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 41 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 soonThe story opens at Cohenburg Castle in Saxony, where two brothers, Alphonsus and Frederic, have grown up, married and started families. Frederic loses his wife and all three of his children, and grief sends him away from the castle. His brother is then called away to the city, and the family's troubles begin in earnest.
Rating coming soonThree people are circling the same secret in contemporary America. Hollis Henry, a former musician now writing for a magazine that does not exist yet, is researching a story about locative art. Tito moves information for a family with unusual employers, and Milgrim is a translator held in place by a man who claims to have rescued him.
Rating coming soonHenry Perowne is a successful London neurosurgeon, happily married and content with his life, and the novel follows him through a single Saturday in February 2003. A demonstration against the coming war in Iraq is filling the streets. On his way across the city he has an encounter with a violent and troubled man.
Rating coming soonHollis Henry has lost most of her money in the crash and cannot afford to refuse the advertising executive Hubertus Bigend when he offers her work. She is sent to find the designer behind a secretive clothing label, while Milgrim, who also works for Bigend, investigates military garment design. Their assignments soon collide with a rival contractor and a missing researcher.
Rating coming soonVictoria McQueen is eight years old when she discovers that riding her bicycle through a particular covered bridge can carry her to anything she has lost. Each trip across the bridge costs her more than the last, in body and in mind. The talent also brings her to the attention of a man who collects children, and the novel follows her from childhood into adulthood.
Rating coming soonYakov Liebermann runs a centre in Vienna documenting Nazi crimes, and his funding is failing as the world loses interest in the work. Then a stranger telephones from Brazil with a recording of a meeting held by Josef Mengele, who is organising a strange operation: ninety-four harmless civil servants in different countries are to be killed on particular dates spread across several years.
Rating coming soonLinus Weems wakes in a concrete building with no windows and no doors, where an elevator is the only way in or out. Five other people arrive from different backgrounds, all of them kidnapped, and none of them knows who has taken them or what he wants. Linus keeps a diary of it.
Rating coming soonThree men are found dead in a locked Honolulu office, their bodies covered in ultra-fine cuts, and the police dismiss it as a bizarre suicide pact. In Massachusetts a group of graduate students are recruited by a microbiology company and flown to Hawaii. What waits for them is not an ordinary research project.
Rating coming soonFrank Burnet's leukaemia treatment led to a discovery about his genes, and his university sold the rights to his cells to a biotechnology company. When he sues, the court decides the cells were waste. His case is one strand in a satirical novel about genetic research, patent law and the people caught between them.
Rating coming soonIt is 1996 and Jack Reacher is still an army major. He is given a medal in the morning and sent back to school in the afternoon, to a course shared with an FBI agent and a CIA analyst, each of whom is wondering what he is doing there. It is not a school at all.
Rating coming soonOdd Thomas can see the dead, and during a chance encounter with a truck driver he receives a vision of three children being burned alive by a man in a red suit and a black mask. He understands that the driver had the same vision because he is the man in the mask, and Odd has to stop him.
Rating coming soonIt is 1914 and Britain needs Russian support in the naval arms race against Germany, so the Tsar's nephew is sent to London for secret talks. One of the men at the table is married to a Russian aristocrat whose nephew the prince is. An anarchist named Feliks arrives intending to kill him.
Rating coming soonKeith Russo, a young lawyer in a small Florida town, is shot dead at his desk one night, and the police settle on Quincy Miller, a young Black man who had once been his client. Quincy is convicted and spends twenty-two years insisting he is innocent before writing to a small innocence project run by a lawyer who is also a minister.
Rating coming soonA minimalist London house comes with a long list of rules imposed by the architect who designed it, and a woman recovering from a traumatic break-in is glad to move in. Three years earlier another woman lived in the same house and died there. Both of them answered the same strange question about what they owned.
Rating coming soonA man wakes in the lavatory of a railway station in 1958 with no memory of who he is, and his clothes and surroundings suggest to him that he is an alcoholic derelict. He is in fact a rocket scientist, and the launch he helped to design is due in a matter of days. Working out his own identity means working out who took it from him.
Rating coming soonSamantha Kofer is an associate at a New York law firm when the financial crisis hits and she is put on furlough instead of being laid off. She spends the year volunteering at a legal aid clinic in Virginia's coal country, where the clients have real problems and the law behaves differently.
Rating coming soonA test rabbit infected with a dangerous strain of Ebola is stolen from a Scottish research laboratory on Christmas Eve, and then the virus itself goes missing as well. The company's head of security has to recover it through a blizzard with almost no help from the police, while the director's family gathers for Christmas nearby.
Rating coming soonJackie Burke is a flight attendant who couriers money for a gunrunner named Ordell Robbie. When federal agents catch her and threaten her with prison and the loss of her job, they want her to act as bait in their case against him. Ordell wants her to stall them long enough to collect the rest of his money.
Rating coming soonThe Ingalls family is in debt, the years at Plum Creek have gone badly and Mary has been left blind by illness. Pa goes west to work as a bookkeeper in a railroad camp in the Dakota Territory and sends for his wife and four daughters. They become the first settlers in the new town of De Smet, and the railroad follows them.
Rating coming soonIt is 1889 in Wyoming, where homesteaders have claimed land that a cattleman named Luke Fletcher used to run his herds across. The Starrett family are among the settlers, and a stranger rides into their lives: a quiet man with a past who takes work on their farm, says nothing about where he came from and is plainly more than a hired hand.
Rating coming soonHermann Kermit Warm is going to die, because the man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and the hired killers are Eli and Charlie Sisters. Eli does not share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, and on the road to a gold-mining claim he begins to wonder what he does for a living.
Rating coming soonThe Pioneers is set in a settlement beside Lake Otsego, where a new town is working out how to live on land it has only recently taken. Into this comes Natty Bumppo, a hunter and frontiersman whose understanding of the forest is shared by almost none of his neighbours, and whose freedom the new laws do not protect.
Rating coming soonAfter an October blizzard the Ingalls family leaves their claim shanty for the town of De Smet, intending to wait out the winter there. A local man has predicted seven months of bad weather. The trains stop running, the town runs short of food, and the blizzards keep arriving one after another.
Rating coming soonMatthew Penicuik has raised his ward Kitty Charing in the country, and his fortune will become her dowry only if she marries one of his three great-nephews. Kitty finds the condition intolerable. She has already lost her heart to Jack Westruther, a rake who knows it and has done nothing about it.
Rating coming soonMr and Mrs Darcy have been married six years and are preparing for their annual ball at Pemberley. Jane and Bingley have arrived, the staff have everything in hand, and then the night before the ball Lydia turns up in hysterics, shouting that her husband has been murdered. A body is found in the woods.
Rating coming soonLaura and Almanzo Wilder are married and working their own homestead on the prairie, and this book follows the first four years of their life together. There are good crops and bad ones, debts, weather, neighbours, sickness and livestock, and a daughter called Rose, and not everything the couple builds survives the seasons that follow.
Rating coming soonSarah Noble is eight years old when she travels with her father into the Connecticut wilderness to build a new home for the family. She is left in the care of a neighbouring Native family while her father goes back for the other children, and she has to find her courage in a place she has never been.
Rating coming soonPhilip Jettan is a provincial squire in eighteenth-century England, and his childhood friend Cleone Charteris has come home from finishing school with a taste for polished, aristocratic men. Philip is none of those things. Encouraged by his father, he leaves for Paris to acquire the manners Cleone says she wants, and returns home a different man.
Rating coming soonA stranger approaches people in bars and car parks with information that ruins their lives: a fact about a spouse, offered quietly and without explanation, after which he walks away. Adam Price has a comfortable marriage, two sons and a good job, until he meets the stranger and is told something about his wife.
Rating coming soonDellarobia Turnbow is twenty-eight, married, poor and discontented, and one afternoon she sets off up the mountain to begin an affair. What she finds instead stops her in her tracks: an enormous population of butterflies, settling where they have no business being. The discovery changes her marriage and her village.
Rating coming soonBrian Robeson survived alone in the northern wilderness, and now he is back in ordinary life, where high school makes no sense to him at all. He feels more isolated in a crowded corridor than he ever did in the woods. The only answer he can see is to go back to the country where he knew how to live.
Rating coming soonHerald Mags, the King of Valdemar's Herald Spy, has built a network of young informants in the streets of Haven and in the kitchens of the great houses. His wife Amily is King's Own Herald, and finds it useful to be underestimated. Somebody has collected the secrets of the women of the Court.
Rating coming soonBarnabas Sackett is leaving England for good to make his fortune in the New World, but a warrant sworn against him by Queen Elizabeth sends him into hiding instead. What put the crown on his trail was a handful of rare gold coins he found and sold, believed to be part of a treasure King John lost.
Rating coming soonLady Chastity Ware needs to get her widowed sister and her baby away from a deadly pursuer, so she dresses as a highwayman and stops the first coach on the road. The occupant is an arrogant aristocrat named Cyn Malloren, and instead of robbing him she orders him to drive her to a remote cottage.
Rating coming soonTwo men wounded in the same train robbery are left on Abigail McKenzie's doorstep in frontier Colorado, and she nurses both of them back to health. One is gentle David, who offers her a happiness she had given up expecting. The other is Jesse, rude and violent, who challenges every idea she has about herself and about the life she intended to lead.
Rating coming soonSigrid is a Viking widow, and the English army is raiding behind her. Out of desperation she throws herself on the mercy of a Saxon warrior, an enemy whose look seems to offer shelter from the carnage. She has never wanted a man in her life, and she and this one have good reason to hate each other.
Rating coming soonTen years after the murders at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, Charlie returns to the town where her father owned the restaurant and meets her childhood friends again. On the anniversary of the tragedy they find a way inside the abandoned pizzeria, and the four animatronic mascots that once entertained children have changed in ways nobody can explain.
Rating coming soonMary Jo Summerhill has always been in love with Evan, and three years ago the difference between his blue-blooded family and her blue-collar background sent her out of his life. It broke his heart as thoroughly as it broke hers, and she has not stopped thinking about him. Now she needs his help, and what she wants beyond that is another chance.
Rating coming soonGeorge Talboys comes home from the Australian goldfields to the wife and baby he left behind three years earlier, and learns that his wife is dead. He is drawn into the household of a friend's future family, and he and his companion begin to wonder about Lady Audley, whose past nobody can account for and whose composure seems harder to explain the longer they look.
Rating coming soonSquire Dale is an embittered old bachelor established in the Great House at Allington, and his sister-in-law lives with her two daughters in the Small House next door. The novel concerns the relations between the two houses and the courtship of Lily and Bell Dale, one of whom is loved by a man she does not want.
Rating coming soonIsma Pasha has spent years raising her younger siblings in London after their mother died, and an invitation from a mentor in America gives her the chance of a life of her own. She cannot stop worrying about her sister Aneeka or her brother Parvaiz, who has gone abroad to prove himself to the legacy of the father he never knew.
Rating coming soonLionel Burger is a white South African doctor sentenced to life imprisonment for organising political resistance to apartheid, and the novel follows his daughter Rosa. She has grown up inside the movement, and after her father's death she has to decide what her own life is for when the cause no longer gives her an identity.
Rating coming soonWillow O'Keefe is born with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, which means hundreds of broken bones and a lifetime of pain. As the family struggles to cover medical costs, her mother Charlotte considers a wrongful birth lawsuit against the obstetrician who cared for her in pregnancy, a case that would require her to say in court that she would have terminated.
Rating coming soonDuring the Blitz, Elizabeth White is sent from London to the small Irish town of Kilgarret, where she meets Aisling O'Connor and her crowded household. The two become best friends, and the novel follows them for three decades of marriages, children and disappointments, through the sort of trouble that only a friend would ever be told about.
Rating coming soonBret Ellis, the narrator of this novel, is the author whose first book made him famous while he was still at college. After years of wealth, drugs and grief he tries to build a family life with a former partner and their son, and a series of bizarre events and murders connects everything happening to him back to his own past.
Rating coming soonOn a windy afternoon in the Chilterns, Joe Rose's ordered life is interrupted by a ballooning accident and by a brief encounter with a stranger called Jed Parry. Nothing much passes between them at the time. In Parry it gives rise to an obsession powerful enough to test Joe's rational certainties and the love of his wife.
Rating coming soonMark Robarts is a young clergyman with a good living at Framley and ambitions above his income. His father is a physician with no private money but a lucrative practice, and Mark's education has given him a taste for company he cannot afford, which is how he comes to accept the wrong kind of help from the wrong kind of man.
Rating coming soonPaul and Rochelle Isaacson are tried and executed for passing secrets to a foreign power, and their children Daniel and Susan are left to grow up in the glare of the case. The novel is Daniel's attempt to write the story of his family, and he is unable to keep it in order or to settle what actually happened.
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.
