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 18 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 1832 thirteen-year-old Charlotte Doyle sails from England to join her family in America as the only passenger on a merchant ship. Caught between a murderous captain and a crew preparing to mutiny, she has to decide who to believe, and the voyage changes what she thinks a young woman of her class is able to do.
Rating coming soonFour young people make their way across the winter of 1945 towards the Baltic coast, hoping to board a ship out of the path of the advancing Soviet army. Their separate journeys converge on the liner Wilhelm Gustloff, packed with refugees, and on a disaster that few histories of the war mention and that the novel sets out to recover.
Rating coming soonIn England in 1020 a boy watches his mother die and decides to become a healer. Barred from studying medicine at home, Rob Cole travels across Europe and into Persia, where he conceals who he is in order to enter the school of a famous physician, and learns a medicine that Europe has not yet imagined.
Rating coming soonOn the Discworld the eighth son of an eighth son is always a wizard, so when such a wizard has a son of his own the child is a sourcerer: a source of magic rather than a user of it. This one is a small boy, and the wizard Rincewind, lately fallen off the edge of the world, is one of the few people who could stop him.
Rating coming soonMoist von Lipwig is a fraudster who is hanged for his crimes and then offered a choice: take charge of the city's derelict post office or be hanged properly. He accepts, and finds a building full of undelivered letters, a staff of two, a rival in the clacks company, and a golem watching his every step.
Rating coming soonOn Hogswatchnight, the Discworld's version of Christmas Eve, the Hogfather goes missing, and Death takes his place in the sleigh so that the sun will rise and the year will turn. His granddaughter Susan, a governess with a firm grasp of what is real, sets out to find who arranged the disappearance and why.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl II is twelve years old, a criminal mastermind, and the heir to a family fortune he intends to rebuild by kidnapping a fairy. He gets more than he bargained for when the fairy police send a reconnaissance officer to negotiate and then a full retrieval team into the tunnels beneath his house.
Rating coming soonEragon, once a farm boy and now a Dragon Rider, returns for the last stage of the war against the king who destroyed his order. With his dragon Saphira and his cousin Roran he has to gather allies, break a siege and face Galbatorix, an opponent who holds the true names of things.
Rating coming soonTenar is taken from her family as a child and raised as the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, servant of nameless powers that have no name she can be given. Her closed life is interrupted by a wizard's thief who comes for a treasure in the dark, and she has to decide what she owes the place that made her.
Rating coming soonHenry DeTamble has a genetic condition that throws him through time without warning or clothing, and Clare Abshire meets him for the first time when she is six and he is thirty-six. Their marriage is built around his disappearances, and the book follows the two of them out of order, from Clare's childhood to the end of Henry's life.
Rating coming soonTeppic is the crown prince of Djelibeybi, a small desert kingdom on the Discworld, and he has been educated at the assassins' guild in Ankh-Morpork. Called home when his father dies, he finds a country run by a priest who has managed it for seven thousand years and a pyramid-building habit that is about to cause serious trouble.
Rating coming soonMole leaves his burrow one spring morning and discovers the river, where Ratty teaches him to boat and the two become friends. Through Badger and the reckless Mr Toad, who is obsessed with motorcars, they are drawn into adventures, a court case and a plan to take Toad Hall back from the animals that have occupied it.
Rating coming soonEvery four years two children are taken from the village of Gavaldon and never seen again. Sophie, who is beautiful and desperate to be a princess, and Agatha, who is thought to be a witch, are taken together, and both are placed in a school where children are trained to become heroes or villains.
Rating coming soonThe Grinch lives in a cave above the town of Whoville with his dog Max and cannot stand the noise the Whos make at Christmas. He decides to stop the holiday altogether by dressing as Santa Claus, stealing every present, tree and decoration on Christmas Eve, and waiting on the mountainside to hear the wailing that should follow.
Rating coming soonDespereaux Tilling is a small mouse who reads books instead of eating them, and he falls in love with the human princess he is supposed to fear. When the mice sentence him for breaking their rules he is sent to the dungeon, where a rat who wants a princess of his own is already making plans.
Rating coming soonIn Icewind Dale, where the Ten Towns survive on the edge of the tundra, a barbarian named Wulfgar is defeated and indentured to a dwarf for five years. A crystal shard found in the mountains gives a wizard's apprentice the power he has always wanted, and the dark elf ranger Drizzt Do'Urden is drawn into the defence of the towns.
Rating coming soonThe tenth book of the Wheel of Time opens with the world reacting to a vast display of power, while the three principal figures are each occupied with something else: Mat is fleeing with a kidnapped empress, Perrin is trying to free his captured wife, and Egwene is working to reunite the Aes Sedai before the Last Battle.
Rating coming soonCarter and Sadie Kane barely know each other: he travels the world with their Egyptologist father, while she lives in London with their grandparents. When their father attempts a ritual in the British Museum and releases five imprisoned gods, the two discover they are magicians and have to work together.
Rating coming soonSusie Salmon is fourteen when she is raped and murdered near her home, and the novel is narrated by her afterwards, from a personal heaven. From there she watches her family and friends try to carry on and to work out what happened, while she comes to terms with what her death has done to the people she loves.
Rating coming soonFour years after his wife's death the novelist Mike Noonan cannot write, and he begins spending time at the lake house in Maine they used to share. There he becomes involved with a young widow and her daughter in a dispute with the child's grandfather, and finds that the house has a history of its own.
Rating coming soonTwo years after her husband's death, Lisey Landon begins clearing out the office of the bestselling novelist Scott Landon. Going through his papers brings back the violence of her own past and the private place he retreated into, and forces her to deal with the collectors who want what he left unpublished.
Rating coming soonDavid Talbot meets Pandora in a Paris cafe and is given the account of her two thousand years of life. Born in the Roman Republic, she was made a vampire by Marius, the ancient who becomes the centre of her existence, and her story is one of love, betrayal and the long survival of the Children of the Millennia.
Rating coming soonMichael Henchard, a hay trusser, sells his wife and child to a sailor at a country fair while drunk, and swears an oath never to drink again. Eighteen years later he is the mayor of Casterbridge, wealthy and respected, and the family and the consequences he thought he had left behind return to the town.
Rating coming soonJohn Carter, a Confederate veteran who has not aged for as long as he can remember, is transported from Arizona to Mars, where the weaker gravity gives him great strength. Captured by the green Martians, he meets the princess Dejah Thoris, becomes involved in the politics of a dying world, and has to earn a place among people who regard him as a curiosity.
Rating coming soonSnowman, once called Jimmy, lives alone on a shore after a plague has destroyed almost everyone, and the only people left with him are the Children of Crake, a gentle species engineered by his friend. To explain how the world ended he works backwards through his friendship with Crake and his feelings for the woman they both wanted.
Rating coming soonA human ship sent to investigate a signal finds the Moties, a species confined to a single star system by their own biology, and the crew has to work out how to talk to a civilisation that has risen and collapsed over and over again. First contact turns into an argument about what should be done with what they learn.
Rating coming soonCoriolanus Snow is eighteen and preparing for the tenth Hunger Games, at which tributes will be paired with student mentors for the first time. He is given the girl from District 12, and the two of them work out what will keep her alive, beginning the process that turns Snow into the man he becomes.
Rating coming soonJohnny Smith wakes from a coma of nearly five years and finds that touching people gives him visions of their past and their future. Some of what he learns is ordinary and some of it is not, and one of the futures he sees belongs to a politician whose ambitions would be catastrophic.
Rating coming soonTally Youngblood is about to turn sixteen, when an operation will make her Pretty and move her across the river to live with the other new Pretties. Her friend Shay does not want the operation and disappears before the date, and Tally is given a choice by the authorities: find her, or never be made pretty herself.
Rating coming soonCarter and Sadie Kane have spent months training as magicians since the gods of ancient Egypt were released into the modern world, and the task in front of them is to wake the sun god Ra before the chaos serpent can rise. They have five days to find the three parts of the Book of Ra.
Rating coming soonAfter her father dies in a car accident, Emily Hayes moves with her mother and brother into her great-grandfather's old house, where she finds a stone amulet in the library. When her mother is taken by a creature from below the house, Emily has to accept what the amulet makes her and go after her.
Rating coming soonAfter his grandfather is killed, Jacob Portman follows the clues he left and finds a Welsh island where an orphanage once stood, and where children with unusual gifts are living inside a day that repeats. The photographs Jacob has been collecting turn out to be records of real residents, and something that hunts them is still looking.
Rating coming soonSabriel has been raised outside the Old Kingdom, at a school in Ancelstierre, and knows her father only as the Abhorsen who lays the dead to rest. When he disappears she crosses the wall into a country where magic is loose, taking his bells and his sword, and has to take up the work herself.
Rating coming soonThe journalist Ed Malone asks for an assignment dangerous enough to impress the woman he wants to marry, and is sent to interview Professor Challenger, who claims to have found a plateau in South America where prehistoric animals still live and where no expedition has returned. A party sets out to prove or disprove the claim.
Rating coming soonRedwall Abbey is a peaceful place of mice and other woodland creatures until the rat Cluny the Scourge arrives with an army. Matthias is a young mouse who wants to be a warrior like the abbey's legends, and the siege forces him to search the abbey's records for a sword and a founder he can follow.
Rating coming soonBill Masen wakes in hospital with his eyes bandaged to find that almost everyone who watched a spectacular meteor shower has been blinded, and that society has stopped. The triffids, walking plants that have been farmed for their oil, are now free to move and kill, and he has to decide what kind of life is possible.
Rating coming soonWill is an orphan at the castle and is chosen, on the day the wards are assigned to their trades, to be apprenticed to the Rangers rather than to the warriors he admires. His training takes him out of the castle and into the forest, and his first task turns out to involve the mountains.
Rating coming soonZachary Ezra Rawlins, a graduate student, finds a book in his university library that describes an episode from his own childhood, and follows it to a hidden world below the earth. There he meets people who belong to a story about the Starless Sea, and has to decide which part of it he is in.
Rating coming soonApophis, the serpent of chaos, is close to breaking free and swallowing the sun. Carter and Sadie Kane have to find a way to destroy him, which means executing the shadow of a god, and they have only a few months to work out how before the equinox and the end of the world they know.
Rating coming soonTessa Gray crosses the Atlantic in 1878 to join her brother in London and is taken from the docks by two women who want her for what she can do. Held in a house in the Downworld, she discovers she is not entirely human, and is rescued by the Shadowhunters who are hunting the same people.
Rating coming soonIn the seven kingdoms some people are Graceling, marked by eyes of two different colours and gifted with an extreme skill. Katsa's Grace is killing, and her uncle the king has used her as an enforcer since she was a child, until a rescue she carries out on her own account brings her into the company of a prince from another kingdom.
Rating coming soonDick Diver is a promising young psychiatrist in Europe who marries Nicole, a wealthy patient he has been treating, and builds a life around her money and her needs. Set on the French Riviera in the last years of the Jazz Age, the novel follows the slow unmaking of the marriage and of the man.
Rating coming soonAt the end of the Second World War, four damaged people are living in a ruined Italian villa: a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief and a burned man who cannot remember his own name. As they care for the patient his past as a desert explorer returns in fragments, and the others reveal what the war has cost them.
Rating coming soonHugo Cabret is an orphan living in the walls of a busy Paris train station in the 1930s, keeping the station clocks and stealing what he needs to repair an automaton his father left him. His thefts bring him to the attention of a toy-seller, and to the story of the man behind the machine.
Rating coming soonBy 2100 humanity has found a way to exchange matter with a parallel universe through a device called the Pump, and the arrangement has made the world wealthy. One physicist works out that the exchange will eventually destroy the sun, and the novel follows the three stages of the argument against the people who refuse to hear it.
Rating coming soonAlanna of Trebond wants to be a knight and her twin brother Thom wants to be a sorcerer, so they change places: she takes his name and goes to the capital to train as a page while he goes to the convent. She has to conceal what she is among boys who would not accept her.
Rating coming soonA secret government project turns twelve death-row inmates into something that spreads across the country, and a six-year-old girl is carried out of the facility by an agent who means to keep her safe. The novel follows the collapse of the United States and then, decades later, a community of survivors living behind lights that the infected will not cross.
Rating coming soonArthur Dent and his companions, having escaped the destruction of the Earth, need somewhere to eat, and the universe offers a restaurant that survives to the end of time. The journey there involves a stolen spaceship, a planet of people nobody wants, and the story of what happened to the rulers of the galaxy.
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.
