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 34 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 soonMarie Antoinette is fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranges for her to leave her family and her country to marry the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France. She comes of age in the most public of arenas, and her marriage does not produce the child and heir that she and the French people expect, because her husband repeatedly fails to consummate it. The novel is her own account of her life from Versailles to a prison cell.
Rating coming soonLucanus grows up in the household of his stepfather, the Roman governor of Antioch, studies medicine in Alexandria and becomes one of the greatest physicians of the ancient world, travelling through the Mediterranean healing the sick. In time he learns of the life and death of Christ and recognises in him the God he has been seeking, and he sets out to discover everything he can about a man he never met. The novel is the story of how he came to write the third Gospel.
Rating coming soonA devastating palace fire has killed the royal family of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, leaving Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen Nefertiti, as a survivor whose family has been branded heretical. She is pushed aside and left to run wild in the palace until the Pharaoh's aunt takes her in hand and has her educated as a future queen. Then she catches the eye of the crown prince, and much of Egypt objects to the match.
Rating coming soonJohn Tradescant is the greatest gardening pioneer of his day and a man of humble birth who is trusted by politicians, aristocrats and royalty. He collects, raises and nurtures plants and travels the known world looking for new species, and his position gives him a view of the most secret activities at the court of Charles I. His loyalties are tested when he enters the orbit of the Duke of Buckingham, the most powerful man in England.
Rating coming soonJarndyce and Jarndyce is a case in the Court of Chancery that has been grinding on for years, and it has drawn a disparate group of people into its orbit. Ada and Richard Clare have an inheritance that the legal costs are gradually eating; Esther Summerson is a ward of court whose parentage is a deepening mystery; and around them are the lawyer Tulkinghorn, the detective Inspector Bucket and a crossing sweeper named Jo. Dickens published it as a serial across twenty parts.
Rating coming soonJo March and her husband Professor Bhaer run Plumfield, a progressive school where the characters of Little Women have grown up and begun new work. With two sons of their own and twelve rescued orphan boys in the house, they try to make the school a happy, comfortable and stimulating place. The novel follows the life of the school and the children in it.
Rating coming soonThomas Gradgrind is a schoolmaster who believes in facts and nothing else, and the novel is Dickens's portrait of a Victorian industrial society built on that philosophy. It is set in Coketown, a northern mill town of red brick and machinery, and it puts Gradgrind's children and the people around them through the consequences of an education that leaves no room for imagination.
Rating coming soonMaxine Hong Kingston grows up Chinese-American in California, living in two worlds at once: the America her parents emigrated to, and the China of her mother's talk stories. Her mother tells her traditional tales of strong, wily women warriors, and those stories clash with the expectations placed on a girl in the family and the neighbourhood. The book blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales.
Rating coming soonDave Eggers's parents both died of cancer within a few weeks of each other, and the book is his account of what happened afterwards: he took over the care of his younger brother Christopher, known as Toph, and moved with him to California. It is a memoir about grief, family, and the business of being in your twenties and suddenly responsible for a child.
Rating coming soonDag, Claire and Andy are three friends in their twenties living together in the Coachella Valley in southern California, working at badly paid jobs with no future in them and telling one another stories. The tales they exchange are by turns heartfelt accounts of their own lives and fantastical stories of their own invention, and the novel is arranged so that the tales are told by different characters across three parts.
Rating coming soonDavid Lurie is fifty-two, twice divorced, and a professor of communications at a technical university in Cape Town who teaches a course in romantic literature. An affair with one of his students costs him his job and his standing, and he retreats to the isolated smallholding of his daughter Lucy in the Eastern Cape. What begins as a visit turns into an extended stay, and the book follows what happens there.
Rating coming soonEvelyn Couch is a middle-aged housewife in a slump when she meets Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly woman in a nursing home, and begins visiting her every week. Ninny tells her about her youth in Whistle Stop, Alabama, where her sister-in-law Idgie and Idgie's friend Ruth ran a cafe. The novel moves between the present and the past, and the two stories feed each other.
Rating coming soonClaireece Precious Jones is an illiterate sixteen-year-old in Harlem who has so far been invisible: to the father who rapes her, to the mother who beats her, and to the authorities who treat her as one more casualty. She is pregnant with a second child by her father when her school discovers the pregnancy and she is sent to an alternative school, where she meets a teacher who takes her seriously.
Rating coming soonThe third Dollanganger novel is narrated by the two half-brothers of the household. Jory is fourteen, good-looking and talented, and wants to follow his mother Cathy into ballet; Bart is nine, sees himself as plain and clumsy, and feels inferior to his brother. Their parents are living as husband and wife while hiding their history from everybody, and Bart has begun retreating into a world of his own making.
Rating coming soonBernadette Fox is a notorious figure in Seattle: to her husband, who works at Microsoft, a fearlessly opinionated partner; to the other mothers at her daughter's private school, a disgrace; and to Bee, her fifteen-year-old daughter, simply her best friend and her mother. Then Bernadette disappears, shortly before the family trip to Antarctica that Bee asked for as a reward for her perfect report card.
Rating coming soonA young man arrives in Ukraine with a tattered photograph in his hand, looking for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis fifty years earlier. His guides are Alex, a translator whose English has become a language of its own, a blind old man haunted by memories of the war, and an undersexed guide dog called Sammy Davis, Jr, Jr. The book tells the story of that search and the history of the town it is trying to find.
Rating coming soonSatan and the rebel angels, defeated and cast out of heaven, plot their revenge on God, and the struggle they begin ranges across heaven, hell and earth. Its victims are Adam and Eve, who are tempted and fall, and the poem is the story of the Fall of Man told on an epic scale. Milton wrote it in blank verse, and it is divided into twelve books.
Rating coming soonThe vampire world is in crisis. Vampires have been proliferating out of control, and burnings have begun around the world, massacres on the scale of those carried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned. Old vampires, roused from their sleep in the earth, are doing the bidding of a Voice that commands them to burn the mavericks of their own kind in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto and San Francisco.
Rating coming soonSavaged by the K'Chain Nah'Ruk, the Bonehunters march for Kolanse, where an unknown fate is waiting for them. The army is tormented by questions and stands on the edge of mutiny, and Adjunct Tavore will not relent: one final act remains to her, if she can hold the soldiers together and if the alliances she has forged can survive what is coming. Awaiting her and her allies are the Forkrul Assail, the final arbiters of humanity.
Rating coming soonThe Alexandrian Society looks after the lost knowledge of the great civilisations of antiquity, and it is the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. A place in it brings wealth, power and prestige, and once a decade the six most uniquely talented magicians alive are selected as candidates. The newest six include two rivals who between them control the physical world, a naturalist who can read the language of life, a telepath and an empath.
Rating coming soonThe warhammer Aegis-fang has ended up in the hands of the pirate captain Sheila Kree, and Wulfgar is following her. When Drizzt Do'Urden and his companions leave Mithral Hall in search of Wulfgar, they find themselves on the trail of the hammer as well, a path that will lead them to a reunion and to the last battle for the heart and soul of their friend.
Rating coming soonRanulf is the English conqueror known as the Black Lyon, darkly handsome and rich beyond imagining, and a man no woman has been able to win. Then he meets Lyonene, a tawny-haired beauty whose temper matches his own, and the two of them are married after a whirlwind courtship. A web of lies spread by a jealous rival drives Lyonene away from her home and across the Irish Sea, and only Ranulf can undo the plot against their marriage.
Rating coming soonJace Montgomery comes to Chandler, Colorado, as a stranger: tall, proud and homesick for his family in Maine. He takes immediately to Nellie Grayson, the shy elder sister who has spent her life helping her beautiful younger sister Terel become the belle of the town, and gives Nellie her very first kiss. Nellie has no confidence that a man like Jace would choose her over Terel, and an unexpected new friend helps her see the situation differently.
Rating coming soonSara Fielding is a prim and proper gentlewoman who writes novels, and curiosity takes her out of her country cottage and into the London gambling world of Derek Craven, a man who rose from poverty to become the owner of the most exclusive gaming house in the city. He finds that the innocent woman he had dismissed as a mouse can be something quite different, and she finds that a cynical gambler can be shaken by what he feels.
Rating coming soonNeville Wyatt, Earl of Kilbourne, is waiting at the altar for his bride when a ragged woman runs down the aisle instead. He stares at her, and then announces to the assembled company that she is his wife: Lily, the woman he married, loved and lost on a battlefield in Portugal, whom he had believed to be dead. He says he will honour his commitment to her, and then Lily speaks, and what she asks for changes what he had planned.
Rating coming soonWulfric Bedwyn, the Duke of Bewcastle, is the eldest of the six Bedwyn brothers and sisters, and he is cool, arrogant and mysterious, the head of a family of passion and privilege. All of London is waiting for his arrival at the most glittering social event of the season, and the only woman in the room who is not trying to capture his attention is the one who interests him. Then he invites Christine Derrick to become his mistress.
Rating coming soonIn the twelfth century, with Scotland under siege, King David looks for warriors willing to fight for him with their blood and their hearts. Waryk de Graham, the greatest of them, is knighted Lord Lion, and the honoured position of Scottish chieftain comes with a price attached: a Viking bride who has sworn to resist him. Mellyora MacAdin rules her ancestral lands like a Valkyrie, and now she is an unwilling captive of his power.
Rating coming soonIn colonial New England, the British are hunting a masked patriot whose raids frustrate them at every turn, and he is known only as the Raider. Jessica Taggert, proud and quick-tempered, is thrilled by the Raider's midnight embrace and despises Alexander Montgomery, the drunken town buffoon. The two men are the same person, and only his success against the Redcoats will let him tell her so.
Rating coming soonFreya is eighteen when she is taken captive in battle, and she is furious that her captor takes no account of her noble birth and treats her as he would any woman captured in a raid. Alaric, the prince who took her, has spent years planning to humiliate the daughter of a man he hates, and he intends to keep her as a slave in his own household. Neither of them plans for what develops between them.
Rating coming soonIn Wessex in 873, Kristen Haardrad is nineteen and defiant, and she has been made a prisoner by Royce, Thane of Wyndhurst. He intends to keep her as a slave, and she has no intention of being one, and the two of them recognise in each other a pride and a strength neither had expected. He also carries a hatred for a crime committed by her people, and it was not her crime.
Rating coming soonBrianna Munro escapes into Scotland at night to avoid the marriage her guardian has arranged for her, and travelling alone and fearing for her safety she takes shelter at Castle Glenloch. She intends to stay for a single night, and then she meets Hugh Christie, Laird Glenloch. She tells him she is a lady's maid running from a vengeful employer, and he can see that she is hiding something.
Rating coming soonRue has thought Hawke Masters the most insufferable man she has ever met from the moment she saw him: proud, arrogant and overbearing, and insultingly clear that although her grandfather's shotgun forced him to marry her, nothing would make him share a bed with a scrawny backwoods girl like her. Then he takes her home to his ranch to look after his orphaned niece and nephew.
Rating coming soonLady Averill Mortagne has spent years learning to control a fierce temper, and her father's habit of parading her in front of English lords who look sideways at her flame-coloured hair is testing it. Her only relief is the time she spends with Kade Stewart, a wounded Scot her brother brought home from the Crusades. He is grateful to her for helping save his life, and he does not think he could subject a gentle lady to the life of a laird's bride.
Rating coming soonCatherine Enderly is sixteen and on her way to boarding school when she is abducted and taken from England to the coast of Ireland, where she becomes the prisoner of Sean Culhane, a young and powerful man who has sworn vengeance against her family. She meets him with a defiance out of proportion to her size, and his determination to have his revenge becomes complicated by what he begins to feel for her.
Rating coming soonAdrian Montfort, Earl of Mowbray, has been warned that Lady Clarissa Crambray is dangerous: she steps on toes and sets things alight, and she has earned a nickname for the mayhem she causes. He is a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and considers one woman and her unfortunate past to be a challenge he can handle. Clarissa, meanwhile, wants a husband, though possibly not as much as her mother wants one for her.
Rating coming soonLady Emmalene Eberhart was eager to be a good wife, and when her husband died she was still a virgin. Her dowry and her hand then become part of a struggle over feudal power, and she is promised to Amaury de Aneford, a landless knight whose sword has preserved the King's crown. On the wedding day a rival knight is already riding towards the bridal chamber.
Rating coming soonAfter three London seasons looking for a husband, Daisy Bowman has been told by her father that she must find one now, and that if she cannot then she will marry the man he chooses: the ruthless and aloof Matthew Swift. Daisy is appalled, and being a Bowman she refuses to admit defeat, deciding to marry anyone rather than Matthew. What she does not expect is that Matthew has charms of his own.
Rating coming soonDanielle D'Aville is the ward of Edward III, and she is sworn to obey the King's order that she marry her enemy: Adrien MacLachlan, the Scottish knight who masterminded the fall of Aville, the home she loved. She becomes the reluctant wife of a man she has promised herself she will despise, and she is carried off to his castle in the Scottish Highlands.
Rating coming soonMarty Claridge's husband is killed in a horse accident, and she marries Clark Davis, a man who needs a mother for his daughter Missie. The arrangement is practical for both of them, and over the months that follow Marty becomes attached to the child and to her husband. When the wagon train returns in the spring, she has to decide whether to go home or stay.
Rating coming soonLinnet Berry Thrynne is a beauty, and she is betrothed to a beast. The man she is to marry is difficult and unlikely ever to love her in return, and she has no idea of the danger that presents to her own heart, or of what she will have to decide about the life she had planned for herself. The novel is a retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, set among the English nobility and in Wales.
Rating coming soonMadeline Deveridge is well aware of the whispers behind her back, and of the rumour that she dispatched her husband to the next world and concealed the crime. Being called the Wicked Widow is not, however, her most pressing problem: she has come to believe that she and her beloved aunt are being haunted, and there is nobody she can ask for help without inviting more of the gossip that already surrounds her.
Rating coming soonLady Sophia Bryant has no intention of ever marrying, but her parents have been estranged for fourteen years and her one wish is to bring them back together. Announcing a betrothal, even a false one, would force them both to attend to her. Lord Francis Sutton, a handsome and notorious rake, is perfect for the deception, being always ready for a game provided it costs him nothing.
Rating coming soonGlory Parsons dreads going home for the holidays. Her brother was killed in a war, and Jesse Bainbridge was lost to her through her own weakness: she left him abruptly ten years earlier after promising to love him forever, and she never told him why. Jesse is now the sheriff of Pearl Lake and responsible for his orphaned niece, and he has no intention of getting involved with her again.
Rating coming soonPoppy Hathaway loves her unconventional family, though what she longs for herself is an ordinary life. Then she meets Harry Rutledge, the enigmatic owner of a hotel and an inventor with wealth, power and a dangerous hidden side to the way he lives. When their flirtation compromises her reputation and the season's gossip starts, Poppy surprises everybody by accepting his proposal of marriage, and finds that she has married a man who will share his passion but not his trust.
Rating coming soonEdie was a ruined American heiress until the devil-may-care Duke of Margrave agreed to her proposal of a marriage of convenience. Five years later she is delighted with the arrangement, particularly because her husband is living on another continent. Then a brush with death brings him home, and he proposes a new bargain: ten days to win a willing kiss from his wife.
Rating coming soonJonty Rand was raised in a bawdy house and has posed as a boy all her life to keep the cowboys who use the place from noticing her. The most notorious of them, in her view, is Cord McBain. When her grandmother's dying wish makes Cord her guardian, Jonty is sure she will never be able to tell him who she is.
Rating coming soonCatherine Tremyne was stolen from her father's Cornish estate as an infant and raised by Gypsies, and she has grown into a beautiful young woman without knowing where she came from. Her life is turned upside down when she is carried off to Paris by Jason Savage, which begins a long passage through danger and captivity at the hands of a man she cannot escape.
Rating coming soonCorinne is the scandalous darling of Boston society, and she sails halfway around the world to Hawaii to ruin the man who ruined her: Jared Burkett, who took her, humiliated her, and left her with feelings she did not want to have. She hates him as much as she wants him, and he wants to possess her as well, whatever the cost to both of them.
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.
