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 43 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 soonAveline Stoddard's father loses everything at the card table, and she agrees to submit to the winner for three nights in settlement of the debt. The three nights pass too quickly, and the man the town calls Lucifer vanishes. Five years later he returns to London looking for his enemy, and finds her instead.
Rating coming soonGrace Porter has just finished a PhD in astronomy and goes to Las Vegas with her friends to celebrate. She is not the sort of person who gets drunk and marries a woman whose name she does not know, until she does exactly that. Then she flees Portland for a summer in New York with her new wife, because finishing the degree has not made her feel the way she expected.
Rating coming soonEvelyn Amherst is compelled by her dying father, a spy in His Majesty's service, to finish his last mission. The trail takes her to London and to Lord Justin Barclay, an intelligence agent who suspects her father of supporting Napoleon and courts Evelyn in order to find out what she knows. The courtship is a professional deception, and it stops working rather quickly.
Rating coming soonSadie Montgomery is a struggling artist who has just been named a finalist in the portrait competition of her dreams, and then she develops a rare condition that makes human faces look like jumbled puzzle pieces. She has weeks to paint the best portrait of her life, and she can no longer read a face, so she has to judge everybody from what they say instead.
Rating coming soonLucky and the Leashed Dogs find a forest with prey and fresh water and believe they have found their new home, but a fierce pack of wild dogs has already claimed the territory. Their leader will not allow other dogs to settle, and Lucky is forced to work behind enemy lines. He understands both packs, so whichever side he chooses he betrays dogs he knows.
Rating coming soonThe Wild Pack's ruthless Alpha has agreed to let the Leashed Dogs join him, but not before he learns that Lucky has been spying on him, and Lucky is cast out. He tries to enjoy his freedom, but the world after the Big Growl is dangerous for a dog on his own. For the first time since the disaster, he wants company.
Rating coming soonOn a beach walk during a family holiday, Beth Anderson finds something that looks like a skull and remembers the retired couple who vanished from the island's coast months earlier. A stranger approaches, she panics and covers it up, and when she returns the skull has gone. Her brother treats the story as entertainment, and the other holidaymakers agree with him.
Rating coming soonAlmanzo Wilder grows up on a farm in rural New York, and this book describes his childhood from the age of about eight: the work of the farm, his parents and his brothers and sisters, and the education a boy received in a place where the seasons decided what everybody did next. The family is prosperous by the standards of the time.
Rating coming soonNash Morgan was the good Morgan brother, with a smile and a wink for everybody, until he was shot in the line of duty. Now the chief of police is having panic attacks and nightmares, and he is hiding both from everyone he knows. His new next-door neighbour sees right through him, and she is keeping secrets of her own.
Rating coming soonAnya Hamilton takes Ravel Duralde prisoner to prevent a duel she is certain will kill her sister's fiance. In a small room on her Louisiana plantation the situation reverses and she becomes the one who cannot stay away from him, whatever her own mind tells her about the arrangement. The rest of the plot belongs to the men who wanted the duel.
Rating coming soonFaced with a forced marriage to a neighbour she cannot bear, Elizabeth Woolcot appeals to her guardian, Nicholas Warring. He is called the Wicked Earl with reason: convicted of murder, he barely escaped being hanged, and his reputation keeps respectable company well away. Elizabeth is drawn to him the moment they meet, and he is married already.
Rating coming soonJenny Sullivan left Cole Randall at the altar, unsure whether she was marrying a man or uniting two cattle ranches, and went east for two years. Her father's death brings her back to the Lazy S for good, where Cole is running the ranch as executor of the estate. She intends to restore the family's spread, and her feelings have not stayed as businesslike as she intended.
Rating coming soonCarolyn Dawson spent her childhood holidays on Greycliff, the Cornish island owned by the rich and powerful Brandon family, and never forgot its heir. Years later she returns as his bride and the mistress of Greycliff Manor, and finds that the rest of the household regards her as an intruder who has married above her place.
Rating coming soonLindsay Phillips has spent years refusing to listen to the voice she calls Vermilion, which tells her to go to Arizona. Everything she wants is there, along with her father's murderer, the dragon-headed cane she remembers from childhood, and the man she loved at seventeen who married her half-sister. Going back means putting herself within reach of all three.
Rating coming soonLauren Moore is left penniless when her mother dies, and her aunt's invitation to Falconridge seems too fortunate to be true. She is drawn to her arrogant cousin by marriage, and the house by the sea is full of locked rooms, strange happenings and a housekeeper who tells her plainly that she does not belong.
Rating coming soonAt their favourite restaurant, four professional women start discussing what would make the perfect man. The conversation turns into a joke list that is funny, detailed and deliberately racy, and it spreads through their company and out into the wider world until the four of them are briefly famous for it. Then somebody begins to take the list seriously.
Rating coming soonA Chinese smuggler has built a fortune out of human lives, moving immigrants into countries around the world. Dirk Pitt follows his activities from Washington State to Louisiana, where the man is building an enormous shipping port in the middle of nowhere, and the reason for the location turns out to matter more than the port.
Rating coming soonFour friends from a Georgia city drive into the mountains for a last canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River, a wild stretch of water that is about to be dammed. Lewis Medlock, an experienced outdoorsman, has planned the weekend; the narrator, Ed Gentry, is a graphic artist who has come along because Lewis asked him to. The river turns out to be indifferent to their preparations.
Rating coming soonNell and Eva live with their father in a house deep in a Northern California forest, more than thirty miles from the nearest town. When the electricity fails and stays off, and the shops run out of fuel and food, the family discovers that nobody is coming to put things right. The sisters have to work out how to live in a place that is suddenly all they have.
Rating coming soonUnder a fallen-down house in the bayou country where Texas meets Louisiana, a hound dog named Ranger is kept chained by a man who has no use for him. A cat who has lost her kittens comes to live in the space beneath the floorboards, and against every instinct Ranger lets her stay. Their safety depends on staying hidden, and on a very old snake called Grandmother Moccasin.
Rating coming soonA young Labrador retriever, an old bull terrier and a Siamese cat are left with a friend in the Ontario countryside while their family travels. When circumstances separate the animals from the person looking after them, the three set out together to find their way home, a journey of some three hundred miles through lakes, rivers, forest and widely scattered farms.
Rating coming soonMafatu is the son of the chief of Hikueru, an island whose people judge a man by his courage on the water. He has been afraid of the sea since he watched his mother drown, and the other boys have never let him forget it. At fifteen he takes a canoe and sails out alone to prove that he is not the coward they call him.
Rating coming soonIt is 1974, and Leni Allbright's father comes home from the Vietnam War and decides to move his family to Alaska to live off the land. The Allbrights arrive in a small community before winter with almost nothing and no experience of the country. As the dark closes in, Leni watches her parents' marriage come apart, and she has to grow up quickly.
Rating coming soonThree months after every adult in the town disappeared and a barrier sealed the children inside, the food has run out and nobody has a plan. Some of the younger survivors are developing powers that set them apart from the rest, and the ordinary children are starting to be afraid of them. In the hills above the town, something old has begun calling to a handful of teenagers.
Rating coming soonIn New York, a fourteen-year-old girl named Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness, and she believes the answer lies with the author of a book her mother is translating. Across the city, an old man called Leo Gursky is living out his last years and thinking about the woman he loved in Poland sixty years earlier, and about the manuscript he wrote for her.
Rating coming soonBigger Thomas is twenty years old, black, and living with his mother and his brother and sister in one room on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. A relief agency finds him work as a driver for a wealthy white family, an opportunity that frightens him more than it reassures him. Within a day of taking the job he kills the daughter of the house, and the novel follows what comes next.
Rating coming soonThe novel begins sixty-five million years ago, with a small mammal in a world that is about to be struck by an asteroid, and ends half a billion years in the future, when the descendants of humanity have changed past recognition. Between those points it follows a single line of descent, and its characters change as the line does. The result is a family history rather than a hero's story, running from the age of the dinosaurs to the far end of time.
Rating coming soonStephen Dedalus grows up in Ireland in a Catholic family that is slowly losing its money and its standing. He is sent to a boarding school and then to university in Dublin, and he discovers that the religion, the politics and the language of the country he was born into are all things he must either accept or refuse. His answer is to leave.
Rating coming soonIn the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood wins a month-long internship at a New York fashion magazine and finds that the life she was supposed to want leaves her cold. She comes home to Massachusetts, and the distance between what she can feel and what everyone expects of her widens until she cannot work, sleep or read. The novel follows her through the doctors and hospitals that follow.
Rating coming soonWill Farnaby, a journalist working for interests that want an island's oil, is shipwrecked on Pala, a small country in the Indian Ocean that has been left to run its own affairs for a century. He is taken in by a family who explain their society to him: its medicine, its schools, its psychology and the way it deals with the outside world. Pala is rich, and its neighbours want what it has.
Rating coming soonJason wakes on a school bus holding hands with a girl who says she is his girlfriend, with no memory of anything before that morning. Piper knows more than she is telling and has dreams about her missing father, and Leo can build almost anything. When monsters attack a school trip, the three of them are taken to Camp Half-Blood and given a quest to rescue a goddess.
Rating coming soonA robot called Roz opens her eyes for the first time on a wild island and finds herself alone there, with no idea how she arrived or what she is for. She survives a storm and a bear, and works out that her only chance is to learn from the animals who see her as a dangerous stranger. Then her past catches up with her.
Rating coming soonKatniss Everdeen survived the Games twice, and the second time she was pulled out of the arena by rebels who want her to be the face of their war against the Capitol. She agrees, on conditions she does not really expect to be met, and becomes the Mockingjay in a propaganda campaign. The fighting is real, and so are the people making films about it.
Rating coming soonAn unnamed narrator who works out product recalls for a car company cannot sleep, and finds relief by turning up at support groups for conditions he does not have. Then he meets Tyler Durden, who has ideas about how a man should live, and the two of them start a fight club in the basement of a bar. What begins as an experiment has its own plans.
Rating coming soonPercy Jackson wakes with no memory of his life, hunted by monsters, and follows a wolf's training until he reaches a camp of Roman demigods who have never heard of him. There he meets Hazel, who is supposed to be dead, and Frank, whose family has secrets of its own. The three are sent north to Alaska to free the god of death.
Rating coming soonJames Henry Trotter loses his parents and is sent to live with two aunts who work him hard and give him nothing. An old man hands him a bag of green crystals and tells him they will make wonderful things happen, and James spills them by the old peach tree. One peach grows and grows, and James finds company for the first time inside it.
Rating coming soonNed Kelly works as a lifeguard at a Florida resort and has fallen for a guest who is far out of his league. When his cousin offers him a share of a break-in worth five million dollars, he takes it. On the night of the robbery everything goes wrong, and Ned runs, because speed and secrecy are the only things that will keep him alive.
Rating coming soonOn the northern shore of Sicily, the castle of the Mazzini family stands half in ruins, and its southern wing has been shut up for years. The Marquis's daughters, Emilia and Julia, live there in the shadow of a father who has returned to rule them. Julia loves a count, her father has promised her to somebody else, and the abandoned rooms are not as empty as they should be.
Rating coming soonNew York, 2000. A young woman from a wealthy family, two years out of art school and recently orphaned, decides that the best thing she can do for herself is to sleep for a year. She finds a psychiatrist willing to prescribe almost anything, stops answering her doorbell, and begins. Her only regular visitor is a friend she does not much like.
Rating coming soonIn the thirtieth century most people have left their bodies and live as software in the polises, where citizens are born from mind seeds and design their own children. Yatima is one of these, and when a catastrophe destroys the flesh-and-blood humans still living on Earth, the polises have to decide what they owe the rest of the universe. Then an ancient, encoded theory of physics turns out to be true.
Rating coming soonChief Bromden, a huge half-Native American man who has been in an Oregon psychiatric hospital for years, pretends to be deaf and dumb and watches everything that happens on the ward. Then Randle McMurphy arrives, having faked insanity to serve his sentence in hospital rather than on a work farm, and starts testing the authority of Nurse Ratched. The ward becomes a contest between the two of them.
Rating coming soonHoward Roark is an architect who will not design anything he does not believe in, which costs him the commissions that would make his career. Peter Keating, who was at school with him, takes the opposite approach and prospers. Around them are arranged a critic, a newspaper publisher and a woman who cannot decide whether she wants Roark to succeed or to be destroyed.
Rating coming soonMax puts on his wolf suit and makes so much trouble that his mother sends him to bed without any supper. His room turns into a forest, and a boat takes him across a sea to an island where the Wild Things live. They make him their king because he can stare them down, and they have a wild rumpus, and then Max has to decide what he wants most.
Rating coming soonIrene Redfield lives comfortably in Harlem with her physician husband and two sons, arranging charity events for the city's black elite. On a hot afternoon she runs into Clare Kendry, a childhood friend who has been passing as white and is married to a man who does not know she is black. Clare wants Irene's world back, and Irene cannot decide whether to admire her or fear her.
Rating coming soonSterling, New Hampshire, is a small town where very little happens, until a morning when a bomb goes off in a school car park and a student walks into the building with a gun. Nineteen minutes later ten people are dead. The novel follows the shooting, the trial and the years of bullying that came before it, through the eyes of the judge, her daughter and the shooter's mother.
Rating coming soonThe second book about Winnie-the-Pooh collects ten more stories from the Hundred Acre Wood, in which a house is built for Eeyore, Tigger arrives and is unbounced, and Rabbit has a busy day. The stories are about the ordinary business of the forest: building, eating, getting lost and being found. At the end of the book Christopher Robin is growing up, and Pooh finds an enchanted place on top of the forest.
Rating coming soonBella Swan is about to turn eighteen, and being in love with a vampire means that every ordinary accident is dangerous. When a paper cut at her birthday party sets off an attack on her, Edward Cullen decides to leave Forks, and his family leaves with him. Bella gets through the winter with Jacob Black, whose own family has a secret, and then a telephone call changes everything.
Rating coming soonLestat de Lioncourt has spent decades asleep under a New Orleans house, and he wakes in the 1980s to find that the vampire Louis has published an account of their lives together. His answer is to write his own version, and to form a rock band and play to crowds. He wants the attention of the vampires who have been avoiding him for centuries.
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.
