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 45 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 soonHaroun Khalifa lives in a city so miserable that it has forgotten its name, with a father who is a famous storyteller. When his mother leaves and his father loses the gift of the gab, Haroun sets out to find out what has gone wrong with the stories. The journey takes him to a moon called Kahani and to a sea of stories that somebody is poisoning.
Rating coming soonWith their parents away, four children are left in a London boarding house where the only other lodger is an Egyptologist with a room full of antiquities. They meet the Psammead again, and with it an amulet that can carry them through time. Half of the charm is missing, and until they find the other half they cannot wish themselves home.
Rating coming soonHarper has cerebral palsy, a dying mother and a brother who does not think she can look after herself, and she is used to being underestimated. When she tries to stop a kidnapping in Washington she is pulled into another world, to a castle where the autumn of a prince's eighteenth year repeats and where a monster rampages at the end of every season.
Rating coming soonAn earthquake in California opens a crack in the ground, and Dorothy, her cousin Zeb and a horse fall through it into a country beneath the earth. They are joined by the Wizard, who arrived the same way, and by a piglet, and together they travel through lands of vegetable people and glass cities looking for a way back to the surface.
Rating coming soonTaran is an assistant pig-keeper in the land of Prydain, and men have been disappearing while the undead warriors of Arawn Death-Lord grow more numerous. A council of princes and allies decides that the only answer is to take the Black Cauldron itself, the thing that makes the dead soldiers, and destroy it. Taran insists on going.
Rating coming soonIn the last volume of the Prydain chronicles the forces of Arawn Death-Lord come south in earnest and the allies gather for the final campaign. Taran, who began the series as an assistant pig-keeper, has become a leader, and the book asks what he is prepared to give up for the good of the country. It also requires him to part with the people he loves.
Rating coming soonTommy Stubbins finds an injured squirrel and is told that the only man who can help is a doctor who speaks the language of animals. Dolittle takes him on as an assistant, and the two of them, with a parrot, a dog and the rest of the doctor's household of creatures, sail to find a missing naturalist on a floating island in the tropics.
Rating coming soonLuther and Nora Krank do the arithmetic on Christmas and do not like the answer, so they decide to skip it. No tree, no rooftop snowman, no Christmas Eve party, and a Caribbean cruise instead. Their neighbours, and the street's annual competition for decorations, have opinions about this, and the Kranks find that opting out is more work than joining in.
Rating coming soonHonour Huston is the plain one of three sisters, and she has always disliked the nickname Beauty. When her father's ships are lost and the family has to move to the country, she is happier than she expected to be. Then her father comes back from a journey with a story about a castle in a forest, and Honour goes there in his place.
Rating coming soonJamie is the first boy Peter Pan ever brought to the island and the one who has stayed longest, which is the problem, because Jamie is growing up. He looks after the younger boys while Peter plays, and when Peter's jealousy of a new child turns dangerous, Jamie begins to see what Peter really is. How a lost boy became a pirate is the story of the island's rules.
Rating coming soonCimorene is a princess with an interest in fencing, magic, cooking and Latin, and her family finds all of it unsuitable. When they announce her engagement to a prince she cannot stand, she runs away, and the dragons she meets are happy to take her on. She becomes the princess of a dragon called Kazul, keeps the library and the treasure, and spends her time discouraging the princes who come to rescue her.
Rating coming soonDiamond sleeps in a loft above a stable, and the wind comes in through a hole in the wall. When he blocks it to keep warm he finds that he has stopped the North Wind from looking through her own window. She takes him with her through the night, over the city and out to sea, and Diamond discovers that she is a great deal more than weather.
Rating coming soonGeralt of Rivia kills a monster that was made to slaughter people, and within days he is under arrest, his two witcher swords are gone and he has made a powerful enemy. Getting them back means dealing with a sorceress, the authorities and a great deal of rumour. The novel stands on its own in the middle of the Witcher series.
Rating coming soonElsa is seven, she corrects other people's grammar, and she is bullied at school. Her grandmother is seventy-seven, drives the neighbours mad and tells her the stories of a kingdom called Miamas. When her grandmother dies, she leaves Elsa a series of apologetic letters to deliver, and each one introduces a neighbour whose real life turns out to be part of the fairy tales.
Rating coming soonA young woman is about to be married when a blackmailer obtains letters that would ruin her, and Holmes is engaged to get them back. Charles Augustus Milverton has made a profession out of other people's secrets and does not care what publishing them costs. When his price cannot be met, Holmes considers taking the letters rather than buying them.
Rating coming soonEight months after his wife was murdered, James Bond is drinking, gambling and making mistakes, and the Service sends him to Japan on a semi-diplomatic mission rather than dismiss him. The head of Japanese intelligence offers him a private bargain: kill a man who has built himself a garden of death. Bond recognises the target's other name.
Rating coming soonA skiing holiday in Utah ends with thirty Secret Service agents dead and the President of the United States kidnapped. Scot Harvath, a former Navy SEAL who is the only survivor of the detail, refuses to accept the official explanation of a landslide. He starts his own investigation, and it takes him to Switzerland.
Rating coming soonMitch Rapp has spent fifteen years hunting terrorists for the CIA, and the people he has killed have families with money. A Saudi businessman whose son died in one of Rapp's operations buys the services of a professional assassin, and the intention is not a quick death but an example. Rapp's private life is the part of him that is unprotected.
Rating coming soonMitch Rapp's cover has been blown, and the man who killed terrorists quietly for years is now a public figure and a target. He is moved onto the CIA director's staff as an adviser, and then a rescue operation in the Philippines goes wrong because somebody in Washington passed on its details. Rapp is asked to deal with both the leak and the hostages.
Rating coming soonJohn Corey is a New York homicide detective recovering from gunshot wounds at his uncle's house on the North Fork of Long Island. The local police chief asks him to look at the murder of two biologists who worked on Plum Island, a research site suspected of germ warfare work. Corey knew both of the victims.
Rating coming soonMegan is a suburban mother with a husband, three children and a past she has told nobody about. Ray was a documentary photographer and now works as a paparazzo. Broome is a detective who has never closed the case of a man who vanished seventeen years ago. When another man disappears on the same date, the three of them are drawn back to it.
Rating coming soonCatherine Douglas wakes in a convent on a Greek island knowing only her own name, and is told that everyone believes she died at the hands of her husband and his mistress. Her benefactor is a shipping magnate who arranges for her to recover, to work and to remember. What she remembers is inconvenient for more than one person.
Rating coming soonA reporter and four urban explorers break into the Paragon Hotel, an abandoned seaside building where nothing has been touched since its owner killed himself. They are looking for a vault they believe is somewhere inside. They find that the building is not empty, that somebody has been living in it, and that they are not the only people who came for the money.
Rating coming soonMolly Lasch pleaded guilty to manslaughter rather than stand trial for murdering her husband, a respected doctor, and served her sentence. Now on parole, she tells anyone who will listen that she cannot remember the night and believes she is innocent. An old college friend, a reporter, agrees to look at the case.
Rating coming soonSara Linton, a paediatrician and medical examiner, is being sued by the parents of a patient who died, and the town she has served for sixteen years is lining up against her. Her husband, the police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, gets word that his detective has been arrested in connection with a murder, and the two of them drive south into country where they are not welcome.
Rating coming soonA couple on a Long Island beach are filming each other when an explosion lights up the sky and something appears to rise from the sea towards a plane. Five years later the crash of TWA Flight 800 has been attributed to a mechanical fault. Detective John Corey and his wife, who worked on the original inquiry, go looking for the video.
Rating coming soonA killer in Minneapolis parks burns the bodies of women he has already killed, and the press has named him the Cremator. When one of the victims is the daughter of a wealthy family and a homeless teenager claims to have seen the fire, the case is handed to the Bureau. A former FBI agent working with witnesses and a profiler are put together on it.
Rating coming soonA pawnbroker with very red hair is recruited into a society that pays its members to sit in an office copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and when the league is suddenly dissolved he asks Sherlock Holmes about it. Holmes listens, takes three pipefuls of tobacco and goes to look at the street outside the shop. The answer is not about red hair at all.
Rating coming soonA private jet goes down in the water sixteen minutes after taking off from Martha's Vineyard, killing everybody on board except a middle-aged painter and a four-year-old boy. The painter swims for hours with the child on his back, and then finds himself at the centre of a media storm and an investigation into why the aircraft crashed.
Rating coming soonSix years ago Jake Sanders watched Natalie, the woman he loved, marry another man, and he promised to leave her alone. When he sees that her husband has died he goes to the funeral. The widow is not Natalie, and she has been married to the dead man for far longer than six years.
Rating coming soonJack Crabb is 111 years old and has two fathers, one white and one a Cheyenne chief who named him Little Big Man. He has been a Cheyenne, a white man, a buffalo hunter, a shopkeeper's assistant and a survivor of the fight at the Little Bighorn. He tells the whole story to a credulous young man who has come to write it down.
Rating coming soonDuncan McKaskel is taking his wife Susanna and their twelve-year-old son west to start again, and he has prepared for the travelling and the weather. What he has not prepared for is the men who follow families like his, or for Con Vallian, the stranger who saves his life one night and does not explain why. The family's own camp is the part he cannot read.
Rating coming soonTyrel Sackett is eighteen when he has to leave Tennessee, having killed a man who was trying to kill his brother. Orrin catches up with him, and the two of them head west to New Mexico, where land grants are being voided by fraud and where a man with a gun and a willingness to use it is not automatically welcome.
Rating coming soonIn 1756, in the settlements of upper New York, ten-year-old Edward Van Alstyne and his mother are left to look after the farm while his father goes with the militia. The house holds an old Spanish matchlock gun, far too heavy for a boy to manage, and news keeps arriving of raiders burning farms up the valley.
Rating coming soonIn 1920 Jack and Mabel have left Pennsylvania for a homestead in the Alaskan wilderness, and the work is harder and the isolation longer than either of them expected. Mabel is still grieving the baby they lost. The night of the first snow they build a girl out of snow, and in the morning she is gone, and there are small human tracks at the edge of the property.
Rating coming soonNatty Bumppo, called the Pathfinder, is in his middle years and guiding a party across the country towards Lake Ontario, the inland sea of the title. The journey takes them through forest and water and past men who would rather they did not arrive. Among the travellers is a young woman, Mabel Dunham, and Natty finds his own convictions tested by her.
Rating coming soonIn 1875 a group of American women travels west under a government programme that will marry them into the Cheyenne nation, in exchange for horses sent to Washington. The scheme was proposed by a Cheyenne chief and taken up by the administration as a way of assimilating the tribes. The novel is the journal of one of the women who volunteered.
Rating coming soonMary Jemison is twelve and takes her family's farm in eastern Pennsylvania for granted until a war party takes the household captive in 1758. She is separated from her parents and travels to a Seneca village, where she has to learn the language, the work and the customs of people she was brought up to fear. She tries several times to run away.
Rating coming soonMarguerite Ledoux is thirteen and alone in the world when she is taken on as an indentured servant by a family settling on the Maine coast in 1743. The family regards her as very little better than the people they are afraid of, and the first winter is not kind. She earns her place slowly, by knowing what to do when nobody else does.
Rating coming soonFay Larkin is being held prisoner in a hidden canyon near a Mormon village where wives are sealed to their husbands, and anyone who finds the place is not expected to leave it. John Shefford, who wants to marry her, goes looking for her through the canyon country. He does it without a gun.
Rating coming soonIn 1963 two young men, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, are hired to spend a summer herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They have almost nothing in common and no reason to expect to meet again after the season ends. What begins on the mountain follows both of them through the next twenty years of their marriages and their work.
Rating coming soonRandall Kapplehoff goes back to Camp Outland every summer, and this year he has a plan. He has renamed himself Del, changed how he dresses and worked on his shoulders, all to get the attention of Hudson, the boy he has been in love with for years. The trouble with a summer of pretending is that it has to end.
Rating coming soonBean is small even for a child living on the streets of a city where gangs of hungry kids fight over scraps, and he survives with his mind rather than his fists. He is recruited to Battle School, where the children are trained in war games for a conflict they are too young to understand. Bean's talent is finding the weakness in whatever is in front of him.
Rating coming soonMallory is an orphan of the corporate war: she lost her parents and her home in an airstrike and now shares a hotel room with eight people, working several jobs to pay for water. The work she is best at is streaming a virtual reality war game. Then a chance meeting inside the game shows her where the real soldiers came from.
Rating coming soonMasha Maximow works for a cybersecurity company that sells to governments, and her job is to make the hacks that let repressive states watch and manipulate their opponents. The pay is enormous and the work is the best she has ever done. She also sometimes helps those same opponents evade detection, which is a game she cannot keep playing indefinitely.
Rating coming soonSix friends speak in turn, from childhood to middle age, and the reader hears only their voices and their thoughts. Bernard tells stories, Susan wants a house and children, Rhoda cannot hold on to a self, Neville loves one man, Jinny lives in her body, and Louis measures himself against everyone. Between their soliloquies the sea moves through a single day.
Rating coming soonA young man in Bangalore sits in an old coffee shop and thinks about his family: the years of scarcity, the uncle whose spice business made them rich, the large house they moved into and what money did to everyone in it. He also thinks about the woman he let go. The phrase the book is named after was invented by his wife and her brother.
Rating coming soonDaniel Lavette is born on the ship that brings his French father and Italian mother to America, and grows up helping on his father's fishing boat in San Francisco. When the earthquake of 1906 destroys the city and his parents with it, he earns money ferrying survivors across the bay and uses it to start a business. He does not stop there.
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.
