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 37 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 soonHarry Clifton grows up in Bristol expecting to work on the docks like his father and uncle, and he has one thing they did not: a voice good enough to be noticed. A choir mistress, a schoolteacher and an old soldier all take an interest in him, and the question of who his father really was follows him from the docks to a scholarship and a war.
Rating coming soonJackson Brodie is a former police inspector making a living as a private investigator in Cambridge, and three old family tragedies come to him at once: a little girl who vanished from a garden thirty years ago, a woman who killed her husband with an axe, and a solicitor's daughter murdered for no reason anybody can find.
Rating coming soonLuLing Young is in her eighties and beginning to lose her memory, so she writes down what she can remember of her life as a girl in China. Her daughter Ruth, who makes a living writing other people's books, arranges for the Chinese manuscript to be translated, and learns a version of her mother's history that she had never been given.
Rating coming soonLarry Cook is an ageing farmer in Iowa who decides to hand his thousand acres over to his three daughters, and when the youngest objects she is cut out of the arrangement. What follows is a legal quarrel inside a family that has kept its worst history to itself, told by the eldest daughter, Ginny, who has been keeping quiet for years.
Rating coming soonTom Wingo teaches and coaches football in South Carolina until his twin sister's third suicide attempt takes him to New York to talk to her psychiatrist. He tells the doctor the story of the family the two of them came from, and in doing so he describes a childhood on an island in the low country that neither of them has ever quite escaped.
Rating coming soonRosemary Cooke begins the story of her family in the middle, and she begins it by explaining that she was raised with a chimpanzee. Her father is a behavioural psychologist, the experiment was a long one, and the sister she grew up with was taken away. Rosemary is in her twenties before she can give an account of what her childhood did to all of them.
Rating coming soonHarriet and David Lovatt marry young, share a taste for the settled family life they cannot find elsewhere, and buy a large house with room for the children they intend to have. The first four arrive to general disapproval and private happiness. Then Ben is born, and the household that was built for a particular kind of contentment cannot hold him.
Rating coming soonThe Pontifex family rises over four generations from a small English village to wealth and respectability, and the novel is hardest on the version of that success that is built on piety and pretence. Ernest Pontifex, brought up by a clergyman father and a mother who watches appearances, is the one who has to work out how much of it he can live inside.
Rating coming soonRee Dolly is sixteen and lives in the Ozarks, where her father has put the family house up as bail and then disappeared on a charge of running a meth lab. If he fails to appear in court the house is lost, and she has two younger brothers to keep. To keep them she has to find a man the neighbours would rather she left alone.
Rating coming soonDaisy Goodwill Flett is born in Canada in 1905, and her mother dies a few hours later. What follows is an ordinary twentieth-century life told in ten chapters, through marriage, motherhood, work and widowhood, and through the accounts of other people who think they know what happened to her. The voice telling the story is not always her own.
Rating coming soonPaula Spencer is thirty-nine and tells her own story: her childhood in Dublin, the courtship that turned into an eighteen-year marriage, the violence inside it, and the year her husband was shot by the Guards. The excuse she gave for a bruise he caused gives the novel its title, and she is the one deciding what to say now.
Rating coming soonLyman Ward is a retired historian who uses a wheelchair and has lost touch with his son, and he decides to spend what time he has writing the story of his grandparents. Their letters describe a life spent on the frontier of the American west, and the work of reconstructing it makes him examine his own marriage at the same time.
Rating coming soonCarol Milford marries a doctor and moves with him to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a small town she intends to improve. The town has its own opinions about a young woman with ideas, and the novel follows the years in which she tries to live there without giving up what she thinks, while the judgement of her neighbours follows her into everything she does.
Rating coming soonSelina Boyce is ten and lives with her Barbadian family in a brownstone in Brooklyn during the Depression. Her mother is saving to buy the house they rent, her father dreams of going back to Barbados, and Selina has to work out who she is going to be while the two of them pull in opposite directions.
Rating coming soonJulian English is a car dealer in a small Pennsylvania town, comfortably married and still inside the social circle he was born into, and in the course of three days he does everything necessary to destroy his position. The novel follows his own evening of recklessness and the town's reaction to it, hour by hour.
Rating coming soonAfter the defeat of the Dominator, the Black Company is down to seven men, and they march south in search of the place their annals say they belong. On the way they are hired again, this time by the crown prince of Taglios, whose commission is to stop the advance of the Shadowmasters before his city is swallowed like the ones behind them.
Rating coming soonThe Dominator was a wizard his enemies could not kill, so they imprisoned what was left of him in a silver spike instead. The object is enormously powerful, some people are willing to steal it and others are determined that nobody should have it, and the men who have to decide what to do with it have all left the Black Company behind.
Rating coming soonMurgen is inside the siege of Dejagore, where both sides are committing atrocities and where the company's situation looks worse by the day. He is also telling the story from somewhere else, out of order and years too late, and the account he gives of Taglios and of the Liberator's rule is as tangled as the siege itself.
Rating coming soonLady is left for dead when the company is broken at the end of Shadow Games, and she begins the novel by digging herself out of a heap of the dead. Separated from Croaker and the rest of the unit, she attaches herself to two strange men and starts to rebuild an army in a country that has very little appetite for another war.
Rating coming soonMost of the Black Company's leadership is held in stasis beneath the glittering plain, and the survivors have been fighting a guerrilla war in Taglios with whatever they can find. The plan now is to free the people who are sleeping underground, which means reaching the plain, getting past the last of the Shadowmasters and surviving whatever the plain does to the company that walks on it.
Rating coming soonThe gods of the Myriad were enormous sea creatures that fed on human fear, and thirty years ago they turned on each other and tore one another apart. What is left of them is valuable: the remains of their bodies are cut and sold as godware. Hark lives on the island of Lady's Crave with his friend Jelt, and one of the gods is not as dead as everyone believes.
Rating coming soonLiga is fifteen and motherless, and she has been abused by her father for years. When she becomes pregnant for the third time she tries to end her life, and instead finds herself in a gentler world where she can bring up the two daughters she has, safe from the place she came from. The two worlds do not stay apart.
Rating coming soonTyr is a city on a world of dust and heat, ruled for a thousand years by the sorcerer-king Kalak, whose magic has reduced the place to fear and blood. He is preparing to make himself into something immortal, and the people who could stop him are a statesman with a bad reputation, a half-elf slave girl and a dwarf gladiator who have very little in common.
Rating coming soonWydrin of Crosshaven and Sir Sebastian make their living by going down into ruins and coming back with something worth selling, and they have heard the stories about the caverns beneath the Citadel without believing any of them. Then a crippled nobleman offers them money to go and look, and the thing they find down there has been waiting for someone to open the way.
Rating coming soonThe Age of Ruin is a time that needs heroes, and the candidates are scattered and in poor condition: a former rebel now serving as an unwilling envoy between the powerful, a half-mage in disgrace whose warnings about a coming war are being ignored, and others who would rather not be involved at all. The war arrives anyway.
Rating coming soonWren Southerland's reckless use of magic has cost her the place she had in the Queen's Guard and the company of the friend she loves. So when a letter arrives from a reclusive lord asking her to come to his estate to cure a patient, she takes the commission, and finds that the house and the man she is meant to heal are not what the letter described.
Rating coming soonA young woman born out of wedlock and shunned by the society she was raised in makes a bargain with a god, and the bargain is for revenge on the aristocratic family that turned its back on her. What the god wants in return, and what the house he keeps turns out to contain, is not explained to her in advance.
Rating coming soonA wave takes Mau's island village and everyone in it, and it leaves him and a girl from the other side of the world as the only people left on the island. She is called Daphne, she was on a ship when the wave came, and between them they have to work out how to live somewhere that has lost every adult who knew how anything was done.
Rating coming soonThe Soviet Union and the United States exchange nuclear strikes, and the small Florida town of Fort Repose is left standing but cut off. There is no electricity, no fuel and no supplies coming in, and the people who live there have to work out how to keep going with what is in the shops, the gardens and the river.
Rating coming soonMiyax is thirteen, and she has run away from her husband's parents' house with the idea of reaching the coast and travelling to San Francisco. Instead she is lost on the tundra of the Alaska North Slope with nothing to eat, and the only others out there are a pack of wolves whose habits she has to learn in order to live.
Rating coming soonFelix has been in a Catholic orphanage in Poland for more than three years, and he believes his parents are coming back for him. When he sees the nuns burning the library's books, he decides to go and find them, and the journey takes him through a country where the danger in the streets is not the sort of thing he has been told about.
Rating coming soonSeth Wearing drowns in the sea off the coast of his home town, and then he wakes up on an empty street in a town that looks like the one he grew up in and has nobody else in it. He is naked, thirsty and starving, and he has no idea whether he is dead, dreaming or somewhere that has been arranged for him.
Rating coming soonBefore the maze, there was the world's end: forests burnt, rivers dried, the oceans swollen, and then a plague that spread across the globe until families were dying and people were killing each other. Then came WICKED, an organisation looking for a way out of it, and the children it collected in order to find one.
Rating coming soonThe warrior cats have lived in peace around the lake for many moons, but a shadow is gathering on the edge of their territories and the clans are not ready for it. One young cat is given a message that points beyond everything the clans have mapped, and following it means leaving behind the only country he has ever known.
Rating coming soonUnwinding is legal: difficult teenagers can be taken apart, and their organs and limbs given to other people. The revolt at a harvest camp made the practice impossible to ignore, and the three young people who escaped it are now the most wanted fugitives in the country, with a movement growing behind them and a system that needs them caught.
Rating coming soonThe Raxter School for Girls has been under quarantine for eighteen months, since the Tox arrived and began changing the island the school stands on. The teachers died first, the girls began to change next, and the supplies the navy brings are only just enough. Hetty is waiting for her friend Byatt to come back from the infirmary.
Rating coming soonThe dead rose on the battlefields of Gettysburg and the American Civil War stopped before it could be won. In the country that emerged, safety depends on a few people doing dangerous work, and the laws require Black and Native American children to attend combat schools to learn how to put the dead back down.
Rating coming soonJack Sullivan is a foster child who has been left behind by the end of the world, and he has decided to make the best of it: a fortified tree house, unlimited junk food and video games, and a monster or two to deal with now and then. What he does not have is company, so he sets out to find some.
Rating coming soonPeak Marcello is fourteen and already known in climbing circles for getting to the top of skyscrapers and bridges in New York, which is how he ends up in court. His father, who left years ago, turns up with a way out of the charges and a proposition: come to Nepal and take a run at the highest mountain in the world.
Rating coming soonOllie has been reading a book of ghost stories since her mother died, and the story she keeps returning to is about a girl called Beth, two brothers who loved her, and a bargain with something called the smiling man. Then her school bus breaks down beside a farm, and the story stops being something she is reading.
Rating coming soonParvana is eleven and lives in a one-room flat in Kabul with her family, and since the Taliban took the city she has rarely been outside. Her father, the person who could go out, is arrested, and the family has no man to send to the market. To feed them Parvana has to become something the authorities will allow in the street.
Rating coming soonOn a planet where violence and vengeance are the ordinary business of government, every person develops a currentgift when they come of age, and most of the gifts are useful. Akos and Cyra are not so lucky: his gift makes him unable to bear the pain of others, and hers gives pain to everyone who touches her, including herself.
Rating coming soonTurner is a corporate mercenary who wakes in a rebuilt body and is sent out on a job more dangerous than the one that nearly finished him. Elsewhere a woman in the art trade is offered a piece that comes with a strange history, and a teenager in the projects finds that something in the matrix has noticed him. The three stories are heading for the same place.
Rating coming soonTakeshi Kovacs is serving with a mercenary outfit on a planet where a war between the corporate governments and a rebel movement has settled into a stalemate. A pilot offers him a private scheme instead: a Martian artefact has been found that opens onto a ship left by a civilisation long gone, and the people who know about it intend to own it.
Rating coming soonLife on Mars is hard enough that the colonists depend on a drug which lets them share in a fantasy world built around a set of dolls and their house. Then Palmer Eldritch comes back from the outer system with something new, and the men who make their living from the old arrangement have to work out what he has brought with him.
Rating coming soonColin Laney studies the patterns that very large amounts of information make visible, and what he has concluded is that the world is approaching a point at which the arrangements of the present will be replaced by something else. He expects it to happen around the settlement built on the Bay Bridge, and other people have their own plans for the same moment.
Rating coming soonHaden's Syndrome left a proportion of the people who caught it alive and conscious but unable to move their own bodies, and most of them meet the world through robot bodies instead. That has produced its own culture, including a violent sport in which one player is chosen at random to be decapitated. A death in the game cannot be explained.
Rating coming soonRichard Forthrast, known as Dodge, is a billionaire who made his fortune from games and who is declared brain-dead after a routine medical procedure. His will asks for his body to be preserved so that his brain can be scanned later, and the scan is carried out. What follows is a world that has to decide what a copied mind is.
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.
