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 47 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 soonJoe Stoshack loves baseball and is not good at it, which is most of what he knows about himself. Cleaning out a neighbour's attic for small money, he finds a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card, the most valuable one in the world. When he holds it and wishes he could meet the player, he finds himself standing in front of him.
Rating coming soonAnnette Klein and her family are agents of Crosstime Traffic, working under cover in an alternate world where the Black Death killed most of Europe and Muslims settled the continent. Travelling back to their base in Marseilles, Annette is kidnapped and sold into slavery. There is an unofficial portal in the city, and if she is taken through it she may never be found.
Rating coming soonIn one strand of the story a computer programmer in a newly independent Scotland takes a job on a remote asteroid and finds that the owners of the place have plans he was not told about. In the other, the crew of a starship far in the future trade with an alien world and learn something about where human beings came from. The two stories are the same story.
Rating coming soonThe demon dactyl has been destroyed, but the kingdom of Honce-the-Bear is not at peace: goblins and powries are moving deeper into settled land and a captive centaur is held at the monastery of St.-Mere-Abelle. Elbryan and Pony, who have known each other since childhood, set out to rescue him. Meanwhile the head of the church begins a private revenge.
Rating coming soonJerry Luna is fourteen and has stopped speaking since her mother disappeared, and she is sent to live with her great-great-aunt Constanza in New Mexico. In the basement she finds an old trunk, and the things inside carry her into the lives of her ancestors, first among the Jews of Spain before the Inquisition and later in Spanish America.
Rating coming soonBirdie Lee and her sister Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother who met in the civil rights movement in Boston. Cole is taken for black and Birdie for white, and that difference decides what the family is allowed to be. When the marriage breaks apart and the parents believe federal agents are after them, Birdie and her mother take new names and disappear to a small town in New Hampshire.
Rating coming soonRuby, Oklahoma, is a town founded by freed slaves who wanted a place that was entirely their own, and for most of a century it has kept outsiders out. Seventeen miles away, in a mansion that once housed a school for Native American girls, a small group of women live in a way the town cannot tolerate. One morning in July 1976, nine men from Ruby walk into the Convent with guns.
Rating coming soonDuring the American Revolution, the strip of New York country between the British and Continental lines is nobody's ground, and both armies move through it at night. At a house called The Locusts, a Loyalist family shelters a stranger from a storm, and a peddler named Harvey Birch arrives behind him. Nobody in the house can agree on whether the peddler is a patriot, a thief or a British agent, and the fighting that follows is as much about who deserves to be trusted as it is about which army wins.
Rating coming soonFramboise Simon comes back to Les Laveuses, the village on the Loire where she grew up, and opens a small restaurant there. Nobody recognises her as the daughter of the woman the village still blames for what happened during the German occupation, and she intends to keep it that way. In the scrapbook of recipes and notes her mother left her, she begins to find the record of one summer, and of a girl of nine who kept a secret from her family.
Rating coming soonIn the summer of 1953, Owen Meany hits a foul ball in a Little League game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, and kills the mother of his best friend, John Wheelwright. Owen is the smallest boy in town and his voice never broke. He is also certain that everything about him, including how and when he will die, has been arranged in advance, and he spends his childhood preparing for it.
Rating coming soonJohn Singer is deaf and mute and has shared a room with another deaf man, Spiros Antonapoulos, for ten years. When Antonapoulos is committed to an asylum, Singer moves alone into a boarding house in a mill town in Georgia. Four people in the town begin to visit his room and tell him their lives, and each of them is sure that he understands what nobody else does.
Rating coming soonSara Smolinsky is ten years old and lives with her parents and three older sisters in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the rent is almost always overdue. Her father studies the Torah and will not take a job to feed them, and her mother takes in boarders to keep the family in the room. Sara decides early that she will not live the way her sisters do.
Rating coming soonMary Thorne is the orphaned niece of the doctor in the village of Greshamsbury, and she has been a favourite at the great house since she was a child. When Lady Arabella discovers that her only son Frank is in love with her, Mary is banished from the house: the family's debts are so bad that Frank has to marry money, and Mary has none.
Rating coming soonJoe Fernwright repairs pottery on a future Earth where almost nobody needs pots repaired any more, and where the guild has a form for every kind of idleness. A godlike alien called Glimmung hires him for a job on another planet: to raise a cathedral from the bottom of an ocean. Joe travels there with a team of specialists and finds he does not know what he is for.
Rating coming soonThe Stone family live on the Moon, where the twins Castor and Pollux have decided that life is too dull. They buy a used spaceship to go into business for themselves, and their father, mother and grandmother Hazel come along for the ride. The tour takes them from Mars to the asteroid belt and further out, with a cargo of bicycles, a doctor's house calls and one Martian pet that nobody thought through.
Rating coming soonThe Star Empire of Manticore has fought the Republic of Haven for a generation, and Honor Harrington has paid for every victory she has won. Now the Solarian League, with its thousands of capital ships and its trillions of citizens, is drifting into the same war. Honor has a plan to end the older conflict before the bigger one begins, and enemies she cannot see are already moving against her home system.
Rating coming soonThe winter of 1857 has left Abner Marsh with one working steamboat and a reputation he cannot afford. So when a soft-spoken stranger named Joshua York offers to pay for a boat finer and faster than anything on the Mississippi, Marsh takes the money. York asks only that his business on the river be nobody else's concern.
Rating coming soonJason is fifteen and has never fitted in at home or at school, and his only comfort is a band called Lost Souls. Then he reads the note that was left with him as a baby and works out that his father was a vampire. He renames himself Nothing, runs away from home, and is picked up on the road by three beautiful strangers who know what he is.
Rating coming soonEmma Carstairs was a child when her parents were murdered, and she has spent the five years since then training to find out why. She and Julian Blackthorn are parabatai, bound to fight as a pair, and they run the Los Angeles Institute with Julian's younger brothers and sisters. Then the faeries ask for help with their own dead, and the bargain they offer brings one of the family home.
Rating coming soonNick Carraway takes a small house on Long Island for the summer of 1922, next door to a mansion where enormous parties are thrown by a man nobody seems to know. The host is Jay Gatsby, whose money has no visible source and who has spent years arranging to meet Nick's cousin Daisy, now married to a rich and careless man. Nick is drawn into the middle of it, and what he is told is not always the same as what he sees.
Rating coming soonAmy Dorrit was born and raised inside the Marshalsea, the London prison for debtors where her father has been held for so long that he has become one of its institutions. She sews for wages outside the walls to keep the family fed, and she thinks of the prison as home. Then Arthur Clennam comes back to England after twenty years abroad and begins asking about her family.
Rating coming soonNell Trent is not quite fourteen, and she lives with her grandfather in his shop of odds and ends near the Strand in London. He adores her and he is gambling away everything they own. The moneylender Quilp has begun to take an interest in the shop and in the girl, and one night the pair walk out of the city with nothing.
Rating coming soonFanny Price is ten years old when her overburdened family in Portsmouth sends her to be raised at Mansfield Park by her wealthy aunt and uncle. Her cousins treat her as a dependant, and only Edmund is kind to her, so she learns to watch and to hold her tongue. The arrival of the fashionable Crawfords some years later gives her plenty to watch.
Rating coming soonAnne Elliot is twenty-seven and unmarried, and her father is renting out the family estate to reduce his debts. When she was nineteen she was engaged to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, and her friends and family persuaded her to break it off because he had no fortune. The new tenants are his sister and her husband, so he will be visiting, and nobody in the family has thought about what that will mean for Anne.
Rating coming soonThe Compsons of Mississippi owned land once, and the family has been living on the reputation of it for a generation. There are four children, and the slow collapse of their household reaches the reader in four separate accounts that disagree with each other, most of them tangled around a single weekend in 1928 and the loss of a sister called Caddy.
Rating coming soonAntonio Márez y Luna is six years old when the curandera Ultima comes to live with his family in rural New Mexico, near the end of the Second World War. She becomes his teacher and his protector, and she shows him a knowledge of herbs, weather and dreams that the church in the village will not admit to having. His parents have different plans for his future.
Rating coming soonWillie Stark comes out of a poor farming family in Louisiana and ends up in the governor's mansion, and the people who made him and the people who stand in his way learn what he is prepared to do. Jack Burden, a reporter from one of the old families, works for him and watches. Years later, Jack tries to explain his part in it.
Rating coming soonOn 22 June 1941 Tatiana Metanova turns seventeen the next day, and the morning begins with her older sister Dasha announcing that she is in love and with the radio reporting that Germany has invaded the Soviet Union. Later that day, waiting for a bus in Leningrad, Tatiana is watched by a Red Army officer. His name is Alexander Belov, and he is Dasha's new love.
Rating coming soonAnnie John grows up in Antigua in a house where her mother is the centre of everything, and for years the two of them are inseparable. Then Annie becomes a teenager, and the closeness turns into something harder to live with. The novel follows her through school, through an illness, and towards the ship that will take her away from the island.
Rating coming soonA scientific expedition at the South Pole digs out something that has been frozen for centuries and carries it back into the camp. The thing is intelligent, and it can take the shape and the memories of any living creature it kills. Before the men understand what they have brought inside with them, they cannot be sure which of them is still human.
Rating coming soonA huge rounded ship called the Space Beagle carries almost a thousand men on a long scientific mission into interstellar space. Each stage of the voyage brings the crew up against a different alien species, and each one has to be survived in a different way. The book is an account of those encounters and of what they do to the expedition's own politics.
Rating coming soonUlysses Paxton is an American soldier who looks up at Mars in the night sky and finds himself standing on it, in the middle of a war. He is taken in by Ras Thavas, an old scientist known across the planet as the master mind, who has perfected a way of moving a brain from one body to another and sells the operation to rich old men. Paxton becomes his assistant, and then his opposite.
Rating coming soonThe Psychlos found a deep-space probe carrying pictures and gold, followed it home, and have been mining the planet ever since. A thousand years later humanity is down to a few tribes in the parts of the world nobody wants, and the aliens' mine security has an interest in keeping it that way. Jonnie Goodboy Tyler leaves his village to see the lowlands and is captured.
Rating coming soonAfter the attack on the Manticoran home system, Honor Harrington has uncovered a plan to enslave the whole of humanity, and behind the plan the organisation known as the Mesan Alignment. Closing the wormhole network that gives the Star Kingdom both its wealth and its exposure looks like the obvious next move, except that the Solarian League is certain to treat it as an act of war.
Rating coming soonThe People's Republic of Haven announced that it had executed Honor Harrington, which was a safe thing to announce while everyone believed she was already dead. She is not dead. She has come home from the prison planet called Hell with the prisoners she freed there, and she arrives in Manticoran space in the middle of a war that is entering its decisive stage.
Rating coming soonWilliam Mandella fought in the Forever War and now lives on Middle Finger, an ice-covered world where he fishes and teaches physics. Earth's population has become a single group mind, and it keeps the humans of Middle Finger alive because it values the variety in their genes rather than their company. Mandella and his wife want out, and the only way off the planet is to steal a ship.
Rating coming soonIn 2381 the Earth holds seventy-five billion people and almost all of them live indoors, inside three-kilometre towers called urban monads. The building this book is about is divided into stacked cities of forty floors each, with the administrators at the top. Life inside is orderly, and a few of the residents have begun to find it unbearable.
Rating coming soonThe book opens on board the enormous alien vessel that is carrying a group of humans out of the solar system, with one of them, Nicole Wakefield, escaping from the imprisonment she was left in at the end of the previous volume. The travellers have already met two other species, and the purpose of their journey has not been explained to them.
Rating coming soonSassinak is twelve when the raiders come to the newly settled world her family farms. That is the right age for what the slavers want: old enough to be useful and young enough to be broken. She watches her parents and both her siblings die, is taken off the planet, and spends years in a slave depot before she gets the chance to run.
Rating coming soonClarice Starling is still an FBI trainee when the head of the bureau's profiling unit sends her to a hospital for the criminally insane with a questionnaire. Her assignment is to interview Dr Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist who ate several of his patients. The bureau wants his help with a killer called Buffalo Bill, and Lecter is willing to talk, but only in exchange for something.
Rating coming soonRobert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, travels to Bilbao for an evening hosted by his former student Edmond Kirsch, a technology billionaire who has promised to announce a discovery that will overturn the way people understand human existence. Kirsch is a famous atheist with enemies among the religious leaders he has told in advance. The presentation does not go as planned.
Rating coming soonFive years ago in the town of Little Kilton, a popular schoolgirl called Andie Bell was murdered and her boyfriend Sal Singh was blamed for it and then found dead. Pippa Fitz-Amobi, who knew Sal as a child, has never believed it. For her final school project she decides to reopen the case and prove that the killer is still out there.
Rating coming soonFive students walk into detention at Bayview High, and each of them insists the phone found in their bag was planted there. One of the five is Simon, who runs an app that publishes other students' secrets. Before the hour is up Simon is dead, and the four who are left are the only suspects.
Rating coming soonAvery Grambs is seventeen, sleeping in her car and hoping for a scholarship, when she learns that Tobias Hawthorne, a billionaire she has never met or heard of, has left her almost everything he owned. The will gives her one condition: she has to move into Hawthorne House. The family he has disinherited lives there too, and they want to know why.
Rating coming soonBenny Profane has just left the navy and wants nothing more than to drift through New York with the artists and hangers-on he calls the Whole Sick Crew. Herbert Stencil, who does want something, is trying to identify a woman known only as V., whose name appears in the journals his father kept as a diplomat before the war. Their two stories are told in alternating runs.
Rating coming soonGeorge F. Babbitt is a real estate broker in his late forties in the Midwestern city of Zenith, and he has everything a man in his position is supposed to want: the house, the car, the clubs, the business contacts and the opinions. He is also restless. When his closest friend does something that upsets the arrangement of his life, Babbitt begins to look for something else.
Rating coming soonTony Webster is retired, divorced and on reasonable terms with his daughter, and he has spent decades not thinking about his school friends. Then a solicitor's letter arrives and the past requires his attention: a bequest from someone he barely knew, a diary he is not allowed to read, and a version of events he has been repeating for forty years without checking.
Rating coming soonCharles Strickland is a London stockbroker with a wife, two children and no apparent interest in anything else. One day he leaves them, moves to Paris with very little money and begins to paint. The woman he has left behind sends an acquaintance to talk to him, and the novel follows that narrator's attempts to understand a man who does not want to be understood.
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.
