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 28 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 soonClaire Randall has kept her secrets for twenty years, and she is returning to Scotland with her grown daughter to tell the truth about them. What she has to explain involves the Jacobite rising, the Battle of Culloden and the husband she left behind in the eighteenth century, and her daughter has never been told any of it.
Rating coming soonIn a Yorkshire mill town during the Napoleonic wars, the machinery that keeps the local economy going is being destroyed by men who have no work, and the mill owners are waiting for the army to arrive. Two young women in the neighbourhood are deciding what to do with their lives while the men around them argue about trade and wages.
Rating coming soonJim overhears that he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, and he runs while he works out what to do next. At the same time Huck Finn has faked his own death, and the two of them set off down the river together, with Jim's own account of the journey replacing the one that readers know.
Rating coming soonTorak is twelve and living in the forest with his father in the Stone Age when a bear possessed by something evil kills the man and leaves the boy alone. He is joined by an orphaned wolf cub, and the two of them have to travel north to find help before the same creature finds them again.
Rating coming soonIn Brooklyn, eighteen-year-old Deya is being introduced to suitors she has no wish to marry, and her grandparents will not consider any other arrangement for her future. Her mother Isra was given no more choice when she was married at the same age, and the novel moves between the two generations of women and the family silence that connects them.
Rating coming soonAtretes is a German warrior who won his freedom in the arena as a gladiator, and he means to go home to the forests he was taken from as a child. He takes with him a young Christian woman named Rizpah and her son, and the journey north runs through a Roman Empire that is not finished with any of them.
Rating coming soonChiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America, alone during the pandemic and thinking about the men she has loved and the choices she has made. Her closest friend Zikora is a lawyer whose competence has never protected her from being hurt, and a third woman in their circle has her own account of the same years.
Rating coming soonIn Connecticut in 1666 an ancient spirit wakes in the woods, and the settlers who live near it have a name for him and a use for it. To Abitha, a young widow who is being squeezed out of the land her husband left her, he is the one thing in the colony that is not pretending to be respectable.
Rating coming soonDani Phillips loves her job as the city manager of Magnolia Bay, Mississippi, and she loves the community she works for. When the town council decides to spend money on a campaign to attract tourists and rescue the local economy, she keeps her reservations to herself, until she meets the man hired to sell her town to strangers.
Rating coming soonIpatia is an orphan living with her grandfather on the Greek island of Lipsi, and she intends to leave for Piraeus to study. The day before her trip she falls into the arms of Tony, the son of a wealthy shipowner, and the two of them have to work out whether anything can come of it.
Rating coming soonA party of wealthy and engaged English travellers sets out on a world voyage aboard an ocean liner, and after several weeks at sea the ship is wrecked in the Pacific. Two survivors reach an island whose inhabitants call it Nedra, and being alone together on it, far from the marriages waiting at home, is a problem of its own.
Rating coming soonLauren Carlyle is a schoolteacher who meets a tall stranger across a crowded ballroom and is swept into a dance, and then into an evening neither of them intends to repeat. Afterwards they go their separate ways, until she finds out that the man she danced with is going to be living under the same roof.
Rating coming soonLeonie de Conyers is an aristocratic young woman whose life is broken by the French Revolution and who lives afterwards in the shadow of the guillotine. Roger St. Eyre is an English nobleman who sets out to bring her to safety, without knowing what taking her out of France will cost either of them.
Rating coming soonJudy did not want to marry Chris Voulis, and she had wanted to marry somebody else entirely. She had been brought up on Cyprus, where the marriage was arranged for her in the traditional way, so the decision had already been made for her; what she has to decide now is how she is going to live inside it.
Rating coming soonMaggie West has wanted a family of her own for as long as she can remember, and her new neighbour, a single father named Kellen Ashby, is not the man she had in mind to provide one. His daughters are exactly the sort of children she used to imagine having, and he has just inherited the inn she manages.
Rating coming soonD. J. Holden is a private investigator who has lived by one rule since her boss and foster father taught it to her, which is never to go undercover. When she discovers that his agency is in trouble she breaks the rule and takes a job investigating Maxwell Lotorto, the heir to a grocery fortune and the despair of his formidable grandmother.
Rating coming soonZelda is twenty-one and lives with her older brother Gert, and she organises her life by a set of rules of her own making and by her study of the Vikings. When Gert's circumstances change and money becomes a problem, the saga she has been living inside has to be brought out into the world around her.
Rating coming soonTomi Nakaji is thirteen and mostly worried about baseball, school and a local bully, until the bombing of Pearl Harbor upends his family's life on Oahu. His father and grandfather are taken away to a camp on the mainland, neighbours start treating the Nakajis as enemies, and Tomi has to work out what loyalty means in a country that no longer trusts him.
Rating coming soonIn 1972, workers digging foundations in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well, and a mezuzah found beside it points the police towards the town's only Jewish resident. A hurricane then washes the scene away, and the novel travels back to the 1920s and 1930s and to Chicken Hill, where Black and Jewish families lived side by side and where a deaf boy needed hiding.
Rating coming soonEvery August from 1929, Joey Dowdel and his younger sister Mary Alice are put on a train out of Chicago and sent to spend a week in their grandmother's small Illinois town. Grandma Dowdel keeps a shotgun, holds her own against every neighbour who crosses her, and finds trouble wherever she looks, and over seven summers the children learn what their grandmother is really made of.
Rating coming soonOlivia Dunne, a Denver minister's daughter who had planned to study archaeology, finds herself pregnant and quickly married off to a farmer she has never met in southeastern Colorado. In a landscape of beet fields and wartime shortages she starts a life with a patient stranger and makes friends with two Japanese American sisters held at a camp nearby.
Rating coming soonIn 1900 a twelve-year-old girl is sent by boat to be married to a widower she has never met, and arrives at a family estate in Kerala where the household keeps a water tree, a family record marked with the names of the drowned. In every generation at least one member of the family dies in water, and the novel follows the girl who becomes Big Ammachi.
Rating coming soonElinor Carlisle and Roddy Welman are engaged and expecting to inherit from a wealthy aunt when an anonymous letter warns that someone is courting the old woman's favour. Elinor's suspicion falls on Mary Gerrard, the lodgekeeper's daughter, and before the summer is out Elinor is in the dock on a charge of murder. Hercule Poirot is asked to find out what happened at Hunterbury.
Rating coming soonJune Morrissey dies in the snow on her way home one Easter Sunday, and the novel that follows circles backwards and sideways through the families she belonged to. The Kashpaws, Lamartines and Morrisseys live between Ojibwe reservations in North Dakota and Minnesota and the cities around them, and a different voice tells almost every chapter.
Rating coming soonTayo comes home to the Laguna Pueblo reservation after surviving the Pacific war and a Japanese prison camp and finds that sleep, drink and his own family cannot hold him together. His cousin Rocky died on the Bataan Death March, the reservation is caught in a drought, and the medicine men Tayo visits tell him his cure lies in stories older than the war.
Rating coming soonJohn Butler was four years old when Lenape warriors took him from his family's Pennsylvania farm, and eleven years later he is True Son, accepted as a son by the man who raised him. When a treaty obliged the Lenape to give up their white captives in 1764, he is handed back to a father he does not remember and a life he does not want.
Rating coming soonOn Christmas Eve the fiddlers and singers of the Mellstock parish choir make their rounds of the village, and the youngest of them, Dick Dewy, catches sight of the new schoolmistress at her window. Fancy Day has other suitors and a gift for the organ, and an incoming vicar's plans for church music threaten the choir Dick was born into.
Rating coming soonAshton Wingate's bride Lierin is lost to the river only days after their wedding, leaving the Mississippi planter to mourn a marriage that had barely begun. Three years later his carriage collides with a cloaked rider on horseback, and the woman carried into his house, wearing Lierin's face, wakes up with no memory of who she is.
Rating coming soonMarooned on the coast of equatorial Africa, the English couple John and Alice Clayton die within a year of their son's birth, and the baby is adopted by the she-ape Kala. Named Tarzan, he grows up among the apes, teaches himself to read from the books in his parents' cabin, and eventually meets creatures that look like him and speak a language he has never heard.
Rating coming soonAster Gray is a healer in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a generation ship whose society is organised along the lines of the antebellum South, with dark-skinned passengers confined to the lower decks. The ship's leaders say it is carrying the last of humanity to a promised land. When the Sovereign dies, Aster looks into the connection between that death and her mother's suicide decades before.
Rating coming soonMars has been made habitable, and the long work of terraforming has split its people between those who want the planet green and those who want the old desert back. Meanwhile Earth struggles with too many people and a collapsing ecology, its governments look to Mars for room, and the settlers have to decide what their world is for.
Rating coming soonAn insomniac in 1890s England falls into a trance and sleeps for more than two hundred years. He wakes as the richest man on Earth, the nominal owner of everything his money has been invested in, and finds that his wealth has been used to hold up a society in which most people are poor and more than a third of them are enslaved.
Rating coming soonEvelyn Cyril Gordon has just been discharged from a war in Southeast Asia and has no idea what to do next. Answering a newspaper advertisement that asks whether he is a coward takes him to a woman called Star, to a quest for the Egg of the Phoenix, and to a road that leaves this universe behind.
Rating coming soonMax Jones works his family's farm in the Ozark Mountains until his stepmother's remarriage drives him away from home. With his late uncle's astrogation manuals in his bag he hitchhikes towards Earthport, hoping to be recognised as an astrogator's heir in a world where most trades are closed guilds and space travel belongs to the wealthy. He falls in with a hobo who can get him aboard a starship, but only under another man's name.
Rating coming soonIn 2075 a teenager from Iowa applies to join the Interplanetary Patrol, sits through its physical, mental and ethics tests, and is accepted as a cadet. Training takes him to an orbiting school ship and then to a patrol vessel, where the search for a missing research ship in the asteroid belt turns up evidence of a civilisation that is no longer there.
Rating coming soonPell's World is the transit point between Earth's sector of space and the breakaway colonies of Union, and whoever holds it controls the road between them. The stationers of Downbelow have kept to their neutrality while ships, refugees and politics arrive, and the war fought far away finally reaches their docks. Earth's corporation still governs what it can from a distance, and the fleets it sends out to hold the colonies together come to Pell.
Rating coming soonJohn Carter is returned to Mars after ten years away and lands in the Valley Dor, the Barsoomian afterlife from which nobody is supposed to leave. With his friend Tars Tarkas he discovers that the white-skinned Therns have built their power on a lie about the pilgrimage, and that Dejah Thoris has vanished. Together they save Thuvia, a slave girl held by the Therns, and are caught up in an attack on the Therns by the Black Pirates of Barsoom.
Rating coming soonLionel Verney, the orphaned son of an impoverished nobleman, is befriended by a king's son and drawn into the politics of a Britain that has become a republic. His sister Perdita marries Lord Raymond, the soldier who becomes Lord Protector, and the family's fortunes rise before the sickness reaches Europe. Then a plague arrives and sweeps across the world, and Verney is left to write down what happened to everyone he knew.
Rating coming soonMalcolm Ross, a young barrister, is called out in the middle of the night to the house of the Egyptologist Abel Trelawny, whose daughter has found her father unconscious and bleeding on the floor of a room full of Egyptian relics. The instructions Trelawny left behind require that his body stay where it is, watched, until he wakes. At the centre of the house, and of the archaeologist's work, is the mummy of an Egyptian queen.
Rating coming soonYoung Kindan expects little from his life until the people of Pern discover what the watch-whers, distant relatives of the dragons, can actually do. The beasts can warn miners about gas in the seams they are digging and find men trapped after a cave-in, and the work of putting them to use begins in the camp where Kindan is growing up.
Rating coming soonThe people of the silo live underground in a world their ancestors ruined, and their only view of the surface is a screen showing a spoiled and rotten landscape. Anyone who breaks the rules is sent outside to clean that screen, and Sheriff Holston has spent years wondering why the condemned do it.
Rating coming soonBurt Stallings wants Mike Shayne to find his daughter, who walked out of the family home in the middle of the night, and he makes it sound less like a request than an order. Shayne has a problem before he starts: he has already found the heiress, and somebody had strangled her before he got to her.
Rating coming soonSomething in the Big Woods is frightening the animals of the Bean farm, and the First Animal Bank has been robbed. The neighbours blame a legendary phantom they call the Ignormus, and Freddy the pig, who has solved this kind of problem before, sets out to find out who or what is really behind it.
Rating coming soonDaniel de La Luna arrives at an elite university on the American east coast carrying his family's hopes and the name of an uncle who died before he was born. He flounders until his roommate Sam changes what seems possible, and the friendship between them turns into something more just as the life Daniel came for begins pulling him away.
Rating coming soonYeva is a biologist who travels Ukraine in a campervan she has converted into a mobile laboratory, collecting rare snails and failing to breed them while her relatives press her to settle down. Her research is paid for by working for a bridal agency that brings Western men to romance tours, and two of the women she meets there have plans of their own.
Rating coming soonJohnny O'Brien, better known as White Folks, learned to use his light skin to work the Chicago con game, and he is finished with small money. With his mentor Blue dead and the city used up, he takes his polished act north, where a crew of grifters is assembling around a long con and the stakes are counted in thousands.
Rating coming soonWhite Folks is the son of a Black woman working the streets and a white man, and his complexion is light enough to pass. Blue Howard, an older hustler, raises him and teaches him the con, and together the two of them work the gap between Black and white Philadelphia for everything the marks are willing to hand over.
Rating coming soonIn New Orleans in 1891, the Morningstar children, each of them named by their father after a disease, are growing up in a city of voodoo, race and class, and of a music that is only just being invented. Something older and angrier than any of them is loose in their lives, and the family will have to reckon with it.
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.
