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 44 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 soonA girl wakes in a cave with burns, a head injury and no memory of anything, and finds that she can heal and that she is hungry in a way food will not fix. She looks about ten years old. She is in fact fifty-three, a member of a nocturnal species that lives on human blood, and the people who destroyed her family are still looking for her.
Rating coming soonA vampire of the far north wakes after centuries frozen in ice and goes looking for the one who made him. What he finds instead is Marius de Romanus, who agrees to tell the story of his two thousand years. Marius begins as a Roman patrician taken by druids and ends as the keeper of two sleeping vampires on whom every other vampire's existence depends.
Rating coming soonRose Hathaway is in her final year at St. Vladimir's Academy, training to become a guardian to her best friend, the vampire princess Lissa. She is still not herself after the death of a friend on a training exercise, and she is seeing things that should not be there. Then the academy is attacked, and the person she loves is taken.
Rating coming soonAn unnamed narrator rides to the decaying mansion of a friend from childhood, summoned by a letter that describes an illness and asks for help. Roderick Usher is pale, agitated and hypersensitive, his sister Madeline is wasting away, and the house itself seems to hold a mood of its own. The narrator stays, and what he is asked to help with is a burial.
Rating coming soonIn London, a wealthy young gentleman named Aubrey meets Lord Ruthven, a nobleman with a curious manner and a habit of attaching himself to people who are about to come to harm. Aubrey agrees to travel through Europe with him. He learns what Ruthven is slowly, and then has to watch what the discovery costs the people he loves.
Rating coming soonBeaufort Swan leaves Arizona to live with his father in the small, wet town of Forks, Washington, and finds the people at his new school strange and the Cullens stranger still. He is drawn to Edythe Cullen, who seems to find his presence intolerable and who is not what she appears to be. The novel retells Twilight with every character's gender changed.
Rating coming soonBack at the House of Night for another term, Zoey Redbird is trying to lead her circle of student priestesses while keeping a secret that would destroy her friends. Neferet, the school's High Priestess, has been bringing back the students who died during their change and making them into something obedient. One of them was Zoey's best friend.
Rating coming soonMona Mayfair, a young witch and heir to a New Orleans family, is dying at Blackwood Farm of an illness the doctors cannot name. She and the vampire Quinn Blackwood are in love. Lestat, who has decided that he wants to be good, arrives in the middle of it and is asked by the family's guardian spirit to do something he has no intention of doing.
Rating coming soonLouis de Pointe du Lac is being haunted by the ghost of Claudia, the daughter he made and lost, and he wants to speak to her. He and the vampire David Talbot ask Merrick Mayfair, a witch of a New Orleans family, to call her up. Merrick is also an old colleague of David's, and she has more reasons than either of them to want the dead disturbed.
Rating coming soonSimon Snow won. He defeated the great enemy of the magical world, he lost his powers doing it and he is now living with his boyfriend Baz, and none of it has made him happy. When his best friend suggests a road trip to America, he goes along. The plan is a holiday, and what they find instead is a country full of vampires, dragons and worse.
Rating coming soonDiana Bishop, a historian and a witch, and Matthew Clairmont, a vampire and a scientist, return from the sixteenth century to find that a member of their family has been murdered. They need the missing pages of an old manuscript, and they need the rules that forbid marriage between witches and vampires to be broken. Both are dangerous.
Rating coming soonA man who has always loved animals describes the change in himself that drink brought on, and the black cat he loved best before he began to hurt it. He tells the story from the day before his death, and he does not ask the reader to forgive him. What he wants is for the whole thing to be understood exactly as it happened.
Rating coming soonNatty Bumppo, called Deerslayer, is a young frontiersman on Otsego Lake in upstate New York in the 1740s, before the wars that will make his name. He is travelling to meet a friend of his father's when he falls in with two men who are much less particular than he is. One of them, Harry March, wants to take scalps, and Deerslayer will not.
Rating coming soonIn 1659, with her grandmother condemned as a witch, fourteen-year-old Mary Newbury is taken to the docks and put aboard a ship for the New World. Her grandmother has told her to hide what she can do, and Mary writes the voyage down in a journal she means to survive. The colony she lands in has its own opinion about women who are different.
Rating coming soonA plague called the Red Death is killing half the people in the country, and Prince Prospero has decided not to watch. He retreats into an abbey with a thousand friends, seals the doors and fills the rooms with music and food. Months later he holds a masked ball in seven rooms of different colours, and a guest arrives who was not invited.
Rating coming soonQuentin Coldwater is a brilliant, unhappy high school senior in Brooklyn who is still half in love with a series of children's books about a magical land called Fillory. On the day of his interview for Princeton he is taken instead to Brakebills, a college of magic in upstate New York, and spends four years there. Graduation leaves him with powers and no idea what they are for.
Rating coming soonEmil Sinclair grows up in a comfortable middle-class German household that he thinks of as one world, and discovers that there is another, darker one at the edge of it. A boast he makes to impress a local boy puts him in the power of a bully, and he is rescued by Max Demian, a classmate who reads the Bible in a way nobody else does. Demian changes how Sinclair sees everything.
Rating coming soonEddie is the maintenance man at a seaside amusement park, and on his eighty-third birthday a ride comes apart and he is killed trying to save a child. He wakes in heaven, where he is told that he will meet five people whose lives crossed his own. The first of them is a stranger whose death Eddie caused without ever knowing it.
Rating coming soonOn the Thames at Battersea Reach, a small community of people live aboard barges moored to the mud at low tide. Nenna is waiting for her husband to come back to her while her two daughters run along the foreshore. Maurice next door is sympathetic and makes his living in a way the others do not discuss. An elderly painter called Willis wants to sell his boat.
Rating coming soonAt a hotel in Chicago, Beth Cappadora leaves her three-year-old son Ben with his older brother for a few minutes while she checks in for her school reunion. When she turns round he is gone. The disappearance breaks the family apart, and nine years later a boy knocks on her door and asks whether she wants her lawn mowed.
Rating coming soonFrank and April Wheeler live in a new house in suburban Connecticut with their two children, and both of them are certain that they were meant for something better. Frank commutes to a job in the city that bores him, April has given up acting, and the neighbours are watching. Their plan to leave for Europe is the thing that keeps them going.
Rating coming soonRuby Lennox begins her story at the moment of her conception above a pet shop in York, and from there she talks her way through a childhood in a family that is not much interested in her. Between the chapters of Ruby's life are the stories of the women who came before her: her mother Bunty, her grandmother Nell and her great-grandmother Alice, each of them told in the first person.
Rating coming soonAbby and Red Whitshank have lived for decades in the house Red's father built in Baltimore, and their four grown children gather on the porch to hear the story of how their parents met. Everyone there has heard it many times. As Abby and Red get older, the question of who will look after them, and who will get the house, begins to divide the family.
Rating coming soonVictor Mancini dropped out of medical school to look after his mother, who is in a nursing home and does not always remember who he is. To pay for her care he pretends to choke on food in restaurants and lets strangers save his life. He keeps a list of everyone who has ever rescued him, and writes to them about the debts he says he cannot pay.
Rating coming soonIn Dublin, a school opens an evening class in Italian, and a group of people who have nothing else in common sign up for it. Their teacher is an Irishwoman who lived in Italy for years and came home after the death of the man she went there with. Over the course of a year the class changes what several of the students do with their lives.
Rating coming soonLinden Hills is the neighbourhood a black family moves to when it has done everything right, and its best address is Tupelo Drive. Two young men come to work there over a Christmas holiday, one of them hoping to marry into the family that has owned the place for generations. The houses on Tupelo Drive come up for sale more often than anyone remarks on.
Rating coming soonKatie Carr is a doctor in London, married to David, who has spent years being furious about everything and has made a career out of it. She is also having an affair, and she has decided that the two facts balance out. Then David meets a healer, stops being angry and starts giving his money away, which is much harder to live with.
Rating coming soonTaylor Greer is raising the Cherokee child who was given to her years ago, and the two of them are getting by in Tucson. When Turtle appears on television and a lawyer starts asking questions, a tribal authority in Oklahoma disputes the adoption. Taylor takes her daughter to the Cherokee Nation to find out what the law and the family have to say.
Rating coming soonTambu is a Shona girl in Rhodesia in the 1960s whose older brother has just died, and whose ambition is to go to school. Her brother's death gives her the chance, because the family's money for education is now free for her to use. She goes to live with her uncle's household at a mission school, where she learns exactly what her education will cost.
Rating coming soonAlex Cross is a detective and a psychologist in Washington, called to a murder in the projects and then seconded to a kidnapping case involving two children of famous families. The kidnapper is a teacher at their school, a man who has been planning this for years. Cross works alongside the Secret Service, the FBI and a supervisor named Jezzie Flanagan.
Rating coming soonThe Time Traveller returns from the year 802,701 determined to go back and rescue Weena, the Eloi woman who died in the fire. The quartz of his machine contains a substance given to him years earlier, and the journey takes him much further into the future than he intends, to a sky that has gone permanently dark and to a version of the Morlocks nobody has met before.
Rating coming soonIn 1942 a young American mathematician named Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is posted to a unit whose existence almost nobody knows about, with the job of keeping the Germans from realising that their codes have been broken. Sixty years later his grandson is helping to build a data haven on a small island in the Pacific, using the same mathematics for a different kind of freedom.
Rating coming soonTokyo has been rebuilt after a catastrophic earthquake, and Rei Toei, a singer who exists only as software, is a star. Rez, half of the rock duo Lo/Rez, announces that he intends to marry her. A young fan from Seattle flies to Tokyo to find out whether the story is true, and a data analyst is hired to find out what Rez is doing.
Rating coming soonA hollowed-out asteroid appears in near-Earth orbit, an exact copy of the asteroid Juno but carved into seven enormous chambers and rotating to make its own gravity. The United States and the Soviet Union both want it, and the scientists who go inside find cities that have been running themselves for centuries. At the end of the last chamber is a corridor that leads nowhere on Earth.
Rating coming soonIn a galaxy where no species becomes intelligent without being raised by a patron, humans are the youngest clan and are still suspected of having no patron at all. The planet Garth has been leased to them, and the avian Gubru have arrived to take it, holding the world hostage in order to learn what the dolphin-crewed ship Streaker found. Its uplifted inhabitants have to decide whether to fight.
Rating coming soonPaul Durham has worked out how to copy a human mind into a computer and keep it running, and he needs paying customers. Maria Deluca scans herself to pay for her mother's treatment. The copies live in a virtual city that can be edited, duplicated and switched off, and the question the novel keeps asking is whether the difference between a copy and a person matters.
Rating coming soonTwo centuries after the robot novels began, the Spacer worlds are fading and the crowded population of Earth wants somewhere to go. A robot who has outlived his owner sets out to settle an old account with the man who tried to destroy humanity's home world. The story of how robots disappear from the galaxy is told in the gap between this book and the Empire.
Rating coming soonCommander Honor Harrington has embarrassed a powerful officer, and the reward is command of a light cruiser posted to Basilisk Station, a picket assignment nobody wants, on a ship whose weapons do not work. Her crew blames her for the posting and the local interests resent any authority at all. Then she starts looking into what the smuggling is for.
Rating coming soonFriday is an artificial person, engineered to be stronger, faster and quicker than the humans she works among, and she is employed as a courier by an organisation that operates across a fractured North America. Her abilities are an asset in her work and would expose her to prejudice if anybody found out about them. On one assignment everything goes wrong at once.
Rating coming soonElijah Baley, a detective from overcrowded Earth, is sent to the Spacer world of Aurora to investigate the destruction of a humanoid robot. The man who could have done it has the means, the motive and the opportunity, and the politics of the situation require that he be proved innocent. Baley works with two robots, one his old partner and one far older.
Rating coming soonThe Earthship Streaker is crewed by a hundred and fifty uplifted dolphins, a handful of humans and a chimpanzee, and it has just found a fleet of fifty thousand derelict ships that appear to belong to the first race in the galaxy. Every other species wants to know where they found it. The ship limps to a planet with a poisonous ocean and waits to be found.
Rating coming soonRobert Gu was a celebrated poet with a mean temper, and then Alzheimer's took twenty years from him. He wakes in San Diego in 2025 with his mind restored and his body looking decades younger, in a world where almost every object is networked and much of what people see is added by their clothes and contact lenses. He has to learn to live there, and then somebody recruits him.
Rating coming soonThe world of 2010 has too many people in it, and the institutions that are supposed to manage them are run by corporations. Norman House is a rising executive in one of the largest, using his background to build a career, and Donald Hogan is his roommate, working for an intelligence agency in ways he cannot discuss. Both are about to be sent a long way from New York.
Rating coming soonCasseia Majumdar grows up in one of the old Martian family syndicates, in a society that runs its own affairs and resents the influence of Earth. She goes to university, becomes involved in politics, and finds herself in the middle of the argument about whether Mars should unify. Then a scientific discovery gives the planet a weapon it never expected to have.
Rating coming soonPeter Hobson invents a device that detects a pattern leaving a body at the moment of death, and he wants to know what the pattern is. With his friend Sarkar Muhammed he makes three electronic copies of his own personality, two of them altered and one left as a control. Then the copies escape into the networks, and people Hobson dislikes begin to die.
Rating coming soonAt a party in Kansas City a young woman tries to introduce a man to her father and ends up married to him before the evening is over. The four of them, two of them mathematicians, find themselves flying a ship that can travel between universes. They are not lost exactly, but they cannot get home, and something is following them.
Rating coming soonIn a Manchester that has been rewritten by the drug Vurt, people take feathers and go somewhere else. Scribble and his gang, the Stash Riders, are looking for his sister, who vanished on a shared trip into a place called English Voodoo. To find her he needs a feather that is not supposed to exist.
Rating coming soonCaptain Honor Harrington is sent to the planet Grayson, a society governed by men who treat a female officer as an offence. She is there to escort a diplomatic mission that matters to Manticore's chances in the coming war. The Graysons need the alliance as much as she does, and their neighbours are being courted by the other side.
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.
