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 31 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
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Rating coming soonDarth Plagueis is a Sith Lord with a rare and dangerous command of the dark side: his studies have given him power over life and death itself. His apprentice is the man who will one day become the Emperor, and the two of them work patiently to bring the whole galaxy under the rule of the Sith.
Rating coming soonQui-Gon Jinn and his Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi are a working pair, and the training between them runs both ways. Then an offer arrives that threatens to end the apprenticeship, and the two of them are sent to a planet where the politics are dangerous and the future is more uncertain than either of them can admit.
Rating coming soonThe Empire stands close to collapse and has kept one plan back for the very end. A plot is set in motion that could destroy the New Republic in a bloodbath of civil war, and it is followed by news that changes every calculation: Grand Admiral Thrawn, the warlord long believed dead, may have come back to lead what is left.
Rating coming soonA castaway wakes on the shore of an island with no memory of how they arrived and no idea where they are. The world works by rules that nobody explains, and staying alive means working those rules out one experiment at a time, from what can be eaten to what comes out after dark, while the island keeps its own secrets.
Rating coming soonFour friends meet at college in New York and stay in one another's lives for the decades that follow: Jude, a lawyer with a history he refuses to discuss; Willem, an actor; JB, an artist; and Malcolm, an architect. The novel follows them into middle age, and as it goes on its attention narrows onto Jude, whose past is the one thing his friends have never been able to reach.
Rating coming soonLaura Ingalls lives with her Ma and Pa, her older sister Mary and the baby Carrie in an isolated log cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, where the nearest neighbour is miles away and the family lives off what it can grow, hunt and preserve. The book follows a year of that life, from the work of autumn through a winter spent almost entirely in the cabin.
Rating coming soonWhen Mr Dashwood dies, the estate passes to his son by his first marriage, and his second wife and three daughters are left with very little to live on. Taken in by a distant relative, Elinor and Marianne must each find their way in a world where a woman's marriage is the only security available, and where feeling and prudence pull the two sisters in opposite directions.
Rating coming soonCal Stephanides begins the story of his own life with his grandparents, a brother and sister who left a village in Asia Minor and ended up in Detroit as a married couple. A mutated gene runs through the family into the third generation, where it makes itself known in a child raised as a girl, and the novel is the account that child gives of how it happened.
Rating coming soonClarissa Dalloway goes out to buy flowers on a June morning in London and spends the rest of the day preparing for a party she is giving that evening. As she moves through the city, her thoughts run backwards and forwards over her life, and the people she passes, including a shell-shocked veteran, are drawn into the same day in their own minds.
Rating coming soonIn Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb laid out according to a plan in which every detail was decided in advance, the Richardson family owns an apartment they rent to a woman who is not like them. Mia Warren is an artist who has moved from place to place with her teenage daughter, and the arrival of the two of them sets off something the neighbours cannot control.
Rating coming soonWilliam Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a poor farming family in Missouri and sent to the state university to study agriculture. In an English course he encounters a Shakespeare sonnet, understands something about his own life that he had never suspected before, changes his course of study without telling his parents, and becomes a teacher of literature.
Rating coming soonAn engineer spending the winter in the New England town of Starkfield notices a limping man named Ethan Frome and asks the neighbours about him. What he learns opens the story of how Frome was injured, and of the years he spent on a failing farm with a wife who was constantly ill and a cousin who came to help in the house.
Rating coming soonRachel Chu, who teaches in New York and was raised by a single mother, agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend and meet his family. She is expecting a quiet visit with traditional relatives, and what she finds is an older and far wealthier world than she knew existed, with a grandmother who has strong opinions about who her grandson should marry.
Rating coming soonEsperanza Cordero is a twelve-year-old girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, and the house her family has bought on Mango Street is not the house she was promised. Over the course of a year she watches the people in her neighbourhood and the women in her own family, and she works out what she wants for herself and what she intends to leave behind.
Rating coming soonAnna Fitzgerald is thirteen, and she was conceived so that her blood could be used to treat her older sister's leukaemia. When she is told that she will now have to give Kate one of her kidneys, Anna goes looking for a lawyer and sues her own parents for the right to decide what may and may not be done with her body.
Rating coming soonKambili Achike is fifteen and lives in a large house in Nigeria, in a family whose standing rests on her father's success as a businessman and on his reputation for generosity and Catholic devotion. At home he rules his wife and children with violence, and it takes a visit to her aunt's house for Kambili to see that another kind of life exists.
Rating coming soonAlfred and Enid Lambert have raised three children in a Midwestern suburb, and Alfred is slipping into Parkinson's disease and dementia while Enid decides that the family should spend one more Christmas together. Their children are spread across the country and occupied with the lives they have built, and every one of them is dealing with something they have not told their parents about.
Rating coming soonQuoyle is thirty-six, a third-rate newspaperman in upstate New York, and his life comes apart when his wife dies in a car accident with another man. His aunt persuades him to take his two daughters to the ancestral family home on the coast of Newfoundland, where he finds work at a small local paper and begins to make a life out of the wreckage.
Rating coming soonThe Ramsay family spend their summers in a house on the coast of Scotland, and the question of whether the weather will allow a trip to the lighthouse nearby is the small argument the book begins with. Around that unhurried plan, the family, its guests and its eight children are seen through their own thoughts, and then through the years that follow.
Rating coming soonIn the provincial town of Middlemarch, in the years around the Reform Act of 1832, Dorothea Brooke marries a scholar she believes will give her a life of useful work, and Tertius Lydgate arrives as a new doctor with plans to reform the medicine of the town. Both of those ambitions meet the expectations of a community in which everyone knows everyone else's business.
Rating coming soonOn New Year's Day 1975, a middle-aged Englishman called Archie Jones tries to kill himself in his car and is interrupted by a man delivering meat. He marries a woman much younger than himself, and his friendship with Samad Iqbal, whom he served with during the war, joins two families and three cultures across the decades that follow them into the present day.
Rating coming soonA young widow called Helen Graham arrives at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion that has stood empty for years, with her small son and one servant. She keeps to herself, sells her paintings for money and refuses to explain her past, and the village decides that a woman living like that must be hiding something, until the man who falls in love with her learns the truth.
Rating coming soonCaptain Charles Ryder's battalion is sent during the last years of the Second World War to a country house he knows well, and the sight of it takes him back over twenty years. He remembers being drawn into the Flyte family, wealthy English Catholics living in a palatial mansion, and his friendships with two of them, Lord Sebastian and Lady Julia.
Rating coming soonAn insurance agent named Robert Smith jumps from the roof of a hospital trying to fly, and the crowd that gathers to watch includes a pregnant woman who goes into labour. Her son becomes the first African American child born in that hospital, and the novel follows him from childhood into a search for the family history his parents have never explained.
Rating coming soonTess Durbeyfield is sixteen, the eldest child of a haggler in a poor rural family, when the local parson tells her father that his surname is a corruption of d'Urberville and that he is descended from an ancient Norman family. Her father celebrates by drinking, the family's wagon crashes on the road to market, and the loss of their horse starts everything that follows.
Rating coming soonIn the late summer and autumn of 1952, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's farm in rural Arkansas alongside hired Mexican workers and a family of hill people from the Ozarks. His family is in debt and the harvest has to pay for the whole year, and over the months that follow Luke sees and hears things that the adults around him would far rather he had not.
Rating coming soonAgnes Grey is the younger daughter of a clergyman whose attempt to improve the family's fortunes leaves them poorer than before, and she decides that she will support herself as a governess. What follows is a series of positions in gentry households where the children are ungovernable, the parents careless and her own position somewhere between a servant and a guest.
Rating coming soonIn 1956, the Reverend John Ames of Gilead, Iowa, is seventy-six years old and knows that a heart condition will kill him before long. He begins a letter to his seven-year-old son, who will grow up with almost no memory of him, and the letter becomes the account of his own life and of the three generations of preachers before him.
Rating coming soonTaylor Greer leaves her home in Kentucky and heads west to see something of the country. In Oklahoma, near Cherokee territory, a stranger puts a baby girl into her car and disappears, and Taylor decides to keep the child, drives on until the car breaks down in Tucson, Arizona, and starts a life there with the help of people she meets by accident.
Rating coming soonWinnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years, and now Helen, who believes that she is dying, wants to bring everything into the open. Winnie's answer is that she will tell her American-born daughter, Pearl, about her own past, including the part of her life in China that she has never once discussed.
Rating coming soonRufus Scott is a jazz drummer in New York, and by the end of the first chapter he is dead by his own hand. What follows concerns the friends and lovers he left behind, among them a white southerner, a woman who loved him and a magazine editor's family, and the book follows all of them between Greenwich Village, Harlem and France.
Rating coming soonAddie Bundren is dying in a farmhouse in Mississippi while her eldest son builds her coffin outside the window. When she dies, her husband and children set out to carry the body to the town where she wants to be buried, and the journey takes them through flood, fire and the opinions of everyone they meet.
Rating coming soonAnthony Comstock Patch is a Harvard-educated young man with artistic ambitions and a substantial inheritance he has not yet received, and Gloria Gilbert is a celebrated beauty of the New York social scene. They marry into a life of parties, hotels and borrowed money, and spend the years of the Jazz Age waiting for the money that is supposed to make it all permanent.
Rating coming soonPaul Morel grows up in a mining family in the English Midlands, the son of a woman who married beneath the class she was raised in and a father who drinks and works underground. His mother turns her hopes and her possessiveness towards her sons, and Paul's attempts to love two very different women are made impossible by the bond he cannot break.
Rating coming soonMassoud Behrani is a former colonel in the Iranian air force who fled his country after the revolution, works in America at jobs far beneath his old life and hides the fact from the other exiles. Kathy Nicolo has been evicted from the house her family owned, because of unpaid taxes the county wrongly claimed she owed, and both of them want the same small bungalow.
Rating coming soonHarry Angstrom is twenty-six, a former high school basketball star who now sells a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeeler, and he is married to Janice, who is pregnant. They live in a small town near Brewer, Pennsylvania, with a two-year-old son, and one evening Harry gets into his car and drives away from all of it.
Rating coming soonIn the spring of 1984, two high school students in the small town of Oriental, North Carolina, fall in love. Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole come from opposite sides of the town and the difference between their families is not something either of them can ignore, and the years that follow take the two of them into separate lives far from where they began.
Rating coming soonTom and Maggie Tulliver grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire. Maggie is clever and hungry for affection, and her brother Tom is the one sent away to be educated and given authority in the family, and the difference in what is expected of the two of them shapes everything that happens between the brother and sister.
Rating coming soonSimon Basset, Duke of Hastings, comes back to London in 1813 with a reputation for arrogance and no intention of ever marrying. Daphne Bridgerton is the eldest daughter of a large and noisy family whose mother has pushed her into the marriage market, and the two of them agree to a pretence that will keep the matchmaking mothers of the ton away from both of them for the season.
Rating coming soonA correspondence that began as an exchange of letters has continued long enough for Sir Phillip Crane to feel that he knows Miss Bridgerton, although the two of them have never met. He writes to invite her to visit him, on the understanding that they may find they suit, and the visit is not what either of them had pictured from the letters.
Rating coming soonMichael Stirling is known in London as a rake, and the moment his life changed was the first time he saw Francesca Bridgerton. She married his cousin instead, and Michael spent years away from England, coming home when that marriage ended and finding that the woman he could never speak to honestly is now available, free and in need of a friend.
Rating coming soonAfter her mother dies, Whitney Stone's father cannot manage her high-spirited behaviour, so he sends her to France with her aunt and uncle to be educated. She leaves behind Paul Sevarin, the older man she has decided she is in love with, and returns several years later as a polished young woman expecting to win him, only to find that her father has already made an arrangement on her behalf.
Rating coming soonRowena Belleme has been ordered to produce an heir, and if she does not the stepbrother who controls her family's lands will destroy what is left of her inheritance. Her answer is to take a prisoner: Warrick deChaville, a knight, is seized and held so that he can father the child that will save her, and he is not the sort of man to accept such an arrangement for long.
Rating coming soonLady Aline Marsden has been raised for one purpose, which is to make an advantageous marriage to a man of her own class. Instead she gives herself to John McKenna, who works on her father's estate, and when the affair is discovered the consequences fall on the person with no family and no position to protect him. McKenna leaves England, and Aline stays behind to face what the household decides.
Rating coming soonAlexandra Lawrence is a country girl with no interest in the rules of fashionable society, and she marries Jordan Townsende, the Duke of Hawthorne, a man whose wealth and position have never obliged him to explain himself to anyone at all. Their marriage takes her into London society, where the two of them have to work out what they actually owe each other.
Rating coming soonAmanda Briars is a successful novelist who has reached her thirtieth birthday without ever having been kissed, and she decides to buy herself an improper present: one night with a stranger. The man who arrives at her house turns out to be Jack Devlin, a businessman of considerable reputation, and he is willing to keep the arrangement private only for a price.
Rating coming soonEvelinde has agreed to marry the most notorious laird in Scotland, known to everyone as the Devil of the Highlands. Her reason is simple: anything is preferable to remaining with her cruel stepmother, and although the stories about her new husband should give her pause, the man himself turns out to be harder to read than the rumours suggest.
Rating coming soonIliana Wildwood is being pressed into marriage by a baron who wants her lands, and her answer is to run for the Highlands and marry a Scottish laird instead. Duncan of Dunbar Castle is a warrior with a household and a reputation, and the wife who arrives with her own reasons for the marriage is not what he expected to be sent.
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.
