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Stories for the midnight shelf

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.

RomanceFantasySci-FiHorrorMystery & ThrillerHistorical FictionLiterary FictionAdventureRomantasy tagContemporary Romance tag3473 booksEdited by Baby Bat

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Cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

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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 2 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.

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Showing 48 of 3473 books

Rating coming soon

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

V. E. Schwab · 2020

In France in 1714, a young woman makes a bargain to live forever and finds out what the price is only afterwards: everyone she meets forgets her the moment she is out of sight. Addie LaRue spends the next three hundred years being erased, learning to leave marks on a world that keeps smoothing them away, and arguing with the power that holds her contract. Then, in a bookshop in New York, she meets somebody who remembers her name. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a standalone about a deal, the two people on either side of it, and how long a person can keep insisting that they exist.

Historical fantasyFantasy romance

Rating coming soon

The Jasmine Throne

Tasha Suri · 2021

The Parijatdvipan empire rules over a set of conquered kingdoms, and Ahiranya has had its language, its religion and its temples taken from it. The rot is spreading through the region, a sickness that pushes plants out through people's skin, and the empire finds that convenient. In the old temple called the Hirana there are the deathless waters, where the powers of another kind of spirit were once earned at a cost that most children did not survive; Priya is one of the few who did. Malini, the emperor's sister, refuses a ritual that was meant to kill her and is imprisoned in the Hirana for it, where Priya is sent to serve her. The first Burning Kingdoms novel is an Indian-inspired epic in which the rebellion runs through both the palace and the temple.

Epic fantasyFantasy romance

Rating coming soon

A Deadly Education

Naomi Novik · 2020

Galadriel "El" Higgins is in her third year at the Scholomance, a school of magic with no teachers and no holidays, built in the Void and connected to the world only at the graduation gates. Students arrive at fourteen and have no contact with home until they leave, and ninety-five per cent of magic children never reach adulthood, because the maleficaria that feed on magic-users hunt the young. El's affinity is for destruction, and a prophecy made before her birth says she will become a maleficer who pulls down the enclaves. She would rather graduate, which requires allies, and she is bad at being pleasant. Orion Lake, the school's celebrated monster-killer, will not leave her alone.

Dark fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

A Game of Thrones

George R. R. Martin · 1996

The Seven Kingdoms are held together by a king who won his throne in war and has little appetite for governing. Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell is asked to serve as his Hand, in a capital where his predecessor died in circumstances nobody will describe plainly. The marriage alliances between the great houses turn out to be less reliable than they look, the family that lost the throne still has living heirs across the sea, and the Night's Watch on the northern wall is reporting things it cannot explain. The story is told from many points of view at once, and the long summer that has held for years is coming to an end.

Epic fantasyGrimdark

Rating coming soon

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin · 1968

Ged is a goatherd on an island where nobody has much use for him until he stops a raider's spell, and after that the village sends him to a teacher. He has a gift for magic, and wanting to be seen using it leads him, at the school for wizards on Roke, to attempt a spell he does not understand. What comes through the hole he makes in the world follows him for years across the archipelago, and the only way to be rid of it is to work out what it is and what he is. In Earthsea, magic is worked through true names, and knowing a thing's name gives power over it.

Classic fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

American Gods

Neil Gaiman · 2001

Shadow Moon leaves prison a few days early, on the day his wife dies, and takes a job from a man calling himself Mr Wednesday who seems to know more about him than he should. The work is errands: driving, standing where he is told, and being present at meetings with people who are more than they appear. Wednesday is recruiting allies for a war with the newer gods of media, highways and credit, while the older gods he approaches came to America with the people who brought their beliefs and now have far fewer worshippers. Shadow is caught between the two sides, his dead wife keeps turning up, and the trip runs from the northern lakes towards a small town in the middle of the country.

Urban fantasyMyth retelling

Rating coming soon

Assassin's Apprentice

Robin Hobb · 1995

Fitz is the unacknowledged son of a prince, left at the castle when he was six and raised in the stables by a stablemaster who had been a soldier. His grandfather the king decides the boy can be useful, and sets him to be trained as an assassin, which means lessons in poisons, handwriting and the parts of politics that happen at night. Fitz also has the Skill, the magic of the royal line, and a bond with animals that his people consider shameful. Raiders are burning towns along the coast, the king is failing, and an uncle wants the throne that his own brother's son has a better claim to. Fitz is trained to serve the crown while the family he cannot claim divides into rivals.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Babel

R. F. Kuang · 2022

It is the 1830s, and the British Empire runs on silver bars enchanted by translation, which is why it needs people who speak languages the empire does not. Robin Swift is taken from Canton to England as a child after his family dies of cholera, raised by the man who needs his Chinese, and trained for Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel. The tower is comfortable and the work absorbing, and the enchantments that make the empire rich are written in the difference between languages and paid for by the colonies they are taken from. Robin is caught between Babel and a society working against imperial expansion, while the country moves towards a war with China over silver and opium.

Historical fantasyDark fantasy

Rating coming soon

Circe

Madeline Miller · 2018

Circe is a daughter of Helios, the sun titan, and by the standards of the gods she is nothing much: no particular power, a voice that sounds like a mortal's, and no interest in divine politics. When she uses the magic she has discovered to punish a rival, Zeus exiles her to a deserted island, which she turns into a home over centuries of practising herbs and spells. The men who arrive there are mostly trouble, and turning some of them into pigs is the part of her story everyone already knows. She crosses paths with Daedalus, Medea and Odysseus, and is still on the island when the mortal she has come to love needs her to choose between the gods she is born from and the life she could have.

Myth retelling

Rating coming soon

Dragonflight

Anne McCaffrey · 1968

Pern is a colony world that has lost the memory of what it is, and every few generations a silver rain of spores falls from the sky and eats everything organic it touches. The only defence is the dragons: bred from a native species, bonded to a rider at hatching, and able to burn the spores out of the air. Lessa is the last surviving heir of Ruatha Hold, living as a kitchen drudge while she waits for a chance to take her home back. When the dragonriders of Benden come looking for candidates, she gets that chance, and the bond she forms changes what the Weyrs are able to do.

Dragon fantasyScience fantasy

Rating coming soon

Eragon

Christopher Paolini · 2002

Eragon is a farm boy in a mountain valley who finds a polished blue stone while hunting and discovers, when it hatches, that he has a dragon. His village is destroyed by the king's servants looking for it, and he leaves with an old storyteller, the dragon growing on his shoulder, and a plan to find the people who killed his uncle. The Empire has been ruled for a century by a dragon rider who turned on his own order, and a new rider is a threat that has to be removed. Eragon and Saphira travel across Alagaësia towards the Varden, and every city they pass through has someone in it who would sell them to the king.

Dragon fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

Gardens of the Moon

Steven Erikson · 1999

The Malazan Empire has taken Pale's last floating fortress, and the novel begins in the middle of an army that has been fighting this war for years. A young noblewoman is fleeing an arranged marriage, a squad of soldiers has no illusions left, a legendary assassin is carrying a grudge, and the free city of Darujhistan would prefer the empire stayed out of its affairs. Underneath the campaign, older powers are waking up and a deck of cards is telling fortunes nobody wants told. The empress's plans, the gods who take an interest in them and the soldiers who have to carry the orders out all meet in the same city.

Epic fantasyGrimdark

Rating coming soon

Good Omens

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman · 1990

The Antichrist has been born and delivered to a small country hospital, where a satanic order of nuns swaps him with the son of an American diplomat. The angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who have known each other since the Garden of Eden and have grown fond of the arrangement, agree that the end of the world would be bad for both of them and set out to influence the child. What neither of them knows is that the swap went wrong and the boy they have been watching grow up is not the Antichrist at all. There is also a completely accurate book of prophecies, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the beginning of the end of the world in an Oxfordshire village.

Urban fantasy

Rating coming soon

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J. K. Rowling · 1997

Harry Potter lives under the stairs at his aunt and uncle's house and has been told his parents died in a car crash, which is untrue in every particular. On his eleventh birthday a letter arrives by owl, a giant takes him shopping for a wand, and he finds out that he is famous in a world he did not know existed, for something he does not remember doing. He goes to Hogwarts, makes a friend and an enemy on the train, and finds that the school is keeping something valuable hidden behind a locked door that at least one teacher wants opened. There is a mirror that shows what you want most, a game of wizard chess that has to be won, and a package that a great many people want for reasons of their own.

Portal fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

Howl's Moving Castle

Diana Wynne Jones · 1986

Sophie Hatter is the eldest of three sisters, which in the fairy-tale logic of her country means she will not amount to anything, and she has accepted this until the Witch of the Waste curses her into an old woman. She talks her way into the moving castle of the wizard Howl, who has a reputation for eating hearts and whose household is run by a fire demon bound by a contract nobody will explain. Sophie takes over the cleaning, which turns out to be a form of magic, and starts working out what the fire demon, the apprentice and the wizard are each hiding.

Classic fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

Jade City

Fonda Lee · 2017

Kekon is an island that produces jade and the only people who can safely wear it, which makes the clans who control the trade a matter of national security. The Kaul family runs the No Peak clan: Lan is the eldest and the Pillar, Hilo leads its street fighters as the Horn, and their sister Shae comes home from studying abroad and wants nothing to do with any of it. Their rival is the isolationist Mountain clan and its Ayt family, and a new drug called shine lets anyone, including foreigners, use jade. The novel follows the family business through the summer the peace breaks down, in a city where the jade trade, the police and the politicians are all connected.

Urban fantasyEpic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke · 2004

In 1806 practical magic in England has been reduced to a theory that nobody practises, which is a problem for a country at war with Napoleon. Mr Norrell is a reclusive Yorkshire magician who can still do it, and he moves to London to prove as much and to keep the practice of magic to himself. Jonathan Strange arrives later, younger, more willing to share and better with people, and becomes the pupil Norrell did not want and then the rival he cannot control. Between them they bring a fairy gentleman into English politics. The novel's language is a pastiche of nineteenth-century writing, complete with a historian's footnotes.

Historical fantasy

Rating coming soon

Legends & Lattes

Travis Baldree · 2022

Viv is an orc mercenary who has spent years solving problems with an axe and has decided to stop. She claims one treasure from her band's last job, a Scalvert's Stone that is reputed to bring its owner fortune, and arrives in the town of Thune with a plan to open the first coffee shop anybody there has seen. She buys an abandoned stable and starts hiring: a hob carpenter called Cal, an artistic succubus called Tandri, and eventually a baker, a bard and a dire-cat. The coffee takes time to catch on, the local protection racket is suspicious of her, and one of her old colleagues wants the stone. What they build is a small business, a neighbourhood and a new life.

Cozy fantasy

Rating coming soon

Mistborn: The Final Empire

Brandon Sanderson · 2006

For a thousand years the Lord Ruler has ruled the Final Empire, and the skaa who work the plantations have no reason to expect anything else. Vin works a street gang and thinks she is lucky to be alive until a thief called Kelsier finds her and tells her she is something the nobility has spent centuries hunting: a Mistborn, able to burn the metals that give the nobility their powers. He is planning a robbery at the scale of a revolution, and he needs someone who can move among the houses doing the robbing. His crew includes a scholar who reads the old religions, a smoker who hides them from detection, and a Terrisman who can store memories in metal.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Northern Lights

Philip Pullman · 1995

Lyra Belacqua is being raised at Jordan College in Oxford, in a world where every person has a daemon, an animal companion that is part of them. When her friend Roger disappears and her uncle Lord Asriel is reported to be in the Arctic, Lyra is taken north by a woman who is not the ally she pretends to be. She travels with a truth-telling device she has not learned to read, a family of armoured bears, and children who have been separated from their daemons. Behind the adventure is a research programme run by the Church, an opening into another world, and a girl who turns out to be a great deal more important than anyone at Oxford told her.

Young adult fantasyEpic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke · 2020

Piranesi lives in the House, an endless building of halls and statues with tides that sweep through the lower levels, and he keeps a careful journal of the rooms, the birds and the bones. He believes he is one of only two living people, along with the man he calls the Other, who asks him for help with research and does not like the questions Piranesi asks. He is content, mostly. Then the Other mentions a new person in the House, the journal notes things that do not match, and Piranesi begins to sort what he can verify from what he has been told.

Portal fantasy

Rating coming soon

Six of Crows

Leigh Bardugo · 2015

Kaz Brekker runs the Dregs in Ketterdam, a city where everything is for sale, and he has a reputation for doing the jobs nobody else will at a price nobody else can. A merchant offers him a fortune to break a scientist out of the most secure prison in the world, which is why Kaz takes it. He picks a crew of six that includes a spy, a sharpshooter, a convict with a grudge, a Grisha healer and a runaway, and none of them trusts any of the others. The target is held in the Ice Court, on an island that no thief has ever robbed, and the plan requires them to pass as people they are not for the length of the trip.

Young adult fantasyGrimdark

Rating coming soon

The Bear and the Nightingale

Katherine Arden · 2017

Vasya grows up in a village at the edge of the northern forests, where the household spirits are given bread and the winter lasts most of the year. Her mother died giving birth to her, her father is often away, and the wife he brings home from Moscow forbids the family from honouring the spirits that keep the house. Vasya can see them, which is a useful talent in a year when the crops fail, the winter keeps getting worse and an old enemy of the village is looking for a door back in. The old beliefs and the new religion are pulling the village in different directions, and Vasya is caught between an offer of marriage, a convent and the wild places she is drawn to.

Historical fantasyMyth retelling

Rating coming soon

The Blade Itself

Joe Abercrombie · 2006

The Union is in trouble and mostly does not know it yet. Logen Ninefingers is a barbarian warrior who has run out of luck and friends; Sand dan Glokta is a torturer for the Inquisition who was a celebrated swordsman before he was captured and broken; Jezal dan Luthar is a young officer training for a fencing contest he expects to win. A wizard gathering what he needs for a job nobody has explained brings all three into the same scheme. Bayaz could be the First of the Magi or a fraud with a temper, and by the time they reach the frozen North the politics of the Union have caught up with all of them.

GrimdarkEpic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The City of Brass

S. A. Chakraborty · 2017

Nahri survives in Cairo by pretending to be a healer, with just enough real talent to be dangerous and no idea where it came from. When she calls on a djinn as a joke for a paying client, she gets an answer: a warrior from a hidden city, who tells her that the magic in her blood belongs to a people she has never heard of and that the things hunting her are not going to stop. He takes her to Daevabad, a city of brass and the capital of the daeva, where six tribes have kept an uneasy peace under a king who does not want a human-raised girl with that much power inside his walls.

Historical fantasyEpic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Colour of Magic

Terry Pratchett · 1983

Discworld is a flat world carried through space on the back of four elephants standing on a turtle, and its first tourist is Twoflower, a property insurance salesman who has read a book about the place that was wrong in every important line. He arrives in Ankh-Morpork with a magic suitcase made of sapient pearwood that walks on its own legs and is full of gold. Rincewind is the failed wizard appointed to keep him alive, mostly by running away, because he has a spell stuck in his head that makes real magic impossible. Together they travel towards the edge of the world, pursued by the city's guilds, a fire, and a great many people who want the luggage.

Classic fantasySword and sorcery

Rating coming soon

The Eye of the World

Robert Jordan · 1990

In the remote village of Emond's Field, in the Two Rivers, the arrival of a mysterious noblewoman is followed by an attack by Trollocs. She identifies herself as Moiraine Damodred, of the Aes Sedai, and warns that servants of the Dark One are looking for one of three young men: Rand al'Thor, Perrin Aybara and Matrim Cauthon. They leave the village with Moiraine and her Warder, Lan Mandragoran, joined by a young woman from the same village, and spend the first volume being chased across a map that keeps getting larger. The world has a history built out of seven ages that repeat, women who can channel the One Power and men who cannot safely, and a prophecy about a dragon that nobody wants fulfilled.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Fellowship of the Ring

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954

Frodo Baggins inherits a gold ring from his uncle and learns, over a long spring, that it is the one artifact the enemy of the world wants back. Keeping it in the Shire is not safe; carrying it anywhere is worse, because the ring works on whoever holds it. Frodo leaves with three friends and a guide, pursued by riders in black, and reaches the council at Rivendell where the ring's history is finally explained. Nine companions set out from there to take it to the only place it can be destroyed: a mountain in the enemy's own country, with mountains, mines, a forest and a broken kingdom on the way.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin · 2015

The Stillness is a continent that tears itself apart every few centuries, and the people who live there have built a whole civilisation around surviving the next one. Essun lives quietly in a southern town as an orogene, a person who can move the earth with her mind, until she comes home to find that her son has been murdered and her daughter is gone. Two other stories run alongside hers: Damaya, a child handed over to a Guardian because her family cannot bring themselves to kill her, and Syenite, a Fulcrum-trained orogene sent out on a mission with the most powerful orogene alive. Orogenes are feared, controlled and conscripted, and the season that begins in this book will not end in a lifetime.

Epic fantasyScience fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Goblin Emperor

Katherine Addison · 2014

Maia is the youngest and least favoured son of the emperor of the Elflands, of mixed Elven and Goblin heritage, and has spent his life in exile from a court that considers his mother's marriage an embarrassment. Then an airship crash kills his father and his older brothers, and he is emperor at eighteen, with no friends, no training in court politics and a half-goblin face in a court of elves. He has to learn the protocol, the petitions and the names, work out who arranged the crash, and decide how far he can trust the people whose advice is suddenly worth taking.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1937

Bilbo Baggins is a respectable hobbit of Bag End with a comfortable chair, a full pantry and no interest in adventures, until a wizard he has not seen in years marks his door and thirteen dwarves arrive for dinner. They need a burglar for a journey to the Lonely Mountain, where a dragon has been sitting on their people's treasure since it destroyed the kingdom under the mountain. Gandalf has told them Bilbo is the fourteenth member of the company, and the dwarves' leader, Thorin Oakenshield, intends to reclaim what is his. Bilbo signs the contract, and the company sets out east from the Shire, with trolls, goblins and worse between them and the mountain.

Epic fantasyDragon fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

The House in the Cerulean Sea

TJ Klune · 2020

Linus Baker is a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, and he has spent seventeen years writing reports on orphanages from a desk that is too small. His new assignment is a classified one on the island of Marsyas, where six children live with a master who is not what the file describes: a gnome, a forest sprite, a wyvern, a shapeshifter, a boy who is not shaped like a boy, and one called Lucy, which is short for Lucifer. Linus has to decide whether what he writes will keep them safe or close the only home they have, and his department is not the only party interested in the island.

Cozy fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Last Unicorn

Peter S. Beagle · 1968

A unicorn lives alone in a lilac wood and hears a butterfly say that the others of her kind were herded away by a creature called the Red Bull; with no way of knowing whether it is true, she sets out to look for them. She is captured by a travelling circus run by a witch who keeps magical creatures as exhibits, which is how she acquires the company of a magician called Schmendrick and a woman named Molly Grue. To get past King Haggard, who has been hunting her kind for years, Schmendrick turns her into a woman, which solves one problem and creates several. The quest takes them through a country that has largely stopped believing in unicorns.

Classic fantasyFae and faerie

Rating coming soon

The Lies of Locke Lamora

Scott Lynch · 2006

Camorr is a canal city built on the ruins of an older civilisation, where the capa in charge keeps the peace and takes a cut of everything. Locke Lamora is the leader of the Gentleman Bastards, a small gang of thieves raised by a priest of the crooked warden, the god of thieves, and they make their living running elaborate confidence games on nobles who can afford it. A new player called the Grey King is taking over the criminal underworld, breaking the unspoken agreement between the gangs and the Duke's government, and the Gentleman Bastards are caught between them. Their latest scheme has put them in the way of both.

Sword and sorceryEpic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C. S. Lewis · 1950

Four children are sent out of London during the bombing and end up in a country house with a wardrobe that opens onto a snow-covered world. Narnia has been in a hundred-year winter under a queen who turns people to stone, and the animals are waiting for a prophecy about four human children and a lion. The youngest, Lucy, gets there first and is not believed, which is a smaller problem than what happens when Edmund follows her and meets the queen. A beaver, a prophecy and a lion called Aslan all arrive, and the children are asked to help break the winter.

Portal fantasyClassic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss · 2007

Kvothe keeps an inn in a quiet village under a name that is not his own, and he is not good at being ordinary. When a scribe with an interest in his reputation turns up, he agrees to tell his story properly, in three days, and the novel is the first day. It covers a childhood in a travelling troupe, years on the streets of a city after somebody killed everyone he knew, and the scholarship, poverty and badly chosen enemy that came with a place at the University. The telling is framed by the present: an inn, a war in the countryside, and a scribe who wants the full account.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Once and Future King

T. H. White · 1958

The Wart is a boy in a castle who is not important enough to be educated properly, and Merlyn is his tutor, a wizard living backwards through time. Merlyn knows who the boy will become, and turns him into a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose and a badger so that he can learn what it is like to be something other than a human being. Before Arthur is king, his tutor teaches him that the only justifiable war is one fought to prevent another. The novel collects four volumes, The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight and The Candle in the Wind, which follow the boy from a country childhood to the Round Table, the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the war against his own son.

Classic fantasyMyth retelling

Rating coming soon

The Poppy War

R. F. Kuang · 2018

Rin is a war orphan in a poor province, and the only way out of the marriage her guardians are arranging is to sit the imperial examination and come first, which nobody from her district has ever done. She gets in, and then finds that the elite academy trains shamans alongside soldiers, that the gods who answer are not safe to bargain with, and that the people around her are there for reasons of their own. What begins as a school story becomes a war between the Empire and the island federation of Mugen, fought with the weapons the school taught her to use. The novel draws on the history of twentieth-century China.

Epic fantasyGrimdarkHistorical fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Princess Bride

William Goldman · 1973

Goldman presents the book as an abridgement of a much longer novel by the fictional Florinese author S. Morgenstern, keeping, in his telling, the fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes and true love, and cutting the politics. Buttercup is the most beautiful woman in the world; Westley is the farm boy who loves her and goes away to make his fortune; and the story of what happens to them involves a Sicilian who thinks faster than anyone else, a Spanish swordsman with one thing left to do, a giant who is kind, and a prince who is not. The frame story about Goldman and his son is part of the book.

Classic fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller · 2011

Patroclus is a prince who is exiled after he kills a boy by accident, and he ends up in the household where Achilles is being raised to be a hero. Achilles is golden, fast and destined for glory, and his mother is a sea goddess who does not want a mortal anywhere near her son. The two of them grow up together, train together and fall in love, and then the oath that binds every Greek king drags them to Troy, where glory means something different up close. The siege lasts ten years, the leaders argue over a woman neither of them will give up, and the half of the story everyone knows is coming.

Myth retelling

Rating coming soon

The Way of Kings

Brandon Sanderson · 2010

Roshar is a world where highstorms sweep the land with hurricane force, and everything alive has adapted to survive them: animals hide in shells, plants pull back into the ground, and cities are built only where the rock offers shelter. Kaladin is a surgeon's son who joined the army, lost his brother and ended up carrying bridges for a war that does not want him; Dalinar Kholin is a highprince and a legendary soldier whose visions during the storms will not stop; Shallan Davar is a young woman trying to steal from a heretic scholar because her family's estate is failing. All three are moving towards a history older than the Knights Radiant the world has forgotten.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Uprooted

Naomi Novik · 2015

Every ten years the wizard in the tower takes a girl from the valley, and everyone assumes he will take Agnieszka's beautiful, capable best friend. He takes Agnieszka, who is clumsy and distractible and never intended to be chosen, and who turns out to have the magic he was looking for. The tower is a test of patience rather than a fairy tale, and the Wood at the edge of the valley is not a story either: it takes people, turns animals against them and keeps spreading. The wizard protects the valley from it, and neither of them explains how. Agnieszka's magic works differently from the wizard's, and neither of them can say yet what the Wood is or where its heart is.

Fairytale retelling

Rating coming soon

Watership Down

Richard Adams · 1972

Fiver is a young rabbit who sees the destruction of his warren in a vision, and his brother Hazel believes him when nobody else does. A small group leaves before the men come and sets out across a countryside full of roads, dogs, foxes and other warrens with their own politics, looking for a hill high enough to be safe. What they need is a place to dig, some does to build a colony with, and a way past a warren that keeps its rabbits as property. The rabbits have their own language, their own stories and their own folk hero, El-ahrairah, told and retold as the group travels.

Classic fantasy

Rating coming soon

2001: A Space Odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke · 1968

A black monolith appears to a group of pre-human ancestors and teaches them to use what they have. Millions of years later another one is found buried on the Moon, deliberately placed and pointing somewhere, and the people who uncover it discover that whoever left it was waiting for humanity to reach it. Then the story moves to Discovery One, a ship under way to Jupiter with two awake crew members, three in hibernation and a computer called HAL 9000 that runs everything and has been given instructions it has not shared with the crew. Clarke developed the novel at the same time as Stanley Kubrick's film, from an earlier short story of his called "The Sentinel".

First contactClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller Jr. · 1959

After a nuclear war, the survivors turn on the people who built the weapons, and most of the knowledge is destroyed. In the desert of what was the American southwest, an abbey keeps a relic it does not fully understand, the memorabilia of a twentieth-century engineer called Leibowitz, and the monks copy the blueprints the way they copy scripture. The book follows the abbey over three long movements: a dark age, a new age of learning in which science becomes fashionable again, and a second fall. Each movement has a different narrator and a different century, and the abbey's archives outlast every empire that rises around it.

Post-apocalypticClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge · 1992

The galaxy is layered. Near the middle, intelligence stops working; further out, civilisations are ordinary; at the rim, minds become something else again. A human colony on the edge of the Slow Zone finds a dormant thing that was built long ago and is not dormant any more, and the humans who wake it end up fleeing with it in a ship that goes further than they intended, with two children aboard. The chase pulls in a trader crew that is not equipped for a rescue of this size, an ancient power, and a world where dogs are not one mind each but packs of minds that have to agree before they can think.

Space operaHard science fiction

Rating coming soon

A Memory Called Empire

Arkady Martine · 2019

Mahit Dzmare arrives on Teixcalaan as the new ambassador from Lsel Station, a mining habitat that wants to stay independent of the empire next door. She has been given an implant carrying the memories of her predecessor, which should have been updated before she left, and is not. Her predecessor is dead, officially by accident, and the more people she meets the more that looks like a decision. Teixcalaan's elite read and recite poetry the way other capitals use gossip, and Mahit has spent her life studying a culture that is trying very hard to swallow hers. She has to work out who killed him, keep her station from being annexed, and decide how much of the secret she is carrying she can afford to keep.

Space opera

Rating coming soon

A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle · 1962

Meg Murry is failing school, her father has been missing for years, and the neighbours have decided the family is odd. Her younger brother Charles Wallace is five, reads minds without being taught, and introduces her to three strange women who can travel through time and space. Their father is somewhere that requires crossing through a tesseract, which the book presents as an actual geometric idea with an explanation, and the places they reach include a planet where everyone thinks in unison and a darkness that is eating its way through the sky. The rescue depends on the thing Meg likes least about herself, which is the one thing the people with her cannot supply.

Young adult science fictionTime travel

About the book library

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.

From our books editor

Books editor

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Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.

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Open the editor profile

Browse by genre

Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.

Primary genre

Romance

The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.

676 books Primary genre

Fantasy

Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.

685 books Primary genre

Sci-Fi

Generation ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.

536 books Primary genre

Horror

Haunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.

381 books Primary genre

Mystery & Thriller

Detectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.

599 books Primary genre

Historical Fiction

Cathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.

580 books Primary genre

Literary Fiction

Novels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.

575 books Primary genre

Adventure

Shipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.

324 books

One 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.

Browse by tag

Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.

Tag

Romantasy

Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.

70 books Tag

Contemporary Romance

Modern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.

155 books

Romantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.