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 42 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 novel begins at the funeral of its unnamed protagonist and then works backwards through his life: his first encounter with death as a child on a summer beach, his career as a commercial artist, three marriages, two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, and finally the physical decline of old age.
Rating coming soonJack Boughton comes home to Gilead, Iowa, after twenty years away, an alcoholic carrying two decades of secrets, and he is at odds with his traditionalist father even though he remains the old man's favourite child. His sister Glory has come home too, with troubles of her own, and the two of them try to make a life in the house.
Rating coming soonIn the near future, the men and women of Shorn Associates make their money by finding a small war somewhere in the world and backing one side against the other in return for a share of the spoils. Their executives are corporate gladiators who drive armoured cars and follow a samurai code, and Chris Faulkner is very good at the work.
Rating coming soonJulian West is a young American who falls into a hypnosis-induced sleep towards the end of the nineteenth century and wakes up 113 years later in the same city. Boston is still there, but the society around it has been transformed: it is the year 2000, and the United States has become a socialist utopia that his hosts are delighted to explain.
Rating coming soonPastwatch is the story of Christopher Columbus and of the future scientists who study him. One of those researchers comes to believe that the history she can see is a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality rather than an inevitable one, and that her machines might make it possible to reach back through time and alter it.
Rating coming soonPerry Nelson is a navy flier killed in a motor accident in 1938, and he wakes up in the year 2086. The novel that follows is his comparison of the world he left behind with the semi-utopian society that has replaced it, and it sets out the arguments its author would spend the rest of his career developing in his fiction.
Rating coming soonIntelligence agents discover something that strains belief but cannot be argued with: the country's greatest adversary appears to be sending agents back through time. Worse still, someone outside recorded history is supplying those agents with weapons and machines far beyond anything either side has built, and the only answer is to go back and find the source.
Rating coming soonA one-way time tunnel to six million years before the present is opened by researchers of the Galactic Milieu, and every misfit for light years around queues up to go through it. Each of them is looking for a happiness they cannot find in their own world, and none of them can guess what is waiting on the other side.
Rating coming soonIn an alternate United States, love has been classified as a dangerous disease and every citizen is required to undergo a procedure called the Cure at eighteen. Lena Haloway is living with her aunt and uncle in Portland, Maine, and looking forward to her treatment. With ninety-five days to go, she meets a boy from the Wilds.
Rating coming soonFor twenty thousand years, humanity has been at war with the alien Xeelee, using weapons so advanced that time itself has become a battlefield. The war has cost billions of lives and has been fought with a ruthlessness the population has never been allowed to question. A young pilot is about to find out what the conflict is really for.
Rating coming soonCarl Marsalis is a traitor, a killer and a reminder of everything dark in the human psyche. He is also beyond the jurisdiction of anybody who wants to arrest him, until the American police offer him a deal. Somebody has come back from Mars, and a series of brutal murders has begun across the country.
Rating coming soonSelina Peake Dejong marries into a Dutch farming community outside Chicago, is widowed young and has to make a living from the land. She becomes a truck farmer, raises her son Dirk and sends him to the city, and the novel follows both her success and what her son does with the chances she bought him.
Rating coming soonVictoria Dawson has always felt out of place in a family obsessed with appearances, in a city that measures people by how they look. Her parents are disappointed by her and make no secret of it, and her younger sister is the child they can admire. The novel follows Victoria out of that house and into a life of her own choosing.
Rating coming soonJoe Allston is a retired literary agent who describes himself as killing time until time gets around to killing him. His parents and his only son are dead, and he goes through life as a spectator rather than a participant. A postcard from an old friend sends him back to the journals of a journey he once made to his mother's birthplace.
Rating coming soonNico di Angelo, son of Hades, has lost his mother, his sister and his friend Jason, and he has been outed against his will. His boyfriend Will Solace, son of Apollo, is the one bright thing in his life. Then a voice begins calling to Nico from Tartarus, and he is sure he knows who it is. Will insists on going with him.
Rating coming soonAt her birth, Ella of Frell is given a foolish fairy's gift: obedience. She must obey any order she is given, whether it is to hop on one foot for a day and a half or to do something far worse. Ella is strong-willed enough to refuse to accept the gift as her fate, and she sets out to break the curse.
Rating coming soonThe story everyone knows is that Alice was an ordinary girl who visited an invented world. The truth, in this novel, is that Wonderland is real: Alyss Heart is its heir until her aunt Redd murders her parents and takes the crown, and Alyss and her bodyguard are separated while fleeing through the Pool of Tears.
Rating coming soonNico di Angelo and Will Solace return from Tartarus and travel to Camp Jupiter, where Hazel Levesque needs help with a problem they caused: the monsters of the Underworld have learned that they have options and some have come to the camp seeking refuge. Then the newcomers start disappearing one by one, and all three of them turn out to be connected to whoever is taking them.
Rating coming soonAlyss is Queen of Wonderland, and the people who prefer chaos to peace are already trying to destroy what she has built. Between the demands of government and a Royal Bodyguard who follows her everywhere, she has very little privacy. Then a series of phantom sightings convinces everyone that her aunt Redd has returned.
Rating coming soonTwo hundred years after Cinderella found her prince, the fairy tale has become a state ritual. Every year teenage girls must attend the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom choose wives; girls who are not chosen are never heard from again. Sophia would rather marry her childhood friend Erin. At the ball she runs.
Rating coming soonIt is 1931 in Shanghai. Four years earlier, Rosalind Lang was brought back from the brink of death by an experiment that also stopped her sleeping or ageing and gave her the ability to heal from any wound. She now works as an assassin for her country, and the Japanese invasion changes her orders. Solving the murders requires her to pose as the wife of a man she does not trust.
Rating coming soonThe Heart Crystal has been depleted, and imagination has gone with it. The people of Wonderland have lost their creative drive, and Queen Alyss no longer has her powers. Her enemy Redd has been disabled as well, and is proposing an alliance against King Arch, the man who now holds the realm and everyone in it.
Rating coming soonEvery dawn brings horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night and has her executed at sunrise. Sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry him, with a plan to stay alive and take revenge on the boy who killed her best friend and countless other girls.
Rating coming soonSixteen-year-old Manisha has spent years running from monsters: the beasts of the jungle and the King's army, which scattered her people, the naga, across the world. She has found shelter as a priestess in the holy temples on the floating mountains, but the temples are not as safe as they look. The King's most celebrated monster-slayer is a frequent visitor there.
Rating coming soonThe old tale has the spell broken by a prince's kiss. This retelling, the first of a trilogy, begins with the prince waking Beauty by other means and taking her away from the castle, where she is trained in the customs of his household instead of being returned to the parents who have slept through her hundred years.
Rating coming soonBlackwood Academy stands on the fringes of the afterlife, and once a student passes through its gates there is no way out except the Decennial, a magical competition with a single victor. Six of the school's best students have been chosen for its tests this year, and only one of them will win a way out of the school.
Rating coming soonA poor miller's daughter has been cursed by the god of lies and has a talent for spinning stories that are entirely untrue. When one of her tales attracts the sinister Erlking and his undead hunters, she is carried into a world of ghouls and phantoms and told to spin straw into gold or be killed for lying.
Rating coming soonSerilda and Gild are trying to break the curses that tie their spirits to a haunted castle before the Endless Moon, when the Erlking intends to capture one of the seven gods and use a wish to bring his lover back from the underworld. As the deadline approaches it becomes clear that he wants all seven gods.
Rating coming soonSixteen-year-old Joan is sent to stay with her late mother's eccentric family in London for the summer, and it begins well: she likes her job at a historic house and her co-worker Nick has asked her out. Then she learns that her family are monsters with hidden powers, and that Nick is a monster slayer.
Rating coming soonBicho Raro, Colorado is a town of dark saints, forbidden love, miracle-mad owls, estranged relations and a sky full of desert stars. At its very centre is the Soria family, who are able to perform unusual miracles, and three cousins who are each trying to change the family's future from inside it, for reasons of their own making.
Rating coming soonIn the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release an unstoppable army. The army consists of hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises with two clear objectives, and nobody in the wider world knows anything about what has happened in the town. Austin is trying to write the whole thing down.
Rating coming soonBen is a shy and lonely six-year-old living on the Canadian prairie, and he is different from the rest of his family. When he wanders away from the farm and gets lost, he spends a summer in the open country under the protection of a badger, and the arrangement keeps him alive while his parents search for him.
Rating coming soonAbel is a very civilized mouse with a comfortable life and a wife he adores, until a storm carries him away and leaves him marooned on an uninhabited island. His resourcefulness and his endurance are tested to the limit as he works out how to live there and how to get home to Amanda.
Rating coming soonJulie returns to her father's Eskimo village in the Alaskan Arctic, where she has to find a way to save the wolves she loves and to persuade the people around her that the animals should be spared. She falls in love with a young Siberian man, and the world she grew up in is changing faster than anyone in the village expected.
Rating coming soonSix teenagers in California have powers that ordinary people do not. Ethan's ability is a voice inside him that says whatever the person listening most wants to hear, which is useful until it starts talking during a bank robbery. The only people who can help him are the other Zeroes, who are no longer friends.
Rating coming soonIvy Westfall was married to the President's son as part of the settlement between the winning and losing sides of a war, and given a mission: to kill her new husband. She fell in love with him instead, and now she has been exiled beyond the fence, into the country outside the settlement where nothing is provided for her.
Rating coming soonFifteen-year-old Jessie and six companions from an outdoor education program take the company's rafting gear without permission and set off down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. There are no adults, no permit and no river map, and the first days on the water are the best time any of the seven of them have ever had.
Rating coming soonTella is competing in the Brimstone Bleed to win the Cure that could save her brother's life, and the race has reached its final stage. She must face the dangers of the ocean, the cold of a mountain and a set of rules that have been rewritten to make the surviving competitors distrust each other.
Rating coming soonBlandings Castle has acquired a valuable scarab, and Lord Emsworth is not entirely clear how it came into his pocket. The American collector who owns it wants it back, and sends his son to England to steal it. Two impostors are soon in residence, each with an eye on the same prize and no idea about the other.
Rating coming soonLiz Lighty has always believed she is too poor and too awkward to shine in her wealthy, prom-obsessed Midwestern town. Her plan to escape involves an elite college, an orchestra and medical school, and it collapses when the financial aid she was counting on falls through. The school's prom king and queen scholarship is her last option, and running for it means a season of public humiliation.
Rating coming soonSandra Foster studies fads and what they mean for the HiTek corporation, and Bennet O'Reilly studies monkey group behaviour and chaos theory for the same employer. A misdelivered package and a run of bad luck throw them together, and they end up with a joint project involving a flock of sheep whose movements neither of them can predict.
Rating coming soonMeddelin Chan accidentally kills her blind date, and her mother calls in her even more meddlesome aunties to help dispose of the body. Disposing of a body turns out to be harder than expected, especially once it has been shipped in a cake cooler to a billionaire's wedding at an island resort, where the whole family is working. The wedding is the biggest job their business has ever had.
Rating coming soonLucian Rollins is a mogul built entirely out of revenge, working to erase his father's mark on the family name. Sloane Walton is a small-town librarian determined to finish her father's pursuit of justice. An old, dark secret binds them, and the dislike they share now does not stop them from arguing their way into something else.
Rating coming soonDiane Albret was rescued as a girl by Daniel St. John, and over the years she has come to see her guardian as the most dangerous and irresistible man she has ever met. She has grown from an orphaned schoolgirl into a determined young woman, and leaving the sheltered life he arranged for her brings the two of them into conflict.
Rating coming soonSebastian, Lord Somerton, runs a secret organisation called the Nexus and has been responsible for many deaths without ever being a traitor. Accused of treason after the mistreatment of his former ward, he is ordered to hand over the names of all his agents. The widow of one of his men has her own reasons to want him exposed.
Rating coming soonWill was the perfect summer fling, and then the holiday ended and he stopped answering Ollie's messages. A family emergency uproots Ollie and enrols him in a school on the other side of the country, which turns out to be Will's school. The Will who goes there is not the one from the summer, and Ollie has no intention of waiting for him to change back.
Rating coming soonDarcy Phillips runs an anonymous relationship advice service out of locker 89, charging a fee and mostly using her powers for good. When the new Australian jock at school catches her collecting the letters, he blackmails her into becoming his personal dating coach so that he can win his ex-girlfriend back. The arrangement has consequences for both of them, which Darcy did not plan for at all.
Rating coming soonRebecca Porter was never the sister who dreamed of being a princess; that was her twin. But it is Bex who goes to Oxford and meets a boy across the hall, and Bex who finds herself in love with the eventual heir to the British throne, along with everything that comes with him. The novel follows several years of courtship under public scrutiny.
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.
