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 39 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 soonJanuary Wayne is twenty-one when she comes back to New York after nearly three years in a hospital in Switzerland, and the city she left has moved on without her. Her father is a film producer she adores, the people around him are not what they say they are, and she has to find out what she wants now that she is well.
Rating coming soonCynthia Bigge is fourteen and has just had a fight with her parents when she goes to bed, and in the morning her mother, her father and her brother are gone. Twenty-five years later the disappearance is still unexplained, and Cynthia agrees to appear on a television programme that re-enacts the case, hoping that it might produce an answer.
Rating coming soonPenelope Keeling is in her sixties, has just come out of hospital and is recovering at the house in Cornwall where she grew up. She is the daughter of a painter and his much younger French wife, and the novel moves between her present and the years of her marriage, the war and the raising of her three children.
Rating coming soonRachel Samstat is a food writer, seven months pregnant and married to a man whose politics she has been following in print, and she finds out during a dinner party that he is in love with somebody else. What follows is the dismantling of the marriage, told by somebody who knows exactly how absurd it is.
Rating coming soonTrixie Stone is a freshman at a small college when she accuses her former boyfriend of raping her at a party, and the town decides that it does not believe her. Her father is a comic book artist with a violent childhood behind him, her mother is having an affair with one of her students, and neither of them is in a position to give her what she needs.
Rating coming soonBilly Abbott is a teenager at a school in Vermont, where he develops feelings for the wrong people and begins the long process of working out who he is. He tells his own story across more than half a century, through a New England town, a library, a theatre, and the years in which people like him were much less safe than they are now.
Rating coming soonWillard Phule is the son of a wealthy arms manufacturer, and he buys his way into the Space Legion and then into command of the unit nobody wants. The unit is a collection of misfits and rejects, and his plan is to make it into an effective force, largely by ignoring the way the Legion is supposed to do things.
Rating coming soonThe narrator of the novel looks back over the fortunes of his family, whose businesses and quarrels span the modern history of India, and whose story includes early deaths, forgotten loves and the various ways that money and power can be made and lost. He tells it from the position of a man whose own life is nearly over.
Rating coming soonElizabeth is handed to Miles Montgomery as a kind of gift, rolled up in a rug, and the two of them are already enemies before they meet. She is a Chatworth, he is a Montgomery, and the feud between the two families has produced murder and betrayal for generations, which does not stop either of them from wanting what they cannot admit.
Rating coming soonLord Alleyne Bedwyn is a diplomat who is thrown from his horse during a war and left for dead, and he wakes up in a bedroom of a house he does not recognise with no memory of who he is. The women who took him in have their own troubles, and the man without a past turns out to be useful to them.
Rating coming soonSamantha Prendregast arrives at a remote English estate to take charge of six badly behaved girls, and finds the master of the house a harder problem than the children. He is a widowed colonel who likes his life in order, and she is the opposite of orderly, which is what makes the arrangement work and what makes it dangerous.
Rating coming soonA woman known as the duchess of Magnus is wagered and lost in a card game, and the man who won her expects to marry her. What arrives instead is her quiet cousin Eleanor, who has agreed to exchange identities and now has to keep the pretence up with a man who is determined to go through with the marriage.
Rating coming soonChristiana's marriage was short and unpleasant, and when her husband dies she decides not to let the required period of mourning spoil her sisters' first season. She has him put on ice and carries on, which works until the man's twin brother turns up, having been robbed of his name by the husband she has just buried.
Rating coming soonLady Clarissa Pomeroy's grandfather has left her a fortune on condition that she marry, so she does the practical thing and proposes to Simon Sinclair, the Earl of Sheridan. He accepts, though he cannot work out why she chose him, and she has reasons she is not sharing, including a home for unmarried mothers that she has been paying for out of her own pocket.
Rating coming soonLady Edwina Bollash is a linguist who has been set a challenge: turn a rough, incorrigible man from outside society into a gentleman in six weeks. Mick Tremore is the man, and he has no intention of being turned into anything, though the two of them have more in common than either wants to admit.
Rating coming soonRafe Bowman comes from America for a meeting with Natalie Blandford, the daughter of a well-connected family, and the match is being arranged around him rather than by him. His manners and his reputation are against him, and the four friends who have already married into this world decide to take a hand in the courtship.
Rating coming soonLisa Madison has decided that she wants a husband, and she has picked Robert Langley for the position. He insists on thinking of her as the child she used to be, even though the rest of London has noticed her, and when her looks put her in danger it is Robert who has to rescue her, which he does while insisting that his interest is not romantic.
Rating coming soonLaura Morgan is the daughter of two people whose story the earlier books told, and she has grown up beautiful, confident and used to the effect she has on the men around her. The one she wants is Trent Challenger, a man with no interest in being managed, and the two of them are tied together by a promise made in the past.
Rating coming soonLady Saura of Roget has spent years in servitude with her fortune in the hands of a stepfather who does as he likes with it, and she is sent for by Sir William of Miraval, a knight who swore to live by his sword until an injury took his sight. The two of them come together in a castle where the danger is not only outside its walls.
Rating coming soonPrince Olaf of Norway comes to Ireland with a fleet and a plan to build himself a kingdom, and Princess Erin, the daughter of the Irish high king, has every reason to hate him for what his men have done to her country. The alliance that both sides need is sealed by marrying her to him, and neither of them is willing to accept it.
Rating coming soonTo keep her barony from being ruined, Madeleine de la Haute Vironge has to marry one of three lords chosen for her by the king, and the man she ends up with is the most dangerous of the three: a stranger she wants and is afraid of in equal measure. He has a secret that would destroy him if it were known.
Rating coming soonRhiannon is King Alfred's favourite niece, and she is furious when he seals an alliance by promising her to Eric, a Norse prince with a cold manner and an army behind him. She fights the marriage and everything it stands for, and the fight itself is what draws the two of them together, in a country where the politics that made the match keep changing.
Rating coming soonFlint Mahone comes home from the Civil War with one feeling left in him, which is for the children of his dead brother, and when the three of them turn up on his doorstep with a Wyoming winter coming he sets about making them a home. Lauren Hart was raised among outlaws and wants a respectable life, and the two of them are thrown together by the arrangements a frontier town makes.
Rating coming soonSarah MacKenzie has always believed she was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Ross, and when he tells her that the local sheriff was in fact her father she leaves for Edinburgh to open an orphanage and put the disappointment somewhere useful. The Elliot family, who had plans for her and for her dowry, have other ideas.
Rating coming soonLaurel Burke comes back to her father's Texas ranch after two years at a boarding school in the east, and the first person she sees at the station is the young rancher she has been thinking about for as long as she has been away. The two families have been feuding for years, and her father has no intention of allowing a match.
Rating coming soonCarolina Lightfoot is a colonial beauty who sets her heart on Lord Thomas Angevine, the most notorious rake in London, and the scandal that follows sends her back to Virginia. From there she is taken at sea by buccaneers and carried to Tortuga, where she becomes the prisoner of a man with a mysterious past.
Rating coming soonChase Donlin receives a letter from his dying stepsister asking him to take care of her daughter, and he agrees without knowing that the child has grown into a young woman. Raegan arrives expecting a guardian and finds a trapper living in the thinly settled hills of Oregon, and the arrangement they make has to be worked out from the beginning.
Rating coming soonWade Magallen lived as a bachelor with no intention of settling down until Storm Roemer changed his mind, and then something he would not explain made him send her away. Years later she comes back to Laramie with no interest in being sent anywhere again, and the two of them have to decide what to do with the reason he gave her up.
Rating coming soonThe Baudelaire orphans are taken to a boarding school whose motto is Remember You Will Die and whose building looks like a cemetery, where the teachers are unpleasant, the rules are arbitrary and nobody is prepared to sign the permission slips that would let the children sleep anywhere decent. They also make friends for the first time, which is a novelty.
Rating coming soonSusan Marlow returns to Greenwood Manor expecting the house and the aunt she grew up loving. Lady Agatha Gordon has taken in a permanent guest instead: Craig Stanton, a handsome stranger she calls a genius, a man who will shed new light on the Gordon family history, and the only person she trusts. Susan distrusts him on sight, and the harder she tries to keep clear of him the deeper she is drawn into his plans for the house.
Rating coming soonOne ordinary afternoon, every machine in sixteen-year-old Adam's school computer lab stops working, and the problem turns out to be far larger than an outage: cars will not start, phones are dead, and the blackout spreads. Only Adam's ancient car still runs, and the drive home shows him how quickly an ordinary suburb can turn dangerous once the power, the traffic and the information all stop at once.
Rating coming soonDean misses his bus on the morning a monster hailstorm, and then a chemical spill, wreck the road outside a chain superstore. He and thirteen other young people end up sealed inside the store with no adults, limited supplies and no idea whether anyone is coming for them. Their refuge runs on rations, chores and a chain of command that will not hold forever.
Rating coming soonFate of Worlds closes two of Larry Niven's story cycles at once. Decades after the previous Fleet of Worlds novel, the Ringworld has disappeared, and the Puppeteers find their fleet the target of rival war fleets. The exiled puppeteer leader known as the Hindmost has one chance to recover his position, if what he knows about the vanished Ringworld is worth anything to anyone.
Rating coming soonTennal, a rich socialite with telepathic powers he uses illegally, is caught and conscripted. To hold him in line the army binds his mind to Lieutenant Surit, whose coercive ability is strong enough to control him. Tennal wants out, Surit wants his family's pension restored, and both are posted to a frontier where the army's plans matter more than either of them.
Rating coming soonLieutenant Travis Long of the Royal Manticoran Navy likes rules and still finds the sensible answer when everything is coming apart. That talent won him his commission and made him enemies, and his sharpest opponents sit in the young kingdom's parliament rather than in space, where they are certain the navy is a luxury the treasury cannot afford.
Rating coming soonOn Vega III, where the wealthy pass their time in intrigue and pleasure, Lady Nimisha Boynton-Rondymense would rather work in her father's shipyards. Her father makes her his successor at the helm of the Rondymense yards instead of his designated heir, and then a solo test flight of an experimental cruiser goes badly wrong. The relatives she replaced will not wait for her to come home.
Rating coming soonEmily St. Aubert loses her mother and then her father, and finds herself with too little protection and a considerable inheritance. Her aunt's marriage to the Italian Signor Montoni carries the family to a remote castle in the Apennines, where unexplained noises, locked rooms and veiled pictures begin Emily's real troubles. Nothing at Udolpho is explained to her, and very little of it is what it appears.
Rating coming soonThe Memory Cathedral takes Leonardo da Vinci past the sketchbook and gives him a working flying machine. In this version of the Renaissance he builds the devices he only ever drew, takes his inventions into the service of a Syrian general, and sees his designs for war used in a battle in the Middle East.
Rating coming soonThe Warden is the first of the Chronicles of Barsetshire. Septimus Harding, a gentle widower, is warden of Hiram's Hospital, an almshouse funded by a medieval bequest, and lives comfortably on its income with his younger daughter Eleanor. Then a young reformer starts asking who the charity really serves, and how much of it reaches the twelve old men it was meant for.
Rating coming soonBarchester Towers continues the story of Mr Harding and his daughter Eleanor. The old bishop has died, and the patronage that everyone expected to pass to Archdeacon Grantly goes instead to the Evangelical Bishop Proudie, whose wife manages both the diocese and her husband. The new bishop's chaplain, Mr Slope, has ambitions of his own, and the town has opinions about all of them.
Rating coming soonMary Barton is set in Manchester among mill workers and mill owners in the hungry forties. Mary, the daughter of a disillusioned trade unionist, turns down the working-class man who loves her in the hope of marrying the mill owner's son, and then finds herself at the centre of a murder case that puts her lover in the dock.
Rating coming soonSloan Reynolds is a cop who has spent thirty years not needing the father who walked away. When Carter Reynolds invites her to Palm Beach to attempt a reconciliation she refuses, until an FBI agent explains that her father is under suspicion of financial crime and asks her to accept the invitation and report what she sees inside the family.
Rating coming soonLady Morgan Bedwyn is young, independent and not looking for a husband. Gervase Ashford, Earl of Rosthorn, has other ideas: he wants her as an instrument of revenge against her family, and marriage is not part of the plan. One scandalous night leaves them both with reputations to salvage and an attraction that neither of them wanted or expected.
Rating coming soonCameron MacKay, the last member of a broken Highland clan, has one aim: find Meredith Munro, last daughter of his sworn enemies, and force her to give him an heir. What he finds in the priory where she has taken refuge is a woman who bargains hard for her freedom instead of weeping, and a plan that becomes harder to carry out.
Rating coming soonJillian Whitney is well born, penniless and living under the roof of a wealthy nobleman old enough to be her father, which is scandal enough for the London ton. When her guardian is murdered and she becomes the only suspect, she flees and is taken in by Adam Hawthorne, the Earl of Blackwood, who offers shelter from the law.
Rating coming soonTwo children, one date, eighteen years apart, and neither of them knows that the other exists. In New York in September 2001, Brandon is visiting his father's office on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center when an airliner strikes the tower. In Afghanistan in 2019, Reshmina dreams of school and a quiet life, and a battle reaches her village.
Rating coming soonLucky has always been a Lone Dog, surviving on the city's streets by instinct and keeping away from Leashed Dogs and their owners. Then the Big Growl, a devastating earthquake, flattens the city, and he has to work out how to live with a pack of frightened former pets who have lost everything. Water runs short, the weather turns, and the pack must decide what it is willing to do to survive.
Rating coming soonStorm has worked out which dog betrayed the Pack, but coming back from exile has put her straight into the traitor's hands. Held prisoner in the Wild Pack's camp, she is short of allies and shorter of time, and saving the dogs she grew up with means finishing what the traitor started. The pack she left is divided, and every dog in the camp is a possible enemy.
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.
