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 46 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 soonKara and Steve Marshall are selling their house on Long Island so that they can move into Manhattan, and their teenage daughter Lindsay does not want to go. She tells her mother that somebody came into her room during an open house. When her parents are in the city looking at apartments, Lindsay disappears from her bed.
Rating coming soonA tsunami leaves two sisters in coastal India orphaned, and a friend of their father offers to take them to safety. He sells them instead, and the older sister does what she can to protect the younger one in a brothel in Mumbai. On the other side of the world a lawyer takes a sabbatical with an organisation that prosecutes traffickers.
Rating coming soonThe Ambersons are the first family of a midwestern town, and their magnificence rests on a fortune made in 1878 and a house everybody knows. Three generations live on it while the town grows into a city around them and their money is overtaken by people who make things. George Amberson Minafer, the grandson, is the last to notice.
Rating coming soonOliver Watson has a wife, three children and a career he is proud of, and he assumes the arrangement will hold. When Sarah leaves the marriage to go back to university, he is left to run a household he has never had to think about. In the same period his mother dies and his father begins to change.
Rating coming soonAnnie McGairy is eighteen and Carl Brown is twenty when they marry against the wishes of both their families, and Annie takes a train alone to the university town where Carl is studying law. They rent a room near the campus with very little money and no idea how to run a household. The novel covers their first year together.
Rating coming soonBarnaby Gaitlin is nearly thirty, divorced, and works for a company called Rent-a-Back, doing heavy chores for elderly clients. When he was seventeen he was caught burgling the neighbours' houses, and nobody in his philanthropic family has forgotten it. He is waiting for the family's guardian angel to appear to him, as it appeared to his great-grandfather.
Rating coming soonThe Mulvaneys are the family everyone in the small town of Mt. Ephraim admires: a thriving roofing business, four good-looking children and a farm outside town. On Valentine's night in 1976, after a school dance, the daughter of the family is raped by a boy whose father is a friend of her father's. Nothing in the family is the same afterwards.
Rating coming soonHarley Altmyer is nineteen and bringing up his three younger sisters in a coal town in western Pennsylvania, because his mother is in prison for killing their abusive father. He works two minimum-wage jobs and does the cooking and the laundry. He is also falling in love with a woman who lives down the road, and that is not the last secret in the family.
Rating coming soonAlice Goodwin and her husband left the city to run the last dairy farm in a small midwestern town, and six years later the farm is barely making money and her elder daughter is having rages nobody understands. One June morning a child drowns in the pond while Alice is responsible for her. The town's reaction divides the family's life in two.
Rating coming soonNariman Vakeel is seventy-nine, has Parkinson's disease, and lives in a decaying Bombay flat with his two middle-aged stepchildren. When he breaks an ankle, the burden of his care moves to his daughter Roxana and her husband Yezad, who are already short of money. The arrangement strains everyone it touches, and it turns a family held together by habit into one that has to decide what it owes.
Rating coming soonAlisa is five thousand years old and has been a vampire for most of that time. She arrives in Los Angeles to find out who has been asking questions about her, takes the identity of a high-school student called Lara Adams, and makes friends with two boys for reasons that are not entirely honest. Then she goes looking for the men who tried to trap her.
Rating coming soonA young woman asks Holmes for help a few weeks before her wedding, because her sister died in a locked bedroom on the night before her own marriage, and she has begun to hear the same low whistle in the night. Their stepfather, a doctor who once practised in India, keeps a collection of animals and has a violent temper. Holmes and Watson go down to the house.
Rating coming soonLydia Bryant joins a wagon train bound for Texas with a secret she does not intend to explain and a determination that no man will ever have power over her again. Ross Coleman is travelling the same road, with a past that has followed him out of the law's reach. They are thrown together by the journey, and by the men pursuing both of them.
Rating coming soonGrace McCabe is a mystery novelist who goes to Washington to spend time with her sister Kathleen, and finds her working a telephone sex line in the evenings to pay for a custody lawyer. When Kathleen is killed in her apartment, the police settle on a suspect whom Grace does not believe. She starts asking questions of her own.
Rating coming soonArmed intruders dressed as monks kill the congregation of a cathedral in Cologne and leave with the bones of the Magi, which have been kept there for centuries. A group of soldiers and scientists from an American special unit is sent after them. What the thieves want with the relics turns out to be stranger than a theft.
Rating coming soonRegan Madison is a hotel heiress who helps run a charitable foundation, and an anonymous email arrives with a photograph of a crime scene attached. The detective assigned to look after her, Alec Buchanan, would rather be getting on with his career and is not pleased about the assignment. The list the photograph belongs to keeps growing.
Rating coming soonKate Donovan is a television producer whose career has stalled, and she is given an interview with the only survivor of a massacre that has shocked the world. The interview is the chance of a lifetime and it puts her in the middle of an investigation that the authorities would rather she did not pursue. She is also brought face to face with a man from her past.
Rating coming soonBritt Shelley wakes up in a hotel bed next to a detective called Jay Burgess with no memory of the night, and then discovers that he is dead beside her. Five years earlier Jay was one of four officials celebrated for leading people out of a fire that destroyed the Charleston police headquarters. The firefighter who investigated that blaze has never accepted the story.
Rating coming soonJordan Buchanan goes to a wedding that joins two family dynasties, and a dishevelled professor turns up to warn that the MacKennas and the Buchanans have been feuding since Scotland and that a treasure was stolen. The wedding party treats him as a nuisance until somebody takes him seriously enough to hurt him. Jordan starts looking into the story.
Rating coming soonNicolas Creel runs the largest defence contractor in the world, and he decides that his business would do better with a war. He hires a man whose profession is the management of public perception and gives him an unlimited budget. Against them are a woman journalist who has just been handed the interview of her career and a man with no first name.
Rating coming soonIrene Stenson left the small northern California town of Dunsley seventeen years ago, on the night she found her parents dead in the kitchen and the deaths were ruled a murder and a suicide. A cryptic message from the friend she left behind brings her back, and the friend is dead before Irene can see her. The town has not changed its mind about anything.
Rating coming soonBailey Wingate's husband dies and leaves her in control of the family fortune, to the fury of his adult children. A year later she is flying from Seattle to Denver in a small plane when the engine fails, and her pilot brings it down in the Idaho wilderness. Getting out alive is the first problem, and the reason for the crash is the second.
Rating coming soonBeatriz's father is executed and her home destroyed in the upheaval after the Mexican War of Independence, and when Don Rodolfo Solorzano proposes she accepts, ignoring what people say about his first wife's death, because his estate offers her a home. Hacienda San Isidro is not the refuge she imagined. When her husband returns to the capital she is left in the house with his sister.
Rating coming soonKay Scarpetta is at a death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts when her phone sounds an emergency alert and a video arrives that appears to be from her niece Lucy. The film is surveillance footage of Lucy taken almost twenty years earlier, and more of it follows. Scarpetta cannot tell her husband, her investigator or even Lucy what she has been sent.
Rating coming soonTiernan de Haas is the only child of a film producer and an actress, raised in boarding schools with money and no attention, and when her parents die she feels almost nothing. Her father's stepbrother, a man she has never met, becomes her guardian, and she goes to live with him and his two grown sons in a remote cabin in the mountains. Nobody there wanted her.
Rating coming soonTansy Adams runs the family bookshop she inherited from her father and has nothing to say when her stepfamily asks about her love life, so she invents a girlfriend based on the woman on a book jacket. The invention is harmless until the real Gemma van Dalen walks into the shop. Gemma needs a wife within the terms of an inheritance and offers to make the lie true.
Rating coming soonGeorgina is sacked from a restaurant and comes home early to find her boyfriend in bed with somebody else, both on the same day. She takes the first job she is offered, behind the bar of a newly opened pub, and then discovers that the man who owns it is the boy she fell in love with at school. He does not remember her.
Rating coming soonRosie and Dominic Vega have been together since high school, and somewhere in the years since his return from the army they stopped talking to each other. Rosie wants to open a restaurant and wants her husband back. What she proposes is a boot camp for their marriage, and to her surprise he agrees.
Rating coming soonAfter the battle with Lord Morgarath, Will and Evanlyn are taken prisoner and shipped north to Skandia aboard a wolfship. Halt, expelled from the Rangers for defying his king, sets out to find them with Will's friend Horace, who is a formidable fighter despite his youth. It is a long way, and winter is coming.
Rating coming soonThe forest cats have settled into five camps, following the spirit cats' instruction to spread out like the petals of a flower. Then the rogue Slash takes Star Flower prisoner and demands prey the cats cannot spare. Clear Sky needs the other four leaders to help him, and none of them trusts him enough to agree.
Rating coming soonJessi St. James is studying archaeology and gets more than she bargained for when she finds a mirror with an imprisoned Celtic warrior inside it. Freeing him puts her in the way of a group of men who want the mirror and of an immortal who has spent thirteen hundred years waiting for his freedom. The two of them have to stay alive and work out what they are to each other.
Rating coming soonJoe Stoshack has to write a report about an African American who made an important contribution to society, and he has an unusual advantage: with the right old baseball card in his hand, he can travel through time. He decides to go and meet Jackie Robinson. What he finds is a trip that changes how he looks at everything afterwards.
Rating coming soonWill Trent arrives at an abandoned Atlanta warehouse where a former police officer has been shot, and the blood trail shows that a second victim, a woman, was carried out and has disappeared. The building belongs to the city's most famous athlete, a man married to Will's ex-wife and under investigation for rape. Then Sara Linton finds something at the scene.
Rating coming soonMelanie puts on her mother's wedding dress one night and goes out into the garden, and the next morning she learns that her parents have been killed in a plane crash. She and her two younger siblings are sent to south London to live with an uncle they have never met, who makes life-sized puppets and toys and rules his household absolutely. His wife does not speak.
Rating coming soonOn her twenty-first birthday Nell learns that she was adopted, that she was found on an Australian wharf in 1913 at the age of four, and that nobody ever discovered her name. The news rearranges her life. Sixty years later a set of clues sends her to Cornwall, to a house called Blackhurst Manor and to the author of a book of fairy tales.
Rating coming soonGrace Byler is twenty-one and wants to find her mother, who left the family home three weeks ago without explanation, taking nothing and leaving no word. Grace suspects that her reserved and uncommunicative father knows why. In the same period an English woman has come to the Amish country to revisit the place where her mother lived, and to face a diagnosis of her own.
Rating coming soonYears after an unknown gunman killed his wife in front of him, Alex Cross has left the police and the FBI and is practising as a psychologist again. Then his former partner calls in a favour: a serial rapist is working in Georgetown, and the method matches a case the two of them worked together years earlier. Cross says yes.
Rating coming soonJasmine and Camelia Rasheed grow up after the Second World War in a mansion on Virgins of Paradise Street in Cairo, watched over by their grandmother and the women of the family. The city is glamorous and the household still keeps the rules their generation is beginning to question. Both sisters leave the family, in very different directions.
Rating coming soonShane Galanter is ready to settle somewhere after years of moving, and the woman he has never forgotten is on his mind. Lauren Gibbs has spent her working life as a war correspondent and has given up on the future she once wanted. Emily Anderson is a college student raised by her grandparents who discovers, in her first year, a love story with a tragic ending that turns out to be her own beginning.
Rating coming soonSarah Kennedy was orphaned at thirteen, married at fourteen and widowed at sixteen, and has learned to rely on nobody; her brother Conner and the injured hawks she nurses are the only things she loves. Case Maxwell came out of the Civil War with a list of men he intends to find and a rule about loving nothing that can die. He is nearly killed by the family Sarah has reason to fear.
Rating coming soonParis Gibson hosts a late-night radio show in Austin, where listeners call in with their problems and she offers advice. One caller, who signs himself Valentino, tells her that her advice to the woman he loves has driven her away, that he has taken the woman prisoner, and that he will kill her in seventy-two hours and then come for Paris. The police take it seriously.
Rating coming soonGideon is a contract killer who works in a world of money, hotels and women, and he has always been the one in control of the game. He wakes one morning in London with no memory of the night and no idea whom he can trust. Somebody from his past has decided that he is the problem.
Rating coming soonThe Mortal War is over, and Clary Fray is back in New York, training to be a Shadowhunter and looking forward to a period with nothing worse in it than her mother's wedding. Then Shadowhunters begin to be murdered, and the killings are arranged to make the Downworlders and the Shadowhunters blame each other. Her friend Simon, newly a vampire, cannot help her.
Rating coming soonTrevor Mann is a lawyer who has finally found a life he likes, with a journalist girlfriend called Claire Parker who is always chasing the next story. Then one of her investigations leads to violence, and Trevor finds himself following her notes. What she was working on is a secret that governments and terrorist groups would both like to have.
Rating coming soonSix-year-old Sam Kettering is kidnapped from his home and manages to escape on his own, and everybody assumes that the worst is over. A sheriff in eastern Tennessee calls his father, a former FBI agent, and he and Savich fly out to find out why anybody would have brought the boy to a town like Jessborough. Then the kidnappers try again.
Rating coming soonMendoza is a botanist and an immortal, and she has spent a century and a half cataloguing plants in the hills above Los Angeles with almost nobody for company. In the winter of 1862 she is ordered down to a stagecoach inn at Cahuenga Pass to join a team of operatives from the twenty-fourth century. She resents the posting from the moment she arrives.
Rating coming soonThe Cold War grew too complicated for the people running it, so each of the three great powers built a computer to help, and the computers were joined into one. When it became self-aware it destroyed almost all of humanity and kept five people alive. It holds them in the dark inside itself, and it has been torturing them for a very long time.
Rating coming soonOmelas is a city of extraordinary happiness, and the first day of summer is celebrated with a festival and a race. The narrator describes the place and its people, and then explains the arrangement on which all of it rests: somewhere in the city a single child is kept in misery so that everybody else can live as they do. Some of the citizens, having learned this, walk away.
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.
