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 29 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 soonThe Potter family owns a newspaper empire, and Mrs Potter writes the romantic novelettes that fill the shop-girls' magazines the firm prints. She has lost the ability to tell her own inventions from fact, and when her son-in-law is murdered she goes to a medium for the truth, with consequences for everybody in the family business.
Rating coming soonJake is an ordinary kid in an ordinary suburb until a creature from space finds him and his friends and gives them a power nobody should have: the ability to take the shape of any animal they touch. The five of them become the Animorphs, and the enemy they are up against has already been living among the people they know.
Rating coming soonToby Jugg is a decorated fighter pilot who was shot in the back during a raid on Cologne and is now paralysed below the waist. Sent to convalesce in a house in Wales, he finds himself tormented at night by a shadowy many-legged presence, and the man in charge of the house turns out to belong to a Satanist brotherhood.
Rating coming soonIt is 1968, and Rick Desmond has been sent to Brookline Asylum because his parents have decided that his temper is a disease. The staff talk about a Patient Zero, the first person to be tested on, and as Rick learns his way around the building he begins to understand that nobody is being cured here.
Rating coming soonSmall Sam and the Kid have reached the Tower of London, where Jordan Hordern's crew offers food, walls and friendship, and Sam cannot settle. All he wants is his sister Ella, and despite everyone's objections he sets out west through the no-go zone with the Kid beside him, while a hunter called Shadowman tracks a man building an army.
Rating coming soonThe sickness took the adults of London, rotting their minds first and their bodies afterwards, and what is left of them now hunts the streets of the city. The Holloway crew have fought their way across town to the Natural History Museum, and their next trip out for medical supplies asks them whether humans are a greater danger than the creatures.
Rating coming soonMariam is an illegitimate teenager from Herat, married off to a shoemaker in Kabul after a family tragedy. A generation later Laila grows up in the same city with more than Mariam ever had, until a loss of her own forces her to accept a proposal from Mariam's husband, and the two women's lives become one story. Around them the country they live in is being remade by war.
Rating coming soonIn 1843 two servants of a household in Canada West were convicted of murdering their employer and his housekeeper. James McDermott was hanged, and Grace Marks was imprisoned for life, her case argued over by everyone who read about it. Years later a young American doctor begins visiting her in the penitentiary, hoping to establish what a woman like her could possibly have done.
Rating coming soonMichelangelo Buonarroti is apprenticed to a painter's studio in Florence as a boy, is taken up by the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, and spends the next sixty years working in marble, paint and stone. The novel follows the sculptor from his first carved figure through the quarries, the workshops and the long quarrels with the popes and patrons who wanted him for themselves.
Rating coming soonChristy Mansel runs into her cousin Charles in Damascus, and because the two of them are young, rich and used to doing as they please, they decide to visit their eccentric Great-Aunt Harriet. The family has a rule against arriving unannounced at Dar Ibrahim, her crumbling palace in the Lebanese hills, and the cousins go anyway.
Rating coming soonHarrison William Shepherd is born in the United States and grows up in his mother's Mexico, where he mixes plaster for the mural painter Diego Rivera and then cooks for Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. He also works as a secretary for Leon Trotsky during his exile, and the politics he witnesses there follow him north.
Rating coming soonJacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader making his living on the edges of colonial America when he accepts a young girl, Florens, from a debtor in place of payment and takes her home to his farm. His wife Rebekka came from England to marry a man she had never met, and the household they make is one of people who have all lost the places they came from.
Rating coming soonAgnes Magnusdottir is a servant in northern Iceland who has been condemned to death for the murder of two men, one of them her employer. While she waits for the sentence to be carried out she is sent to live with a farm family who do not want her, and the only person willing to listen to her account of what happened is a young priest.
Rating coming soonCharles Dickens is at the height of his fame in 1865 when a train he is travelling in runs off the rails at Staplehurst, and the disaster lays the ground for the last five years of his life. The man telling the story is his friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, whose account of Dickens cannot be trusted.
Rating coming soonWill Andrews leaves Harvard in the 1870s, persuaded by the writing of Emerson that a man should find an original relation to nature, and travels west. In the Kansas town of Butcher's Crossing he falls in with a hunter who tells him about a vast herd hidden away in the Colorado mountains, and puts up the money to join an expedition that goes after it.
Rating coming soonMark Castallack is a proud and difficult man who brings his bride Janna home to Penmarric, the great house on the Cornish coast that gives the family its name and its standing. What follows is a feud inside one family, carried on by children and grandchildren, with the house and the land it stands on as the prize.
Rating coming soonPaul-Edward Logan is the son of a prosperous white landowner and a woman of Black and Native American ancestry, and he is raised openly by his father in Georgia after the Civil War. He looks white, which means Black people distrust him and white people turn on him when they learn about his mother, and he has to find a place of his own.
Rating coming soonSarai is a princess of Ur in Mesopotamia, and a serious, dutiful one compared with her older sister Qira, who is to marry a desert prince named Lot. Sarai has been promised to the temple as a priestess, until Lot arrives with his uncle Abram, who tells her that he will come back one day and marry her himself.
Rating coming soonEcho Sackett has never been far from her Tennessee home until the day she sets out for Philadelphia to collect an inheritance left to her family. She is sixteen, she can handle herself as well as any of the Sackett men, and the city lawyer who means to take the money from her has no idea what he has taken on.
Rating coming soonGeorge Mallory is a Cambridge graduate and a climber with a reputation for going on where other men turn back, and his ambition is the summit of Everest. The novel follows his expeditions and his marriage, and it takes seriously the old question of whether he and Sandy Irvine reached the top of the mountain in 1924, twenty-nine years before anyone else.
Rating coming soonThe bells are ringing for Elizabeth in the autumn of 1558, and the country she inherits is bankrupt and divided. Her adviser tells her she can only hold it by marrying a strong prince, but the man she wants is Robert Dudley, who is already married, and Amy, his wife, has no intention of setting him free. Around the queen, a court of ambitious men watches to see which way her favour will fall.
Rating coming soonHetty Grimke, known as Handful, is an enslaved girl in an early nineteenth-century Charleston household, and she wants a life on the other side of its walls. Sarah Grimke grows up in the same house certain that she is meant for something large, and on her eleventh birthday the two of them are handed a relationship neither of them chose.
Rating coming soonKing David of Israel is old, close to death and in no mood to make his memoirs tidy. He remembers the sheep, the prophet Samuel, the giant Goliath, Saul and Jonathan, Bathsheba and the arrangements around her, and the children whose quarrels he could never settle, and he argues with God about all of it.
Rating coming soonKatherine de Roet is the daughter of a minor knight from Flanders with no prospects of her own apart from a sister who serves the queen and is to marry Geoffrey Chaucer. Through that connection she marries Sir Hugh Swynford, and through her husband's service she meets John of Gaunt, the duke whose notice changes the whole course of her life.
Rating coming soonRodrigo Borgia becomes Pope Alexander VI, and his belief that his office will excuse anything is the assumption his family lives on. His son Cesare is an ambitious soldier and politician, his daughter Lucrezia is married off to one husband after another for the sake of alliances, and the family's interests are always the first question in Rome. The city's other powers have to decide whether to work with them.
Rating coming soonWhen Yance Sackett's sister-in-law is taken from her home, the family has one response. Yance and his brother Kin leave their Carolina settlement and ride north into country they do not know, following the men who took her and expecting to be welcome nowhere along the way. They are travelling towards a frontier where kidnapping, the slave trade and the claims of the nations whose land they cross all have to be answered.
Rating coming soonNed Kelly writes the story of his own life for the child he will never meet, beginning with his father, an Irishman transported to Van Diemen's Land and settled in the colony of Victoria. From the family's farm at Avenel to the years on the run, the account is Kelly's own, and it is written for a country that never stopped arguing about him.
Rating coming soonConstanta is dying when a stranger saves her, and the life he offers her turns out to be one of obedience inside his household. Over the centuries that follow she comes to understand what her rescuer is, and she begins to ask whether she and his other consorts have any way out of the house he has made.
Rating coming soonJody Tiflin is ten years old and lives on his father's ranch, where the work is hard, the grown men are mostly busy and the days have a shape he has grown used to. Then he is given a red pony of his own, and looking after it teaches him things about birth, illness and death that the ranch hands could not have explained to him.
Rating coming soonTwenty children are living at a boarding school in the French countryside during the German occupation, and they agree to hide ten Jewish children among them. When soldiers come to the school with questions, the arithmetic of the arrangement becomes a matter of life and death for everybody in the building, and the youngest of them are the ones who have to keep their answers straight.
Rating coming soonNed Begay is sent to a boarding school where he is taught that his own language is useless, and punished for using it. Then the Marine Corps comes looking for Navajo men, and the language he was told to forget becomes the basis of a code the American military uses through the islands of the Pacific.
Rating coming soonAshley is ten, still furious about her father's death, and she and her mother have moved into the upper floor of a boarding house whose owner dislikes children. The overgrown garden is forbidden to her, and it is where she meets a younger neighbour, hears crying coming from the hedges, and digs up an antique doll buried in a box with a note of apology inside it.
Rating coming soonChloe Saunders is fifteen, wants to be a film director, and has just learned what it feels like to be looked at by a ghost. After the incident at her art school she is labelled schizophrenic and sent to Lyle House, a group home for troubled teenagers where the other residents are not what their files say either.
Rating coming soonChloe Saunders and her friends Tori, Simon and Derek are on the run from the corporation that altered them, hiding in a safe house belonging to a former employee of the Edison Group. They have powers that keep outgrowing the adults around them, and one of the people sheltering them may be working for the people they are running from.
Rating coming soonCas Lowood is seventeen and has spent three years finishing the work his father began: finding the murderous dead, working out what they are and sending them on. He travels with his mother, who practises kitchen witchcraft, and a cat that can smell a ghost, and in one particular house he meets an apparition unlike anything he has faced.
Rating coming soonThe narrator of this story makes her living by reading auras at a shop called Spiritual Palms, a fraud she has refined over the years to something close to a small science. Then Susan Burke comes in, a rich and unhappy woman with a stepson and a house that frightens her, and the woman who does not believe in ghosts is invited to spend time in one.
Rating coming soonCharles Dexter Ward is a young man from a prominent Rhode Island family who has become obsessed with an ancestor called Joseph Curwen, a merchant of unpleasant reputation and, it is said, a wizard who knew things a man should not. Ward vanishes from the asylum where he had been held, and his family doctor sets out to establish what has been done to him.
Rating coming soonThe Spook and his apprentice, Thomas Ward, are the people a county calls when it needs a witch, a ghost or a boggart dealt with. Their work takes them to the cathedral town of Priestown, where something the Spook has never been able to defeat is waiting in the catacombs, and where the arrival of a witch-hunting Quisitor gives them a second enemy.
Rating coming soonStevie Bell went to Ellingham Academy because of its most famous crime: the 1916 kidnapping and triple murder known as the Truly Devious case. Then a present-day classmate was murdered, and although Stevie identified the killer her parents took her home, which leaves her with a cold case and no way back into the school that holds it.
Rating coming soonMolly's mother and stepfather move the family into a converted church in rural Maryland, and Molly and her brother Michael are given the job of looking after their seven-year-old stepsister Heather. Heather lies about them, wanders off on her own, and has begun talking to a girl called Helen whose grave sits in the old cemetery next door.
Rating coming soonTwo hundred years before the Empire, the Republic is expanding and the Jedi are building a beacon called Starlight to link the far parts of the galaxy. Then a cargo ship is destroyed in hyperspace while taking evasive action, and the wreckage begins dropping out of hyperspace across whole systems, killing thousands and leaving the Jedi to reach the survivors and work out who caused it.
Rating coming soonThe Imperial prison barge Purge is carrying five hundred of the galaxy's most dangerous convicts when its engines fail somewhere remote and empty. The only hope for the people aboard is a Star Destroyer found drifting nearby and apparently abandoned, and the boarding party sent across to strip it for parts comes back with fewer than half its people.
Rating coming soonRevan was a Jedi, and then he was something else: his memories were taken from him and he was made into a weapon for the Sith. He has come back to himself believing that he once found something that threatens the Republic, and he sets out to deal with it with no clear idea of what it was or who he can trust with the search.
Rating coming soonOn the planet Tython, long before the Jedi Order of the films existed, the Je'daii order was founded and its masters taught the mysteries of the Force. Lanoree Brock became one of its most capable students, while her brother, in whom the Force showed itself not at all, grew up despising everything the Je'daii stood for. When he goes beyond the order's reach, she is the one sent after him.
Rating coming soonDarth Bane is the last surviving Sith, and the rule he has laid down for the order's future is that there must never be more than two of them. Now he needs a student to carry the dark side forward, and a Jedi called Johun Othone, whose master died at Bane's hands, has made finding him a personal matter.
Rating coming soonIris Chase is an old woman looking back at the death of her sister Laura more than fifty years earlier, and she tells the story of two sisters raised in a small Ontario town who grew up into very different lives. Inside her account there is another book, a novel about a secret affair and a writer of pulp science fiction, and nobody agrees about who wrote it.
Rating coming soonThe Enterprise is on patrol near the Romulan neutral zone, and the crew has begun to dream. Kirk and Spock both admit to the same dream, in which Spock commands the ship and Kirk serves as an ensign, and Starfleet intelligence reports that the Romulans are attempting to use time travel and are moving more ships towards the region.
Rating coming soonThe Romulans attack the planet Gateway, where Federation scientists are studying the Guardian of Forever, and the Enterprise is sent to protect or destroy the portal. Spock has already used it, because records of the destroyed world of Sarpeidon include a cave painting of a Vulcan face, and it belongs to a son he did not know he had.
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.
