounter situations that require the same kind of improvisation the earlier book had confined to the building, and the sequel's scale is deliberately larger.
Rating coming soonNow fully embedded among the Gold ruling class, Darrow continues his work to bring down the Society from within, pursuing the future his murdered wife believed in. The second volume of the trilogy follows his double position as a member of the elite and an agent of a rebellion, and the cost of maintaining both.
Rating coming soonIt began as a problem in one of Holmes's beehives, led to a murderous cult, and appeared to end with an escape from a sacrificial altar. Instead, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have stirred the anger and the resources of the people they thwarted, and now they are separated and on the run, wanted by the police and pursued across the Continent.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes investigate a death on Dartmoor, together with sightings of a phantom coach on the moor. The case places the two of them in a landscape whose legends are as much a part of the evidence as the physical traces, and the investigation has to separate the two.
Rating coming soonWhen Casey first arrived in the off-the-grid town, an isolated community built as a haven for people running from their pasts, she had no idea what to expect: no mobile phones, no internet, no post and no way in or out without the town council's approval. She did not expect to be the homicide detective on two cases, or for the council to drop a dangerous criminal into their midst without a plan to hold him.
Rating coming soonA murder mystery set in New York City and on Long Island, and the first of the Alice Nestleton series. When one of the clients of the middle-aged actress turned cat-sitter is murdered, she is drawn into the world of horse racing, and cats and horses take centre stage in the investigation. The book is a short cosy mystery written for the paperback market.
Rating coming soonA Regency mystery in which a young woman becomes involved in an investigation, in the setting of a country England where the conventions of the period limit what a woman can ask and where she can go. It sits between the historical romance, the woman-detective story and the Regency novel rather than being a straightforward crime novel.
Rating coming soonWyatt has never thought much about his father, a hardened criminal serving a life sentence, until his school baseball programme is cut and the coach shows him a photograph of his father at sixteen looking very much like Wyatt himself. Then he meets a girl whose own father is in the same prison, and arranges a meeting.
Rating coming soonLeonidas Witherall, the man who looks like Shakespeare and writes the adventures of Lieutenant Hazeltine, is finishing the latest instalment when his housekeeper interrupts with her opinion. Then two men deliver an unwanted deep freeze, followed by a woman in an evening gown who mistakes him for somebody else, and the deep freeze turns out to contain something it should not.
Rating coming soonSeveral years after the events of the previous volume, the elderly politician Chrisjen Avasarala dies and is given a state funeral on Laconia, where James Holden, still a captive, pays his respects. Holden is allowed to move around the grounds of the High Consul's residence, and the situation he is in is one of comfortable detention rather than escape.
Rating coming soonA shipwrecked gentleman named Edward Prendick is stranded on a Pacific island presided over by the notorious Dr Moreau, and he confronts dark secrets, strange creatures and a reason to run for his life. The novel is an early work by H. G. Wells in which the possibilities of science are shown as a source of terror rather than of wonder.
Rating coming soonThe novella is set in a future dark age of the great we, a world that deprives individuals of name, independence and values. Its protagonist lives in that age and dares to love a woman of his own choosing, and in a period that has lost the traces of science he seeks knowledge.
Rating coming soonGeorge Orr has an unusual gift: he is an effective dreamer, and his dreams become reality when he wakes. He remembers his past and current life, but the people around him know only the version of reality they are living in, and he begins taking drugs to suppress his dreams, which eventually leads him to a psychotherapist with a machine that records the brain patterns of people as they sleep.
Rating coming soonKell is one of the last travellers, magicians with the rare ability to move between parallel universes connected by one city. There is Grey London, without magic and with one mad king; Red London, where magic is revered and where Kell was raised alongside the heir to the empire; and White London, where people fight for control of magic and the magic fights back. There was also a Black London, once.
Rating coming soonThe children of Dune are the twin siblings Leto and Ghanima Atreides, whose father, the Emperor Paul Muad'Dib, disappeared into the deserts of Arrakis. Like their father they possess unusual abilities, which makes them valuable to their aunt Alia, who rules the Empire as regent. If Alia can obtain the secrets of the twins' prophetic visions, her rule becomes absolute.
Rating coming soonZack Lightman has spent his life dreaming that the real world could resemble the science fiction books, films and video games he consumes, and telling himself that he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. Then he sees a flying saucer, and the alien ship is straight out of the online flight simulator he plays every night, a game in which players defend the Earth from alien invaders.
Rating coming soonHeaven Casteel returns to the West Virginia hills and begins to live out her childhood dreams: she becomes a respected schoolteacher at the local school and marries her sweetheart, Logan Stonewall. After their wedding trip to Farthinggale Manor, Tony Tatterton persuades the two of them to stay in Boston, but old ghosts rise up around her fragile happiness and threaten her marriage with scandal and jealousy.
Rating coming soonAfter a frightening adventure the year before, Gabe is uneasy about returning to Egypt, to the ancient pyramids and to the place where he saw the mummies. Then he learns about an Egyptian superstition and a secret chant said to bring mummies to life. His uncle dismisses it as a hoax, and then something begins to move in the tomb.
Rating coming soonKat is reluctant to visit her uncle Vic Frankenstein because of the rumours about him, but she finds that he is a quiet and gentle man living in a dark, castle-like mansion and working as a scientist who builds robots with artificial intelligence. She also loves his small, fluffy white dog, Poochie. Then an accident in the laboratory sets off a series of strange events.
Rating coming soonEsperanza and her mother are forced to leave a life of wealth and privilege in Mexico for the labour camps of southern California, where Mexican farm workers are living through the years before the Great Depression. Esperanza has never had to work, and the novel follows her as she learns how, alongside people who have been doing it for years and in a place where her family's old standing is worth nothing.
Rating coming soonNel Wright and Sula Peace meet as children in the town of Medallion, Ohio, and their friendship survives the town's opinion of them, a secret they share and the very different lives they choose. Nel marries and stays; Sula leaves and comes back. The novel follows both women and the community around them across four decades.
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.
