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 17 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 gold country of California in 1850, Angel has been sold into prostitution as a child and expects nothing from men but betrayal. Michael Hosea, a farmer who believes he has been directed to marry her, does so and sets about loving her without conditions, and the novel follows her resistance and the flight that answers it.
Rating coming soonTwo boys are born on the same day in 1906 on opposite sides of the world: William Lowell Kane, the son of a Boston banking family, and Abel Rosnovski, born in a Polish forest and raised in poverty. Neither knows the other exists, and the novel follows the rivalry that grows between them over the next fifty years.
Rating coming soonIn sixteenth-century London, a poor boy named Tom Canty and the Prince of Wales discover that they look exactly alike, and they exchange clothes for a few minutes to see how it feels. The exchange is not undone, and each boy is taken for the other: Tom is treated as the heir to the throne while Edward is driven out into the city.
Rating coming soonThree children, three journeys. Josef is a Jewish boy leaving Nazi Germany by ship in 1939, Isabel is a Cuban girl sailing for Florida on a raft in 1994, and Mahmoud is a Syrian boy walking towards Europe in 2015. The stories are separated by decades and continents, and the book links them through the families and the objects they carry.
Rating coming soonJake Barnes lives in Paris in the 1920s among American and British expatriates, and he is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, an attachment that cannot be consummated. The group travels south to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermín, where the drinking, the bullfights and the tensions between them come to a head.
Rating coming soonPecola Breedlove is eleven and prays every night for blue eyes, because she has decided that they would change how her family, her classmates and her town treat her. The novel follows her across a year in Lorain, Ohio, and her wish is answered in the worst way the book can imagine.
Rating coming soonHercule Poirot is travelling to the Riviera on the Blue Train when he meets Ruth Kettering, an American heiress on her way to see a former lover. By morning she has been murdered in her compartment and her jewels are gone, and the only lead is a strange man who was seen loitering near the carriage.
Rating coming soonIn 1959 Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist missionary, takes his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo. The family's belongings and beliefs are both transformed by the country they arrive in, and the novel is told by the five women who came with him.
Rating coming soonSadako Sasaki was born in Hiroshima and was in the city when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. By the time she is twelve she is ill with leukaemia, and recalling a Japanese legend that a sick person who folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish, she begins to fold.
Rating coming soonA radio signal from another world gives the Jesuit order a reason to send a mission, and a small group of linguists, doctors and priests makes the journey. Years later the mission's surviving priest is brought back to Earth, and the novel works out what happened to the people who went with him.
Rating coming soonLeonidas Witherall is knocked unconscious in the lost-and-found department of a department store while retrieving his umbrella, and comes round in a wagon loaded with French bread. Called out later to help during a blackout, he returns home to find the store's owner dead in his study with a samurai sword in his chest, and the police treat him as the obvious suspect.
Rating coming soonMiles Kendig has been one of the CIA's most effective deep-cover officers, until an injury ends his usefulness in the field and the Agency offers him a desk. He retires instead, finds civilian life unbearable, and begins writing a memoir full of what he knows, posting a chapter a week to his old employer and daring them to stop him.
Rating coming soonOn a June evening in 1925, at their home on the Sussex Downs, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes take a telephone call about an old friend's aunt, who has not returned from a supervised outing from Bedlam. Russell has had a difficult few weeks, and the search for the missing woman takes her from the asylum to Venice.
Rating coming soonIn London in 1958, a filing assistant at a secret detective agency receives an unsigned letter naming a place and a time. She goes to look and finds nothing, and at midnight she is murdered by someone she cannot see, which means the killer works inside the agency. Marion Lane is a first-year trainee, and she is drawn into the search.
Rating coming soonDawn has reached a music school in New York and is close to the singing career she has wanted, but she keeps thinking about Jimmy and the secrets they share. When a celebrated singer joins the faculty and takes an interest in her, she is drawn into a relationship that ends with his disappearance and leaves her exposed to her grandmother's schemes again.
Rating coming soonRoots begins with Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka youth captured near his village in the Gambia as a teenager and carried to North America, where he is sold into slavery and renamed. From his daughter Kizzy and her son Chicken George, the book follows seven generations of the same family through plantations, the Civil War and freedom, down to the author's own lifetime.
Rating coming soonAnna and her younger brother Caleb live on a prairie farm with their father, who advertises in a newspaper for a wife after their mother dies. Sarah Wheaton writes back from Maine and comes to stay for a month, bringing her cat, her seashell collection and her longing for the sea, while the children watch for any sign that she means to stay.
Rating coming soonHenry Fleming leaves his mother's farm to enlist in the Union Army, imagining battle as a parade of glory. In his first engagement he runs from the firing line, then wanders behind the lines among the wounded and the dying, ashamed of himself and longing for a wound of his own before he can face his regiment again.
Rating coming soonLeningrad, winter 1942. Lev, a seventeen-year-old arrested for taking a parachute from a German body, and Kolya, a cheerful deserter, are offered a way to avoid execution: find a dozen eggs for a Soviet colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their search takes them out of the starving city, through the wreckage of the front and towards the German lines.
Rating coming soonHercule Poirot is holidaying in Egypt when a wealthy young heiress, Linnet Ridgeway Doyle, is shot aboard the Nile steamer Karnak during a cruise south towards Abu Simbel. Almost everyone on the boat has a reason to dislike her, including the friend whose fiance she married, and Poirot has to work out how and when the killing happened.
Rating coming soonBeginning with a Welsh boy's first day in the coal mine in 1911, Fall of Giants follows five families, Welsh, English, German, American and Russian, through the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the campaign for votes for women. Coal owners, miners, embassy staff and orphans meet across the years as the old order breaks apart.
Rating coming soonRobert Jordan, an American attached to a Republican guerrilla band during the Spanish Civil War, is sent into the mountains to blow up a bridge during an offensive. He lives with the band in a cave, meets Maria, a young woman escaping the Nationalist advance, and waits for an order that will commit them to the attack.
Rating coming soonJess Goldberg grows up working-class and butch in the second half of the twentieth century, leaves home as a teenager and finds factory work, bar life and a community in Buffalo and New York. The novel follows her through police raids, hormones, violence and the search for a body and a life she can live in.
Rating coming soonIsabel Archer, a young American with more imagination than money, is taken to Europe by an aunt and refuses two good proposals to keep her independence. A legacy from her cousin changes her situation entirely, and the freedom it gives her becomes the ground on which two expatriates scheme to arrange her life for her.
Rating coming soonAda has never been allowed outside: her mother is ashamed of her club foot and keeps her shut in a London flat while she cares for her younger brother Jamie. When the city's children are evacuated in September 1939, Ada slips away with Jamie and is billeted in the countryside with Susan Smith, a woman who did not ask for either of them.
Rating coming soonIn February 1862, Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery. The novel follows Willie into the bardo, a space between death and rebirth peopled by ghosts who will not accept that they have died, and follows the grieving president who returns at night to hold his son's body.
Rating coming soonAnnis Wychwood is twenty-nine, wealthy, unmarried and long past the age when society expects her to marry. When she takes up the cause of Lucilla Carleton, a runaway heiress, she cannot avoid the girl's guardian, Oliver Carleton, a man with a reputation for rudeness, and the two of them meet far more often than either would choose.
Rating coming soonThe Ingalls family travels from Kansas to Minnesota and settles in a dugout cut into the bank of Plum Creek, near the town of Walnut Grove. Laura and Mary make friends and start school, their father plants a wheat crop on credit at the store, and a season of grasshoppers followed by a hard winter tests what the family has put into the farm.
Rating coming soonIn 866 the Danes attack Northumbria and kill the father of ten-year-old Uhtred, who is taken as a boy by the Danish earl who raised him and taught him to fight. When events send him into the service of Alfred of Wessex, Uhtred has to choose between the culture that made him and the kingdom that needs him.
Rating coming soonAyla and Jondalar, travelling with two horses and a wolf, reach the camp of the Mamutoi, the Mammoth Hunters, and are taken in by the Lion Camp. Ayla must learn the Mamutoi language and customs before she can be accepted, and the attentions of a man from another camp put the bond she and Jondalar have formed under strain, while the camp's ceremony and hierarchy shape what she is allowed to say.
Rating coming soonLucy Honeychurch travels to Florence with her cousin Charlotte, where the rooms they are given look out on a courtyard and the other guests at the pension prove more interesting than the guidebook. Back in England she becomes engaged to the cultured, condescending Cecil Vyse, and the question of what she actually wants refuses to settle. When the Emerson family moves into the neighbourhood, the argument she thought she had left in Italy starts again.
Rating coming soonBento Santiago tells the story of his life in retirement, beginning with his boyhood love for Capitu, the neighbour's daughter he was sent to a seminary to forget. He describes their marriage, his friendship with his school companion Escobar, and the suspicion about his wife that comes to define everything he remembers about his own household. The account belongs to the husband, so the reader has to weigh how much of it is evidence.
Rating coming soonTen-year-old Mia Tang lives with her parents in the motel they run, where her parents clean the rooms and she works the front desk for the owner, Mr. Yao. She also knows something she must not say: her parents let immigrants stay in the empty rooms for nothing, and one word to the owner would end everything.
Rating coming soonSara Crewe arrives from India as the richest pupil at Miss Minchin's London boarding school, and is kept as a show pupil because she has no mother and a wealthy father. When her father dies and his fortune turns out to be gone, Sara is stripped of her belongings and put to work as a servant in the same house.
Rating coming soonElizabeth Cameron, the Countess of Havenhurst, is discovered in the arms of Ian Thornton, a gambler whose wealth and lineage are both a mystery, and the scandal that follows changes her position in society. Years later the two meet again, each with reasons to distrust the other, and are drawn into an arrangement neither of them planned. Both believe the worst of the other and have their own reasons for it.
Rating coming soonTen years after girls were first permitted to train for knighthood in Tortall, no girl has come forward. Keladry of Mindelan is the first, and the training master is openly against her, so she is placed on probation and told she will be sent home unless she proves herself in a year of hazing, drills and study.
Rating coming soonThe long winter is over and the town of De Smet comes back to life around the Ingalls family. Laura is fifteen, takes her first paid work away from home, goes back to school, and sets out to earn a teaching certificate so that her sister Mary can stay at a college for the blind.
Rating coming soonSet in Jamaica in the 1830s and 1840s, Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the early life of the woman Charlotte Bronte left in an English attic. Antoinette Cosway grows up on a ruined estate after the end of slavery, marries an Englishman who has come for her fortune, and is renamed and carried away from everything she knows.
Rating coming soonAyla and Jondalar, with their horses and the wolf, complete their journey across Europe and are greeted by the Zelandonii, Jondalar's own people, at the Ninth Cave. Ayla has to be accepted by a community that regards the Clan who raised her as animals, while her healing knowledge and her pregnancy shape how she is received.
Rating coming soonLaura Ingalls is fifteen and begins taking teaching posts to earn money so her sister Mary can stay at a college for the blind. The first school is twelve miles from De Smet and the family she boards with is bleak, but the drives back to town in Almanzo Wilder's sleigh begin to change her plans for the future.
Rating coming soonClaire Randall, back in the twentieth century after the events of Dragonfly in Amber, goes looking for evidence that Jamie Fraser survived Culloden. The search through old documents produces a discovery that makes a return through the stones possible, and sends her back into a world where twenty years have passed for everyone but her.
Rating coming soonHank Morgan, the superintendent of a Hartford arms factory, is struck on the head during a fight and wakes in sixth-century Britain, where he is captured by one of King Arthur's knights. He works out where he is, saves himself from execution with an eclipse, and starts modernising the kingdom with schools, newspapers, telephone lines and industry.
Rating coming soonDavid Copperfield is born after his father's death and spends a happy early childhood with his mother and their housekeeper, Peggotty, before his mother remarries. Sent away to school and then to work in a London warehouse by his stepfather, he sets out to make his own life, helped by an eccentric great-aunt and a long series of friends.
Rating coming soonJohnny Tremain is a fourteen-year-old apprentice silversmith in Boston in 1775, badly burned when a crucible he has been told to hold breaks. With his hand ruined he has to find another trade, and the work he takes up brings him into the town's political circles just as the quarrel with Britain becomes the Revolutionary War.
Rating coming soonUrsula Todd is born on a snowbound night in 1910, dies before she can take a breath, and is born again a few pages later. As her lives accumulate she moves through the decades around two world wars, and each version of her history gives her another chance to act on what the previous one taught her.
Rating coming soonThe Ingalls family leave their house in the Wisconsin woods and travel west by covered wagon into Kansas Territory, where Pa builds a one-room log house on land the Osage have been moved from. The family plants and hunts, meets a neighbour living alone on the prairie, and then learns they are living where they should not be.
Rating coming soonMaurice Hall is a schoolboy when a teacher explains the facts of life to him, and the explanation leaves him quite unprepared for what he feels for other men. The novel follows him through Cambridge, a failed affair and a period spent trying to cure himself, until a relationship with a gamekeeper's son gives him a way to live.
Rating coming soonShuggie Bain grows up in public housing in Glasgow in the 1980s, the youngest of three children and devoted to a mother who cannot stop drinking. As the pits and the docks close around them and the household shrinks to the two of them, Shuggie tries to hold his mother together and to work out who he is.
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.
