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 36 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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Rating coming soonHumanity was lifted off the Earth and scattered across the galaxy at random by a machine intelligence called the Eschaton. When a young planetary civilisation is murdered by something that makes its sun explode without warning, the investigation has to work out who owns a weapon that breaks causality. Meanwhile Rachel Mansour is asked to explain her expenses, and Martin Springfield is looking for work.
Rating coming soonTen thousand years from now, human civilisation covers a great many worlds, and Alex Benedict makes his living buying and selling the objects it left behind. A woman brings him a cup covered in archaic symbols and asks what it is worth. The answer is that it came from the Seeker, one of the first faster-than-light ships, a colony vessel crewed by people who wanted a free world and never said where they found one.
Rating coming soonThe passengers of the no-ship Ithaca have been searching for a new home for nearly two decades, carrying among them revivals of figures from the long history of their species while an old enemy hunts them through the darkness. Behind them, in what was the Old Empire, a commander is trying to hold a fracturing human alliance together for one last stand. The machines that were once feared as servants are now the ones doing the hunting.
Rating coming soonKyle McAvoy comes out of Yale Law School with three years of public service ahead of him and a job waiting at the end of it. Then two men who say they are federal agents introduce him to a man called Bennie Wright, who owns a videotape from a party in Kyle's undergraduate apartment and wants something in return for keeping it hidden: a place inside a large New York firm, and information only an insider can reach.
Rating coming soonFlynne Fisher lives in a small town in a near-future America where steady work is scarce and the drug trade is the largest employer. Her brother Burton, a veteran with an implant and a limp, is offered security work that he thinks takes place inside a simulation, and when he cannot take the shift Flynne sits in for him. What she sees through the headset is a murder in a city that is not hers.
Rating coming soonTheodore Decker is thirteen when he and his mother visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a day that ends with a bomb going off inside it. His mother is killed. In the confusion he carries out a small Dutch painting she had pointed out to him, and the painting stays with him through the years that follow, through a friend's family home on Park Avenue and the antiques trade in which he learns his business.
Rating coming soonEco-terrorists are arranging a series of disasters dramatic enough to frighten the world into treating climate change as the emergency they believe it is. Their campaign is managed by a man who moves easily among environmental foundations and their donors, and the lawyer drawn into the trail has to work out who is staging the events and why the intelligence he is given keeps pointing in the wrong direction.
Rating coming soonRobert Langdon wakes in a Florence hospital with a head injury and no memory of the days before it, repeating a phrase in his sleep: seek and find. There is no time to work out what happened to him, because somebody is coming up the corridor with a gun, and the days that follow lead him through Dante's circles of hell and an old map left by a man with a plan.
Rating coming soonIn 1998 a young woman is abducted and killed outside a small East Texas town, and the man who did it watches the police arrest a high school football player for the crime. Nine years later Travis Boyette is ill and decides to clear the innocent man's name. Donté Drumm has days left before his execution, and the lawyer fighting for him is running out of ways to be heard.
Rating coming soonRichard Hannay comes back to London from Rhodesia with a modest fortune and nothing to do, and a neighbour in his building tells him about a plot to throw Europe into war. Days later Hannay finds the man dead in his flat and becomes both the obvious suspect and the next target. He goes on the run across Scotland with the police behind him and the conspirators ahead, knowing only a set of numbers.
Rating coming soonA raid on a Soviet oil refinery leaves the country facing a collapse it cannot hide, and the Politburo decides that the quickest way to recover is to take the oil of the Persian Gulf. NATO and the Warsaw Pact are drawn into a conventional war fought across Europe and the Atlantic, with neither side willing to be the first to reach for nuclear weapons.
Rating coming soonMr Griffin is the English teacher nobody at the high school can please, and a group of his students decide to frighten him into changing. Their plan is to take him away for an evening, and it is meant to be a lesson rather than a crime. It goes wrong, and the five of them are left with something they cannot undo.
Rating coming soonWhen three American officials are killed in Colombia, the President's advisers see a chance to strike at the drug cartels behind the attack without admitting that they are at war. The operation runs through the Caribbean and the Andes, its details hidden even from some of the people carrying it out, until a man at the CIA notices that the reports crossing his desk do not add up.
Rating coming soonThe National Security Agency's code-breaking supercomputer meets a cipher it cannot break, which would be a problem for any bureaucracy in any week. The programme was written by a former employee who objects to the agency reading private messages, and he has arranged for the algorithm to be published if anything happens to him. Then he dies, and the head cryptographer has a day to find out who is holding the key.
Rating coming soonTroy Phelan has spent his life making a fortune and hating his family, and the will he signs shortly before his death leaves eleven billion dollars to a daughter nobody has heard of. His children contest it, and the firm executing the estate sends a lawyer to find the woman named in the paper. She is living in the interior of Brazil with no interest in money.
Rating coming soonJack Forman loses his job in software and takes the only work he can get, which is judging whether a company's new technology is real by trying to defeat it. The technology is a swarm of microscopic machines built to work together like a living thing, and the company's founders are not telling him how much of it has escaped. Then people start disappearing, and the swarm is learning.
Rating coming soonPhilip Ashley was raised on a Cornish estate by his older cousin Ambrose, and the two of them lived contentedly without women until Ambrose travelled to Florence for his health. There he married, and there he died, writing letters home that blamed his wife. Philip inherits the estate and the letters, and then Rachel herself arrives in Cornwall.
Rating coming soonIn 1941 the Lecter family's castle in Lithuania is overrun and the boy Hannibal, eight years old, loses the people he loves in the winter that follows. He grows up after the war in France, in the care of his uncle's widow, Lady Murasaki, and decides that he will find the men who took his family and deal with them himself.
Rating coming soonFrannie O'Neill is a veterinarian in a small Colorado town where her husband was murdered three years ago, and she is still working through what that did to her when an FBI agent rents the cabin behind her house. Then she sees a child running through the woods, a girl with wings, and the search for the girl leads to a laboratory and to the children who were made in it.
Rating coming soonMaud Ruthyn is seventeen and an orphan, and her father's will leaves her in the care of her uncle Silas, a man the family has spent years not talking about. His house at Bartram-Haugh is run down, his household is unsettling, and the fortune Maud brings with her is the only thing standing between her guardian and ruin.
Rating coming soonA scholar named Melmoth sold his soul for a hundred and fifty extra years of life, and the time he was granted is running out. He travels the world looking for somebody desperate enough to take the bargain off his hands, and the people he visits, prisoners, exiles and the bereaved, each have their own account of the offer he made them.
Rating coming soonThe Dollanganger children lose their father in a car crash, and their mother takes them to live in secret in an enormous house, where their grandmother locks them in an upstairs room and their mother promises the arrangement will soon be over. Days turn into years, and the four of them learn what their mother is prepared to sacrifice for the fortune waiting downstairs.
Rating coming soonRosamond Treverton believes she is the daughter of the mistress of Porthgenna Tower, and twenty years after that woman's death the truth about her parentage is still hidden, written down by a servant and left in an unused room. A blind girl, a lost letter and a house with one door that is never opened carry the secret until somebody finds it.
Rating coming soonThomas Small is thirteen when his family moves from North Carolina to Ohio to live in the house of a long-dead abolitionist, a building full of hidden passages that once sheltered people escaping slavery. His father has taken the lease in order to study the house, and somebody in the town wants them gone.
Rating coming soonThe Baudelaire orphans are separated on a mountain road, with Violet and Klaus left behind while Sunny is carried off by Count Olaf and his troupe. To get their sister back they have to climb the Mortmain Mountains in the cold, follow the marks left by a vanished organisation, and work out who among the people they meet can be trusted.
Rating coming soonOdd Thomas has gone to a monastery in the mountains to live quietly and decide what to do with his life. Then a presence he dreads appears in its halls, a monk goes missing, and something with a taste for violence arrives with the winter storm. Odd has to work out what is inside the abbey before the thing he has seen comes true.
Rating coming soonA routine arrest ends in a shooting in which a young girl is killed, and Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer becomes the defendant in a wrongful death case. While she waits for the trial and for the city to decide what it thinks of her, she takes a break in a quiet coastal town and reads about murders there that resemble a case that has haunted her for years.
Rating coming soonA former First Lady dies, and the funeral at St Patrick's Cathedral brings the country's most famous people into one building. During the service armed men seal the doors and take them hostage, demanding a ransom from each captive personally and killing one to show that the terms are serious. The detective sent in as negotiator is Michael Bennett, a widower with ten children at home.
Rating coming soonTwo joggers are found in a San Francisco park, killed in a way that looks less like an attack than an animal's work, and the local police ask Washington for help. Detective Alex Cross arrives to find a case that runs across the country, witnesses who belong to a carefully organised group, and a killer who has been doing this for years.
Rating coming soonTwo species older than humanity have been fighting a war across the galaxy for longer than humans have existed, and one of them has been quietly breeding human genetic lines for generations to produce a weapon. The novel opens with the end of Atlantis, passes through imperial Rome, and follows the families whose descendants will have to take part in the fight.
Rating coming soonTwenty-five years after the defeat of the Empire, Leia Organa sits in a Senate that can barely pass a motion, split between planets that want their own authority and those who want a strong centre. When rumours of a new criminal power reach her, the investigation she opens will put the secret of her parentage in front of the whole galaxy.
Rating coming soonSamuel Johnson is melancholy, ill and increasingly difficult company when he is introduced to the family of a London brewer, whose country house at Streatham becomes his refuge. He grows closest to the eldest daughter, Hester Maria, known as Queeney, and the girl watches a friendship between her mother and the great man that nobody in the house can quite name.
Rating coming soonThis is a retelling of the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and of the legend that has grown around Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. The story is told through the voices of the people who were there, in a deliberately Elizabethan style, and the character the book is named after is only one figure among many.
Rating coming soonA narrator named Bram Presser tries to find out what happened to his grandparents during the war, working from the small hoard of writing and correspondence they left behind. Jakub Rand and Dasa Roubickova were deported from Poland to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz, and the closer he gets to the record the more the family stories and the documents refuse to agree.
Rating coming soonIn 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano Lopez begins courting Eliza Lynch, an Irish woman who becomes his mistress and follows him to Paraguay. In Asuncion she lives as the first lady of a country she does not understand, while the man she came with rises to lead the nation into the Paraguayan War of 1865 to 1870.
Rating coming soonThe Zane family's settlement at Wheeling, on the Virginia frontier, is the furthest American outpost in that country, and in 1782 it comes under attack by Native American and Loyalist forces. The novel follows the family through the years of the Revolution, and the youngest daughter, Betty, whose own part in the defence is remembered in the family's history.
Rating coming soonHenry Rathbone and Clara Harris grew up in the same house as stepbrother and stepsister, and their marriage was the subject of gossip before it happened. In April 1865 they accepted an invitation to sit in the President's box at Ford's Theatre, and the night of the assassination became the event that defined the rest of their lives.
Rating coming soonGiordano Bruno has left the monastery and the Inquisition behind and reached Elizabethan England, where his ideas about astronomy and other worlds attract the attention of the queen's spymaster. Sent to Oxford to look into a matter for Francis Walsingham, he finds the university full of old arguments, a killer at work among the fellows, and the deaths treated as accidents.
Rating coming soonHenry James spends the 1880s and 1890s moving between London, Venice and Paris, writing novels, cultivating friendships and trying to succeed in the theatre. The novel follows his friendship with the artist George Du Maurier, his attachment to the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, his disaster as a playwright, and the long years afterwards. It is as much about the cost of a vocation as about the famous man himself.
Rating coming soonErnest Hemingway married four times, and this novel gives each of the four women a turn: Hadley Richardson in Paris, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn in Spain and Cuba, and Mary Welsh. Each of them tells what it was like to be married to a man who turned his own life into material, and each learns in her turn that the role has a successor already in view.
Rating coming soonLee Miller arrives in Paris in the late 1920s intending to work as an artist rather than be looked at as a model, and she becomes the assistant and then the lover of a celebrated photographer. The novel follows her discovery of what she can do with a camera, the cost of living inside a more famous man's life, and the work she went on to do as a correspondent during the war.
Rating coming soonThe Weber family lives in a crowded house in Mannheim in 1777, where the father copies music and the four daughters sing and play well enough to be noticed. One of them, Aloysia, takes the attention of a young composer passing through, and the novel follows the sisters over the years in which he marries one of them.
Rating coming soonHatshepsut is the daughter of a pharaoh, and she grows up expecting to rule Egypt in her own right, which no woman has done. The novel follows her from a childhood spent in temples and on the river to her marriage to her half-brother, the years in which she governs, and the opposition of priests and courtiers who cannot accept a woman on the throne.
Rating coming soonKid McCoy was a championship boxer, a jewellery thief and a confidence man, and he was married often enough for the count to become part of his legend. The novel follows him from his boyhood in Indiana through the fights, the swindles and the smart company of the years around 1900, and lets him tell much of it himself.
Rating coming soonIn 1897 the explorer Robert Peary brings six Inuit from Greenland to New York, where they are put on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Among them are a father and son, and when the father dies the museum keeps his bones. The novel tells the story of Minik, the boy who was left behind.
Rating coming soonAt a party in Portofino in 1953, the playwright Tennessee Williams and his partner Frank Merlo meet a young Swedish woman who will not say much about herself. The novel follows the three of them across the next decade, through the theatre, the film business and the friendships that held Williams's work together, and the success that came to one of them rather than the other.
Rating coming soonIn the 1950s Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate killed a series of people across Nebraska and Wyoming, and the case has been told over and over since. This novel comes at it from three directions: Caril Ann looking back on the beginning of the relationship, a collector in Manhattan haunted by the crimes, and the man's wife.
Rating coming soonHoward Belsey teaches art history in a New England college town, and after thirty years of marriage he is trying to find his way back to his wife Kiki. Their three grown children are each working out what they believe, and the family's arguments keep running into those of a conservative scholar who has just arrived in the same town with a family of his own.
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.
