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.
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Rating coming soonChristina Wakefield is seventeen when the promise of adventure takes her to the Arabian desert, and she is captured soon after arriving there. The man holding her is a sheikh known as Abu, and she has met him before under another name in England, which complicates a situation in which she has no power at all and no way of getting home.
Rating coming soonVikings come from across the sea and take the Celtic noblewoman Brenna captive, and she swears that no barbarian will ever be her master. Garrick Haardrad, the son of the Viking chieftain, decides that he wants her for a wife, and he is a man who has never been refused anything he has asked for in his life.
Rating coming soonLady Kathryn Grayson has a privileged future ahead of her until her uncle decides that he wants her fortune, and the simplest way to take it is to have her committed to an asylum. Her escape is to hide in the carriage of a stranger, Lucien Montaine, the Marquess of Litchfield, who is travelling away from the city with no wish for company.
Rating coming soonJudith marries Gavin Montgomery at an altar decorated with flowers, and the ceremony is celebrated by everyone except the two people in it. She has decided that her husband will get nothing from her that he does not take, and Gavin, who has married her for reasons that have nothing to do with affection, is not prepared to be refused anything.
Rating coming soonEvangeline Jenner is the shyest of the group of young women known as the Wallflowers, and she stands to become extremely rich when her inheritance comes due. To get to it she has to escape the relatives who mean to take it from her, so she approaches Viscount St. Vincent, a notorious rake, with a proposal he has no respectable reason to accept.
Rating coming soonTara, princess of Helium and daughter of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, has suitors she has no patience for, and Gahan, jed of the city-state of Gathol, is one of them; her first impression of him is that he is vain and decorative. Then a storm catches her flier and drives it far beyond the country she knows, and she is taken captive in a region where the name of Helium carries no weight at all. The fifth Barsoom novel follows a princess who has to survive on her own.
Rating coming soonThe Inhibitors are ancient machines built to find and destroy any species that reaches a certain level of intelligence, and they have arrived at last where humanity lives. A first strike scatters the war veteran Clavain and a group of refugees into hiding, with leadership coming apart and the colony's position growing more desperate by the month. Then an unexpected visitor offers to lead the survivors to safety, and nobody can be certain whether she is an answer or the thing that finishes the job.
Rating coming soonIn the twenty-fourth century, eight million people escape the destruction of human civilisation by a genocidal alien enemy and settle a world they name Safehold, hoping to stay hidden. To keep the colony invisible from space, its leaders decide that it has to give up advanced technology altogether and live as a pre-industrial society. Administrator Eric Langhorne goes considerably further than the plan allows, and the first of the Safehold novels follows what his version of it does to the people who have to live inside.
Rating coming soonThe Arisians are ready to give the first Lens to a human being, and the honour goes to Virgil Samms, who will be known from then on as the First Lensman. The Lens is a symbol, an authority and a set of telepathic powers in one badge, and it can neither be forged nor worn by anyone it has not chosen. Samms has to earn it by building the Galactic Patrol, an incorruptible force strong enough to stand against the Eddorians, while assassins work against him at home.
Rating coming soonQuillon is a pathologist in Spearpoint, a city of more than thirty million people built on the surface of a vast artificial spire that the locals call the Godscraper. The world around it is divided into zones, regions of space-time that exist at different energy states, and each one supports a different level of technology. When Quillon is forced into exile, the only way to survive outside the zone he was born into is to keep moving, and every step takes him further from the last thing he understands.
Rating coming soonTom Dreyfus is a prefect, one of the officers of Panoply whose job is to keep order among the thousands of orbital habitats of the Glitter Band, and to investigate any of them that steps far enough out of line. When the entire population of a habitat is killed in what looks at first like an accident, the investigation runs into the interests of the very people who are supposed to be keeping the Band safe. The book is set before the catastrophe that the other Revelation Space novels are already living with.
Rating coming soonJack Holloway lives alone in the wilderness of the planet Zarathustra, prospecting for the valuable sunstones that the Chartered Zarathustra Company has made its business. One day he finds what he takes to be a small golden-furred animal, and then its family; the creatures turn out to be curious, capable tool users. Their existence matters enormously, because a planet with a native sapient species cannot be owned and worked the way the company owns and works this one.
Rating coming soonMiles Vorkosigan wants to court Ekaterin Vorsoisson, a widow whose husband died during the events Miles set in motion in Komarr, and he is fairly sure that approaching her openly so soon would end the whole idea before it began. So he hires her to design a garden beside Vorkosigan House, which gives him an excuse to be near her while pretending the arrangement is business. Meanwhile the imperial wedding of Emperor Gregor is approaching, and half the capital is watching what Miles does next.
Rating coming soonHumanity has been extinct for more than a century, and the Solar System has been left to the androids that humans built. Freya Nakamichi 47 is a femmebot, one of the last of her line still running, and the market for the work she was designed to do disappeared with the people who paid for it. She takes a job carrying a package from Mercury to Mars, which is enough to put her in the path of some very powerful humanoids who want what is inside it.
Rating coming soonCaptain Ivan Vorpatril is a staff officer on Komarr, cousin to Miles Vorkosigan, and comfortably short of the imperial succession now that other heirs have taken that particular headache away from him. An old friend in Barrayaran intelligence asks him to look into the identity of a young woman who may be on the hit list of a criminal syndicate, and Ivan's approach to the problem is to flirt with her. It goes badly, and then two men break into the flat he is tied up in.
Rating coming soonDon Harvey is taken out of his New Mexico boarding school in the middle of term so that he can join his parents on Mars, and the headmaster suggests the real reason is the prospect of war. Before he leaves, an old friend of the family asks him to deliver a ring to his father, which is how Don becomes the carrier of something he does not understand. He is arrested, released after the ring has been examined, and told that his friend has died of heart failure.
Rating coming soonAlien scientists from an alliance of races called the Galactic Hegemony study footage of the Battle of Agincourt and decide that humanity belongs in the same category as the Shongairi, a carnivorous species the Hegemony has recently admitted. On the strength of that verdict a Shongairi fleet is sent to bring Earth under Hegemony control. What the fleet does not expect, arriving in the Solar System centuries after the images were taken, is how far the technology on the ground has moved since.
Rating coming soonKyr has spent her whole life training to avenge the destruction of Earth. She was raised inside Gaea Station with the last scraps of humanity, taught to expect the day when she would face the Wisdom, the reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory in the Majo War, and she has become one of the best warriors of her generation. When Command assigns her brother to a posting that amounts to certain death, and refuses to explain why, she starts asking questions the station would rather she left alone.
Rating coming soonSharrow once led a personality-attuned combat team through one of the small commercial wars fought in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Now the Huhsz, a religious cult, holds that its messiah cannot be born until her family's female line has ended, and it has been granted permission to kill her. Her only way out is to find the last Lazy Gun, an ancient weapon of enormous destructive power that her own ancestor stole from the cult, before the Huhsz find her first.
Rating coming soonAdrana and Arafura Ness are sisters with a rare talent for bone reading, the art by which ships in this far-future system speak to one another. The skill gets them taken on as apprentices aboard Monetta's Mourn, a vessel whose captain, Pol Rackamore, makes his living cracking open the hidden, booby-trapped worlds that hold the relics of older civilisations. While the crew is hunting one of those baubles, the notorious pirate Bosa Sennen attacks them and separates the sisters.
Rating coming soonJohn Thomas Stuart XI is a high school senior in a small Rocky Mountain town who looks after Lummox, an extraterrestrial animal his great-grandfather brought home. Lummox has learned to speak, was once small enough to carry and is now large enough to ride, and after eating a used car and flattening a good deal of the neighbourhood, the creature has become the town's problem. The argument over what to do with it then stops being a local one.
Rating coming soonThe People's Republic of Haven is close to economic disaster, unable to keep paying for its welfare system and losing its grip on its own politics, and its leaders decide that a short war against Manticore will solve both problems at once. Honor Harrington returns to command of a brand-new battlecruiser after nearly a year recovering from her injuries, and the third Honor Harrington novel puts her in front of an overwhelmingly larger force as open warfare begins.
Rating coming soonAfter the scandal that followed her duel with Pavel Young, Captain Honor Harrington has withdrawn to the planet Grayson, where she holds the title of Steadholder and intends to do nothing more demanding than manage her land and recover from the death of the man she loved. The People's Republic of Haven is rising again from its defeat and looking at Grayson, and the young Grayson Space Navy needs her experience badly enough that refusing is not really an option.
Rating coming soonThe Flow, the extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel between the stars possible, is disappearing, and when it is gone the star systems of the Interdependency will be cut off from one another. Emperox Grayland II is trying to make the empire prepare for a collapse that most of its people would rather not think about. Claiming religious visions to force the issue wins her enemies inside her own church and among the great houses.
Rating coming soonThe world is run by six mega-corporations, and its population is divided between citizens who are bound to serve corporate goals and the dispossessed, who have no status at all. The corporate armies are at war with the separatists of Mars, who are accused of making the whole population of Sao Paulo disappear. Soldiers are broken down into light in order to be sent to distant battlefronts, some of them come back changed, and all of them learn that talking about it is punished.
Rating coming soonWhiteChrys is a cryocorp on the planet Kibou-daini, a company whose business is freezing the sick and the dying in the hope that they can be revived and cured later, and it is opening a subsidiary inside the Barrayaran Empire. Emperor Gregor sends his troubleshooter Miles Vorkosigan to establish what the arrangement actually means. An attempt to abduct the attendees at a conference puts Miles in the underground Cryocombs, where the frozen are stored.
Rating coming soonNews of the coming collapse of the Flow streams has spread across the Interdependency, and there is no longer any question that the empire will fall with them. The End system has become the most valuable place in human space, because it holds the only planet able to support life outside a closed habitat. The disgraced House of Nohamapetan has taken End and blockaded its one remaining incoming Flow stream.
Rating coming soonJack Holloway is a rebellious former lawyer working as a contract surveyor for Zaracorp on the colony planet Zara XXIII, and he is fired for causing environmental damage after letting his dog set off explosives again. The explosion uncovers a seam of sunstones worth a fortune, and Holloway talks the Zaracorp manager into a rider that gives him a much larger share of what comes out of it. Then he meets a family of clever, cat-like creatures, and the claim stops being a simple matter of contract law.
Rating coming soonAn alien armada is sitting at the edge of Teixcalaanli space, nobody can communicate with it, nobody can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options. She asks for a diplomatic envoy, and Three Seagrass, now a senior official in the Information Ministry, smuggles herself to the frontlines by way of Lsel Station, where she persuades Mahit Dzmare to come with her. Mahit is asked by one of Lsel's leaders to sabotage the contact effort.
Rating coming soonThe Starship Titanic is sabotaged before its maiden voyage is properly under way, and the damage brings on a catastrophe the story calls a Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure, leaving the liner crashed on Earth. Three humans from the planet it has landed on are recruited to help repair it, which means dealing with the ship's central computer as well as the bomb on board. Two of the people behind the sabotage had arranged it for the insurance.
Rating coming soonTwo rises in sea level have left most of New York City permanently under water, and the streets have become canals while the skyscrapers have become islands. The residents have adapted: the upper floors are still lived in, and the flooded city, nicknamed SuperVenice, is as busy as it ever was. Against that backdrop the book follows a group of people who live in one building, the MetLife Tower on 23rd Street, and the changes the water keeps forcing on the city around them.
Rating coming soonAn alien invasion is under way in China, and humanity is divided about how to answer it: the Chinese government is determined to fight on its own despite losses close to catastrophic. Captain Wit O'Toole of the Mobile Operations Police and Mazer Rackham have destroyed one of the three alien landers, but they did it without authorisation and with a nuclear warhead they were not permitted to use, which leaves them in Chinese custody. The third book of the First Formic War follows the attempt to turn isolated victories into the defence of a planet.
Rating coming soonGora has no water, no air and no native life, and its only advantage is that it sits near a transit hub where several wormhole tunnels meet, which makes it a useful stopover for ships crossing the Galactic Commons. The Five-Hop One-Stop on its surface sells fuel, transit permits and supplies to long-haul crews. Then a technical failure brings down almost every satellite in orbit and halts traffic for days, and the travellers stranded at the Five-Hop have to spend that time in one another's company.
Rating coming soonA man wakes up naked and freezing, with no memory, on a ship he does not recognise. A small girl leads him through a series of corridors in search of somewhere warm, calling him Teacher, and together they meet other strange inhabitants of the vessel as they try to stay alive. The ship is a generation ship that has lost its way, and the answers to what happened to it are stored in fragments left behind by people who have been through this before.
Rating coming soonA century after the Sentience Wars nearly ended intelligent life in the galaxy, the survivors settled on a way of celebrating their continued existence: an interspecies music contest called the Metagalactic Grand Prix. For a species to be admitted to galactic civilisation rather than declared non-sentient and destroyed, it has to take part, and it must not come last. Humanity's entry turns out to be Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, a washed-up glam rock band with only two members still alive and able to perform.
Rating coming soonKindan has taken a place as an apprentice at the Harper Hall, where he has to deal with a bully, a relationship the people around him consider forbidden, and the responsibility that comes with being a protector of the hall's new female apprentices after the Masterharper ends the old prohibition on women becoming harpers. Then an illness arrives that spreads like influenza, and it threatens to do what centuries of Threadfall never managed: kill every human being on Pern. The book sits shortly before the third return of Thread.
Rating coming soonFor forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia's home, the place where she married, raised her surviving child, kept a garden and grew old. Then the company that owns the colony decides to abandon it and ship the residents away in cryogenic sleep, and Ofelia, who doubts she would survive the freezing and does not want to leave the graves of her family, stays behind. She hides in the woods until the others are gone, and lives alone in the village until the planet's own inhabitants make contact.
Rating coming soonSet nearly a century after the events of Dune: The Battle of Corrin, this is the third book of the Great Schools of Dune trilogy, which follows the founding years of the organisations that will matter in Frank Herbert's Dune. The Bene Gesserit, the Mentat schools and the Spacing Guild are all still being formed, and all of them are threatened by the anti-technology forces that have been gaining power since the Butlerian Jihad. The volume closes the sequence and accounts for the origins of the Navigators.
Rating coming soonIn December 1985, nineteen-year-old Frank Mackey planned to escape his family's cramped flat on Faithful Place and start again in London with his girlfriend Rosie Daly, and the two of them were to meet at midnight at the top of the cul-de-sac. Rosie never appeared. Frank took it that she had dumped him, and he left Ireland without going home again. Twenty-two years later, Rosie's suitcase turns up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place.
Rating coming soonSMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, intends to kill James Bond in a way that will disgrace both him and the British Secret Service, and the lure it has chosen is Tatiana Romanova, a cipher clerk, along with the Spektor, a Soviet decoding machine she offers to bring with her. Much of the book takes place in Istanbul and on the Orient Express, and Bond spends his section of it on a journey he has been allowed to believe is his own operation.
Rating coming soonCordelia Gray, twenty-two years old, arrives at the London office of the Pryde Detective Agency to find that her partner Bernie Pryde has killed himself, leaving her the agency, its unlicensed handgun and a failing business. Her first client, the assistant to a prominent scientist named Sir Ronald Callender, hires her to discover why his son Mark hanged himself after leaving Cambridge to work as a gardener. Cordelia goes to Cambridge expecting to explain a suicide, and begins to suspect that Mark was murdered.
Rating coming soonEleven-year-old Emily Steiner left a North Carolina church meeting one October afternoon and walked along a lakeside path towards her house two miles away. She was taken from her bedroom and her body was found by the lake days later. The case looks like the work of a serial killer who has evaded the FBI for years, and Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist and chief medical examiner, is called in to help, with the help of a clandestine research facility in Tennessee where human remains are studied as they decay.
Rating coming soonWhen a woman's severed leg is delivered to Robin Ellacott at the office of the private detective Cormoran Strike, the package carries a message quoting a song that Strike last heard as a favourite of his dead mother. It points him back at the men he has reason to suspect from his own past, and while he works through the list the sender keeps watching Robin and building a plan around her. Robin, who has spent a year at the agency, is now an investigator as well as a secretary.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher travels from South Dakota to the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th MP, to finally meet its commander, Major Susan Turner, whose voice he has been talking to for months. When he arrives he is told that Turner has been relieved of command, and that two cases have been opened against him: a suspected homicide from sixteen years earlier, and a lawsuit from a woman who says that she and Reacher had an affair that produced her teenage son. Two men in a motel car park give him until the next morning to leave town.
Rating coming soonPaul is a lonely student at the University of Toronto who gives some tablets to band members he was hoping to befriend, one of whom dies shortly afterwards, and who then flees to the apartment of his half-sister Vincent. Five years later the two of them are working at a hotel at the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island, where a line of graffiti written on the lobby window with an acid marker is discovered. Vincent meets the investor who owns the hotel, and the book follows what that meeting costs everyone connected to him.
Rating coming soonStephanie Plum is still new to bounty hunting, so her boss and cousin Vinnie hands her what should be a simple job: bring in Kenny Mancuso, a local man accused of shooting his best friend in the knee and then skipping bail. Kenny is the black sheep cousin of the vice cop Joe Morelli, which puts Morelli on the same trail. A second case competes for Stephanie's time, involving twenty-four coffins that have gone missing from a funeral home, and the friend Kenny shot is shot again.
Rating coming soonMickey Haller is a Los Angeles defence attorney who has spent a year recovering from his wounds and from the painkillers he took while they healed, and he is ready to return to court. When the defence lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his caseload, including the trial of the studio executive Walter Elliott, who is accused of killing his wife and her lover. The trial is due to begin in nine days, and the detective working Vincent's murder believes the killer may come after Haller next.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana, who can hear other people's thoughts, and she has had a run of bad luck. A colleague of hers is murdered and nobody seems to take it seriously, and then she is attacked by a creature that leaves her poisoned. The local vampires save her life by drawing the poison out, and when one of them asks her to do something in return, she agrees. The favour takes her to Dallas to use her telepathy to find a vampire who has gone missing.
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.
