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 48 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 soonIn the early 1950s there is no work for Eilis Lacey in her Irish town, and a visiting priest arranges a job and lodgings for her in New York. She sails alone, works the floor of a department store, takes night classes in bookkeeping and lives in a boarding house run by a woman who misses nothing. Then she meets Tony Fiorello at a dance.
Rating coming soonIt is July 1962, and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting have been married since the morning. He is a history graduate who wants to be a writer; she is a violinist in a string quartet and the daughter of parents with firm ideas about the world. They have dinner in their hotel room on the Dorset coast, and both of them are thinking about the same thing.
Rating coming soonJacob Flanders grows up in pre-war England, goes to Cambridge, reads whatever he can find and later moves to London, and the reader learns almost nothing about him directly. He is assembled out of what other people notice: his mother's letters, the impressions of the women who fall in and out of his life, and the rooms he leaves behind.
Rating coming soonNicholas Urfe takes a teaching post at a school on a small Greek island to get away from an unhappy affair in London. He is bored and mostly alone until he is invited to the estate of a wealthy Englishman who lives there, and who begins to involve him in games that are more elaborate and less harmless each time.
Rating coming soonDream Park is an amusement park where visitors act out adventures that the park's technology makes solid, and in March 2051 a game is running that has drawn a large audience. Somewhere in the middle of the illusion a man is murdered, with a weapon that should not exist inside the game. Alex Griffin, the park's head of security, has to work out which of the players did it.
Rating coming soonGeorge Poole is in his forties when his father dies, and one of the things he finds among the paperwork is that he has a sister he never knew about. Following her trail takes him to Rome and to an old religious order. Half a continent and sixteen centuries away, a girl called Regina is growing up in Britain as Roman rule comes to an end.
Rating coming soonIn 2055 the Earth is fighting on the side of the Starmen of Lilistar against an enemy called the reegs, and nobody in a position of authority is sure the alliance is a good idea. Eric Sweetscent is an organ-transplant surgeon who keeps the Secretary General of the UN alive. Then he and his wife try a drug that shifts them out of their own time.
Rating coming soonThe dead have come back, and they take over the bodies of the living; the only weapon that works against them is a kind of exorcism, and there are not enough people who can perform it. The Confederation that governs human space is coming apart, and some of its wealthiest worlds are preparing to abandon everybody else. This is the third and last volume of the story.
Rating coming soonIn 1978, in a suburb outside Pittsburgh, a seventeen-year-old called Arnie Cunningham stops on his way home to look at a dilapidated 1958 Plymouth Fury sitting on a neglected lawn. The car is for sale, and the old man selling it has a bad back, a sour temper and a name for it: Christine. Arnie's best friend tells him not to buy it.
Rating coming soonRae Seddon, known to everyone as Sunshine, works in her family's bakery and wants a quiet evening by the lake. The vampires who take her are not interested in quiet. She wakes chained in the ballroom of an abandoned mansion, dressed in a long red gown, with a stranger chained in the same room who is also a vampire and is being left there to starve.
Rating coming soonA young woman called Ashley Cordova is found dead in New York, and the police treat it as a suicide. Scott McGrath, an investigative journalist, has reasons of his own for looking into it: Ashley's father is Stanislas Cordova, the director of a set of notorious films who has not been seen in public for more than thirty years. The last time McGrath went after the father he lost everything.
Rating coming soonThe plague has already happened, and the survivors who can still organise are following a girl called Amy. Their target is the virals: the twelve original creatures, each of whom presides over a hive of its own. A raid on all twelve at once is what the book is building towards, and the weapon the survivors are counting on is a woman who is no longer entirely human.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse's boyfriend has been distant, and then he disappears while working on a task for the queen of the Louisiana vampires. His friends tell her he had been in Mississippi, summoned by the vampire who made him. Sookie drives to Jackson to find him, with a werewolf for a bodyguard and instructions she does not entirely trust.
Rating coming soonA year after her son Danny is said to have died on a camping trip, the stage producer Tina Evans is preparing a new show in Las Vegas and trying to decide whether she is allowed to be happy again. Then words appear on the chalkboard in Danny's old room telling her that he is not dead. She never saw his body.
Rating coming soonHarry Benson has had psychomotor epilepsy since a car crash two years ago, and during his seizures he has beaten three people and remembered none of it. As an alternative to prison he is admitted to a university hospital for an experimental operation: electrodes are implanted in his brain to interrupt the seizures before they begin. The day after the surgery he works out how the machine can be made to please him.
Rating coming soonMaurice Bendrix is a writer in London, and he is telling the story of an affair he had during the war with Sarah Miles, the wife of a civil servant he has counted as a friend. He is telling it because she has died, and because he wants to know what happened in the months when he was sure she had left him for someone else.
Rating coming soonMacon Leary writes travel guides for businessmen who hate travelling, and he dislikes it himself, which is part of why the books work. His son has been killed in a shooting at a fast-food restaurant, his wife has moved out, and his own dog has put him in hospital. He goes back to the family house in Baltimore to be looked after.
Rating coming soonWalls of ice are advancing across the world, and governments are losing the argument with the weather. A man who may be a narrator or may be several narrators is looking for a girl: pale, silent, and always being taken somewhere else by someone with more authority. The same search happens over and over, in different cities and with different outcomes, and the ice keeps coming.
Rating coming soonThe narrator is a bestselling novelist living in Paris with the money and freedom that success has brought him. His wife Esther is a war correspondent, and one day she simply does not come back, and does not explain. The police conclude nothing, and he begins asking where she has gone and what kind of man he has been.
Rating coming soonHolly and Gerry are a married couple in Dublin who fight about ordinary things and are entirely at ease together, and then Gerry dies of a brain tumour. Holly stops leaving the house. Her mother telephones to say that a package has arrived addressed to her, and inside it is a letter from her husband, with nine more to come.
Rating coming soonTwenty-five years after China established a permanent colony on the Moon, an American technician called Fred Fredericks arrives to install a communications system for a Chinese research foundation. Hours after landing he witnesses a killing and cannot remember what he saw. A travel reporter and a dissident leader on her way to giving birth become part of the same escape.
Rating coming soonBy 2031 the greenhouse effect has rebuilt the weather, and Texas has become a place of storms that no insurance market will cover. Janey Unger arrives from an illegal clinic in Mexico with her sick brother in tow, and joins the Storm Troupe, a group of scientists and computer people who chase tornadoes to measure them. This year there is talk of an F-6.
Rating coming soonMarian works at a market research company, shares an apartment with a friend who keeps borrowing her clothes, and has a boyfriend she is not sure about. Then he proposes, and the wedding begins arranging itself around her. At about the same time she stops being able to eat, and the food she cannot eat starts to look like the people around her.
Rating coming soonAdolf Verloc runs a shop in Soho that sells photographs and other things the neighbours do not mention, and he is paid by an unnamed foreign embassy for information. His employers want a bombing in London that will be blamed on the anarchists, and they want it soon. Verloc is not a man who has ever been asked to do anything difficult.
Rating coming soonA man collapses in Poirot's rooms and, before he dies, manages to describe an organisation: four criminals, each of them outstanding in his or her own line, operating internationally. Number One is a Chinese criminal mastermind, Number Two an American millionaire, Number Three a Frenchwoman scientist and Number Four the killer who removes anyone who interferes. Poirot takes the threat personally.
Rating coming soonTommy Beresford and Prudence Cowley, known to everyone as Tuppence, are old friends, demobilised after the war and short of money. They decide to advertise themselves as Young Adventurers, willing to do anything and go anywhere, and their first client makes Tuppence an offer that is far more generous than the work. The name they overheard in passing, Jane Finn, turns out to matter.
Rating coming soonPoirot receives a letter from a South American millionaire living in northern France, asking him to come at once because his life is in danger. By the time Poirot and Hastings arrive at Merlinville-sur-Mer, Paul Renauld has been stabbed and his body left in a newly dug grave on the golf course beside his house. The local police already have a suspect.
Rating coming soonOliver Marks has spent ten years in prison for a killing he may not have committed. The night before his release, the detective who arrested him asks to hear the whole story and promises to take no action on it. Oliver begins with the previous decade, at a conservatory where he and six classmates were the last acting students left in their year.
Rating coming soonIn an outdoor cafe in Lahore, a Pakistani man called Changez introduces himself to an American stranger and starts to talk. He tells the man about his education, about the job he took at a valuation firm in New York, about the woman he loved there, and about the year he decided to leave the United States. The American has to wait for his tea and for the end of the story.
Rating coming soonEva Khatchadourian never wanted to be a mother, and the son she had turns out not to want anything from her either. Two days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin kills seven of his fellow students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who had tried to be friendly to him. Two years later, Eva begins writing letters to her husband about what happened.
Rating coming soonChristopher Banks grows up in the Shanghai International Settlement with his parents and his friend Akira, and then both of his parents disappear within a short time of each other. He is sent to England, becomes the country's most celebrated detective, and never stops thinking about the case he could not solve. He returns to Shanghai to finish it.
Rating coming soonEtsuko lives alone in England, and her younger daughter Niki is visiting. The two of them talk about the recent death of Etsuko's older daughter Keiko, and about the life Etsuko led in Nagasaki after the war, when she was young and had a husband and a child and knew a woman called Sachiko who was trying to leave.
Rating coming soonLin Kong is an army doctor in a Chinese city, and for seventeen years he has been in love with a nurse called Manna Wu. In his home village there is a wife called Shuyu whom his parents chose for him, and every year he goes back to ask her, again, for a divorce. The two lives he is keeping apart take a long time to meet.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse is recovering from the torture she was put through during the short war with the fairies, and from the deaths it cost her, and she is not in a forgiving mood. Her relationship with the vampire Eric Northman is the best thing in her life, and it has made him a problem for the new vampire king. Then Eric's maker arrives with a guest.
Rating coming soonThe vampires came out in public a few years ago, and now the werewolves and shape-shifters have decided to do the same. In Bon Temps, Louisiana, the announcement goes better than anyone expected, at least at first. Then the body of a were-panther is found near the bar where Sookie Stackhouse works, and the town's new arrangements are tested.
Rating coming soonLara Calladine is an expert on ice caves, and the cave she keeps looking for is the one she was kept in as a child, where her father and her great-grandfather used her as a source of blood. Her aunts helped her escape, and the search now is to bring them out too. The trail leads her to the Carpathian mountains, and to a man who has come there to die.
Rating coming soonThe twelve original creatures have been destroyed, along with most of the viral population they created, and the survivors on the continent are beginning to build something. Their relief lasts one generation. Two survivors go looking for the truth about what remains: one hunting the creature that started everything, the other sailing in search of the minefields that were supposed to keep the infection contained.
Rating coming soonFour people meet in Rome and become entangled there: Miriam, a painter with a past she does not describe and a persecutor who follows her; Hilda, a copyist whose innocence makes her severe; Kenyon, a sculptor who loves Hilda; and Donatello, a young Italian count who resembles the marble faun of Praxiteles and has something of its nature. Then a crime is committed.
Rating coming soonVirginia Shreves is fifteen and a sophomore at a private school in Manhattan, where she is the one member of her family who is not thin, brilliant and good-looking. Her sister has gone to Africa to get away from their mother, and her brother Byron, whom she has always admired, has been suspended from Columbia University. Virginia is hiding most of herself, and then she stops hiding.
Rating coming soonTwo people who have reasons to spend their lives in a game log in as their characters and settle in to play. One of them is a police officer confined to a wheelchair. What neither of them knows is that a hacker has decided to keep them there, and that the machine they are attached to can deliver pain as well as sensation. The only way out is a menu inside the game.
Rating coming soonInferno is a planet whose terraforming failed, and its surface will not support human life for much longer. Its inhabitants live alongside robots built to the Three Laws and, more controversially, robots built to a revised set of laws that let them protect humanity as a whole rather than an individual. A young man proposes to dig a northern sea with a redirected comet, and not everyone wants the plan to happen.
Rating coming soonEllie Mack was fifteen, the youngest of three, and she left the house one afternoon and did not come back. Ten years later her remains are found and buried, and her mother Laurel has begun to put her life back together. Then she meets a man and is introduced to his young daughter, and the child looks and behaves exactly like the girl who disappeared.
Rating coming soonDavid Rice can teleport, short distances and long ones, and he has been careful about who knows it. He takes occasional work for the National Security Agency, only the jobs he can live with. Then his handler is shot in front of him, David is drugged and taken, and he wakes up in a windowless room chained to a wall with people who intend to make him work for them.
Rating coming soonEugene Gant is born in 1900 in a small town in North Carolina, the youngest of a large family, and the novel follows him until he leaves home at nineteen. His father carves headstones and drinks, his mother takes in boarders, and the family's business is other people's money and other people's grief. Eugene reads everything and wants out.
Rating coming soonSquire Allworthy comes home from a trip to London and finds a baby asleep in his bed. He decides to raise the foundling, calls him Tom Jones, and the boy grows up beside the squire's nephew and near the daughter of a neighbouring landowner. Tom is generous, careless, good-natured and always in trouble, and his feelings for Sophia Western are the beginning of a long journey.
Rating coming soonIn Monterey, the day between Lousy Wednesday and Waiting Friday is called Sweet Thursday, and by that point in the week anything can be arranged. Doc has come home from the war to find his laboratory wrecked and his friends in trouble. A woman called Suzy has moved into the brothel next door and does not intend to stay in it, and the people of the Row decide the two of them would be good for each other.
Rating coming soonConstance and Sophia Baines grow up over their father's drapery shop in Bursley, a town in the Potteries, and their lives run in opposite directions. Constance stays, marries the shop's assistant and keeps the business. Sophia runs away to London with a travelling salesman, goes with him to Paris, and disappears from her family's life for thirty years.
Rating coming soonSophie Bentwood is bitten on the hand by a stray cat she has been feeding, and she refuses to see a doctor about it. She is a translator, her husband Otto is a lawyer in the middle of a bitter split from his business partner, and the two of them are childless and comfortable in a brownstone in Brooklyn. The bite is the start of a long weekend.
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.
