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 26 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 soonZoya Konstantinovna Ossupov is a Russian countess and a young cousin of Tsar Nicholas II when the revolution arrives and takes her world apart. She escapes with her grandmother and a servant, arrives in Paris with nothing, and has to build a life out of what she can do rather than who she was.
Rating coming soonKoly is thirteen and living in India when her parents arrange her marriage to a sickly boy from a family that wants her dowry. Within a year she is a widow, with no husband, no place in her in-laws' house and no way of going home, and she has to make a life for herself in a city she does not know.
Rating coming soonIn Maine in 1789 the Kennebec River freezes over, and the body of a man is found locked in the ice. Martha Ballard is called out to examine him because she is the midwife and healer for the district, and the death turns out to be connected to a case she is already entangled in.
Rating coming soonAnn Hamilton is ten years old in 1784 when her family settles on land west of the Allegheny Mountains, in a cabin whose door faces west because that is the way the family came from. She is lonely for the town she left behind, and then a stranger rides up to the house and everything about the place looks different.
Rating coming soonMungo Hamilton is growing up in a Glasgow housing estate in the early 1990s, where Protestant and Catholic families live alongside each other and the boys divide themselves along the same lines as their fathers. He falls in love with a Catholic boy named James, and the world he lives in has no room for that at all.
Rating coming soonRichard Shelton is a young man in the England of the Wars of the Roses, and the guardian who is supposed to protect him and his inheritance is not to be trusted. When a black arrow carries a threat of vengeance into the forest, Richard has to work out who killed his father and which side of the war he belongs to.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl is twelve, a criminal by choice and the richest boy in Ireland, and he has a problem he cannot solve with money: his father is missing, and the trail leads to a kidnapping in the Arctic. At the same time the fairies he robbed in the first book need his help with a goblin uprising, and neither side is used to asking for anything.
Rating coming soonGregor is eleven and his little sister is not quite two when they fall through a grate in their apartment building's laundry room and end up in an underground world. There the inhabitants are waiting for them, because an old prophecy describes a quest that two people from above the ground are supposed to finish, and the boy from the laundry room is not pleased that anybody has decided that this is his job.
Rating coming soonCrash Coogan is a seventh-grade football player who has been a legend in his own school since he used his first helmet to knock his cousin flat, and who has spent the years since running over other people. The person he runs over most is Penn Webb, a vegetarian Quaker kid who refuses to take it personally, and the story is told from inside Crash's own head.
Rating coming soonA Secret Service agent wants Jack Reacher to look at her arrangements for protecting the Vice President-elect and find the holes in them, which is the assignment she has to make because she cannot ask anyone inside the service without exposing the plan. Someone has already been working on the attack for a long time, and their preparations are further along than she knows.
Rating coming soonA prophecy has named three cats, kin to the leader of ThunderClan, as the ones who will hold the power of the stars, and only one of them knows it. Jaypaw believes the answer is buried in the past, with the ancestors who walk through his dreams, and his search takes him and his littermates towards the mountains.
Rating coming soonTom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are on their way downriver when a strange man asks them to carry a message to a relative in Arkansas. By the time they arrive there has been a murder, a stolen diamond and a confession nobody believes, and Tom decides to solve the case the way the detective stories he has read say it should be done.
Rating coming soonTom is twelve and staying with his aunt and uncle in a converted house while his brother recovers from measles, and his days are made of boredom and rules about noise. At midnight the grandfather clock in the hall strikes thirteen, the back door opens onto a garden that should not be there, and a girl named Hatty is playing in it.
Rating coming soonTom is a climbing boy who goes up chimneys for a master who beats him, and after a fall and a chase he drowns in a river and wakes as a water-baby. What follows is his life under the water, where he is set lessons and given a moral education, all of it written as a fairy tale for a child who lives on land.
Rating coming soonAna Dakkar is in her first year at a school that trains marine scientists, naval officers and underwater explorers, and both her parents died on a research voyage for the same institution. On the day of her first trial at sea the school is attacked, and Ana and her classmates find out what the school's founder actually left them.
Rating coming soonLila's father makes fireworks for a king, and Lila wants to be a maker herself rather than a daughter who is married off. Told that she must find the Royal Sulphur from the sacred volcano of the Goddess of Fire to earn the title, she sets off through a country far to the east with her friend Chulak and a talking white elephant for company.
Rating coming soonBrian Robeson survived fifty-four days alone in the Canadian wilderness, and the experience has left him different in ways he cannot explain to anyone who was not there. Now a government team wants him to do it again, deliberately and with observers and supplies close by, so that they can study what living that way does to a person.
Rating coming soonIn the winter of 1940 German troops arrive in a small Norwegian village and take it over, and nobody there expects to be able to do anything about it. Then Peter Lindstrom's uncle explains what the children can do with their sleds, and a plan begins that puts the country's gold bullion and their own lives on the same sled run down the hill.
Rating coming soonAdam Farmer is riding a bicycle from his home in Massachusetts to visit his father in Vermont, and he is carrying a package he does not explain. Between the stages of the journey the book gives transcripts of tapes made by a subject talking to a doctor, and the two accounts have to be fitted together before either makes sense.
Rating coming soonCarruthers is a junior diplomat in London with a dull summer ahead of him when a friend invites him to spend a holiday sailing in the Baltic. The invitation is really a request for help: Davies has found something in the German sands that suggests a plan for an invasion of England, and he needs someone who can read a chart and understand the politics.
Rating coming soonIntruders break into a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis in the middle of the night and murder Luke Ellis's parents, and the whole operation takes less than two minutes. Luke wakes up in a room that looks like his own except that it has no window, in a building full of other children who were taken the same way and who have telepathy or telekinesis.
Rating coming soonBy the year 2312 humanity has spread across the solar system, and the great city of Terminator on Mercury is built on rails so that it can stay just ahead of the sunrise. The novel follows a woman who has lived her life in that moving city out into the rest of the inhabited system, where the settlements are holding an argument about who gets to decide what happens next.
Rating coming soonThe gates left behind by the civilisation that made the protomolecule have opened the way to a thousand worlds, and the rush to settle them has started. On the first of those colonies a small group of Belters who arrived first and a corporate survey party sent by the charter are arguing about who owns the ground, and the ship that made the gates available has been asked to keep the peace.
Rating coming soonThe western United States is now the Republic, a country permanently at war with its neighbours, and June is fifteen, rich and being trained for the highest military circles. Day is fifteen too, born in the slums and the Republic's most wanted criminal, and the two of them have no reason to meet until June's brother is murdered and Day becomes the prime suspect.
Rating coming soonMalachi Constant is the richest man in America and believes he is the luckiest, and a message from a chrono-synclastic infundibulum tells him that his future has been arranged. He ends up on Mars, then on Mercury, then on Titan, and everything that happens to him turns out to be part of a chain of events he was never meant to understand.
Rating coming soonNona lives with her family, works at a local school, and loves the beach and other people's dogs, and her city is under siege while the dead come back and a monstrous blue sphere hangs above the horizon waiting to tear the planet apart. Six months ago she woke up in somebody else's body, and she is afraid she may have to give it back.
Rating coming soonFifteen years after the regime that took over the United States established Gilead, the republic is still standing and the story is told by three women. One is a girl being raised inside the system, one is a young woman living on the outside in Canada, and one is a woman who has been part of the regime from the beginning and has kept a record of it.
Rating coming soonMaximum Ride is fourteen and she and the rest of the flock, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman and Angel, look like ordinary children except that they have wings and can fly. When Angel, the youngest of them, is taken back to the laboratory where the group was created, the others set out across Death Valley to get her home again.
Rating coming soonWarner is recovering from the bullet Juliette put in his shoulder, and he is still in charge of a sector that is beginning to talk about rebellion. His superiors want the girl found and the two traitors who helped her escape dealt with, and his own obsession with Juliette is not something he can explain to the men he commands.
Rating coming soonMatty has come to live in a village that takes in people who have nowhere else to go, and he works as the messenger who carries news between the settlements. He also has a gift that he has been told not to use carelessly, and the community that sheltered him is beginning to close its borders to strangers.
Rating coming soonSix shots are fired in a city in the middle of the country and five people are killed, and within hours the police have a suspect who fits every detail of the case and a confession that appears to close it. The arrested man says they have the wrong person, and then he asks for Jack Reacher by name, which is how a retired military investigator ends up taking the case apart.
Rating coming soonBryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar have saved their city and would now like a quiet life, but a rebellion is forming against the rulers who have left them alone so far. They are drawn into the rebels' plans, and the choice in front of them is whether to keep their heads down while other people are oppressed or to join in.
Rating coming soonDavie and his friend Geordie are altar boys in a Catholic parish, full of mischief and not much else, until a boy named Stephen Rose arrives in town. Stephen can model figures out of clay, and he and Davie discover that what they make between them can be brought to life, which is exciting until they understand what they have made.
Rating coming soonA film producer with money and nerve pays a young filmmaker to make a documentary about a cult that ended in bloodshed decades ago. The crew travel to the house where it happened and to the other places the cult used, and the record they are making starts to include things none of them can explain and none of them can leave out of the final cut.
Rating coming soonRuby has been driven out of the Dumas mansion and is back in the bayou with her baby daughter Pearl, determined to make a decent home for the child. The family she left behind has other claims on her, and the secrets that shaped her mother's life and her own are still being kept by everyone who knows them.
Rating coming soonApryl is an American who arrives in London to take possession of a flat she has inherited from her aunt, in a grand old building off the Edgware Road. The neighbours do not want her there, the caretaker does not want her there, and the aunt's effects suggest she was spending her last years watching something in the building rather than living in it.
Rating coming soonMaren has never been able to accept affection: whenever anyone gets close enough, she is overwhelmed by the urge to eat them. Abandoned by her mother the day after her sixteenth birthday, she sets out across the country to find the father she has never met and whoever else may live the way she does, with no money and nobody to vouch for her.
Rating coming soonIn 1868 a twenty-one-year-old Bram Stoker waits in a deserted tower with crucifixes, holy water and a rifle, and prays to survive the night. He has already decided that if he lives, he will write down everything that led him there, and the novel is the record he produces, assembled from his own diaries and the letters of the people who were caught up in the same events.
Rating coming soonCharles Hillenbrand is a Cambridge academic looking back on his marriage and on the daughter he lost, when he took four-year-old Naomi to London on Christmas Eve and she disappeared in a shop. He spent the years afterwards continuing the search, through the police, the press and his own household, and what he eventually found was not what he had been looking for.
Rating coming soonAn airliner comes down near a town and everyone aboard is killed except one man, and he is left with the question of why he lived when the others did not. As he starts looking for an answer, through the inquiry and the newspapers, a man who claims to be able to speak with the dead becomes interested in him and in what happened on board.
Rating coming soonCynda is sixteen and unhappy about being left at the inn her father and stepmother run on the coast of Maine, where the season is over and there is nobody her age for miles. Then a guest arrives in the dead of winter, pale and charming and interested only in her, and Cynda is flattered enough not to ask what he is doing there.
Rating coming soonA disease has killed or changed everyone over the age of fourteen, and the children left behind are trying to stay alive in a London where the grown-ups they knew have become something else. A group travelling across the city towards a promised shelter has to work out who to trust among the survivors they meet on the way.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and Sherlock Holmes come home to Sussex in 1924 after seven months travelling in India and Japan, and within days Holmes's estranged son arrives asking for help. A woman and a child have disappeared, the search leads into a religious community in the English countryside and then to Scotland, and the whole case is bound up with the personal failure Holmes has never been able to settle.
Rating coming soonOn a cold winter day in Boston a young man named Martin Jones ducks into a secondhand bookshop to get warm, because the sign in the window says it is warm inside and because the police are looking for him. Inside he meets the man who was once his teacher, Leonidas Witherall, who has lost his money in the crash and is now the shop's janitor.
Rating coming soonLeonidas Witherall has inherited money from an uncle and had a house built while he was travelling the world, and he is on the train to Dalton in Massachusetts to see it for the first time. On the way he meets a nervous woman and a young woman carrying a brown paper package, and the house he arrives at contains a pickaxe and a corpse in the garage.
Rating coming soonSomeone tries to run Leonidas Witherall over on a snowy day in Dalton, and he is saved by a brassy young woman named Margie and her boyfriend Cuff. Then he escapes them, is struck by a second car, and wakes up in the home of a former pupil who is sitting in the same room with a knife in him.
Rating coming soonLeonidas Witherall is writing the latest adventure of his fictional detective when he notices that a parcel of bank papers has gone missing, and he sets off for a dinner at the home of the banker Fenwick Balderston, where he serves as a director. He arrives to find his host dead on the floor, beaten with a bronze bust of Shakespeare.
Rating coming soonDanny has a problem at school and wants to borrow the equipment his friends' professor is working with in order to solve it. Professor Bullfinch and Doctor Grimes are developing new scientific methods of fighting crime, and Danny ends up using their bloodhound robot and their instruments to investigate the disappearance of the manager of the local department store.
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.
