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 49 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.
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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 soonOn a snowy morning in upstate New York, two girls take their horses out and a truck comes round the bend. One girl and one horse are killed, and Grace Maclean is left with a partly amputated leg and a horse called Pilgrim that will not be handled. Her mother Annie, who has built a career as a magazine editor, decides that both of them are going to be saved.
Rating coming soonIn a crumbling house below Mount Kanchenjunga, a retired judge wants to be left alone and is not. His orphaned granddaughter Sai has arrived to live with him, his cook looks after her while thinking about his own son, and the hills around Kalimpong in 1986 are filling with a political movement that will reach the house. The cook's son, Biju, is in New York without papers.
Rating coming soonSophie Caco is twelve and has been brought up in a village near Port-au-Prince by her aunt, who tells her stories and teaches her what she knows. Then a letter comes from Sophie's mother, who left for New York years earlier and has sent for her. Sophie travels alone to a country she does not remember, and to a mother whose nightmares she will come to understand.
Rating coming soonOn a Virginia plantation in the years before the Civil War, the oldest and most respected enslaved man on the estate begins to tell the story of his life. His son Chapel has taught himself to read, has fallen in love with the owner's daughter, and intends to run north. The father has to decide what he is willing to do about it.
Rating coming soonDr Fridolin is a physician in Vienna, comfortably married, and one evening his wife tells him about a fantasy she had about another man. The confession unsettles him more than he admits. Over the next two days and nights he moves through the city, meeting people who give him pieces of a world he did not know was there, and it ends with a masked ball.
Rating coming soonCathy Scarlet and Tom Feather met at catering college and have been friends ever since, and now they are going into business together under the name Scarlet Feather. Cathy is married to Neil Mitchell, whose mother has never accepted that her son married the daughter of the woman who used to clean her floors. Tom's girlfriend Marcella wants to be a model. The first year of the business is going to be difficult.
Rating coming soonFather Tim Kavanagh is the rector of a small church in the town of Mitford, North Carolina, where he lives alone with a dog nobody planned on and a house that needs more work than he can pay for. Into his routine come a boy from the settlement at Little Mitford Creek who has been abandoned by his mother, a neighbour who writes children's books, and a doctor who wants to know why Tim never married.
Rating coming soonDenise Holton has moved to Edenton, North Carolina, with her four-year-old son Kyle, who has severe learning disabilities and cannot yet speak. On a wet night her car leaves the road, and in the search that follows her son is found by Taylor McAden, a volunteer firefighter who works as a carpenter. Taylor is brave in an emergency and unable to stay in a relationship afterwards.
Rating coming soonA man's body is found on a small island off the coast of Maine, with no wallet, no name and no explanation for how he got there. The case goes nowhere: the police are left with dead ends, and more than a year passes before anybody identifies him. Everything else about the death stays open, and the two people who run the island's newspaper never stop thinking about it.
Rating coming soonIn the desert back country near the Mexican border, a hunter called Llewelyn Moss comes across the aftermath of a drug deal that has gone wrong: trucks, bodies, and a case of money that nobody is left alive to claim. He takes it. What follows him is a killer who answers to nobody, and behind them both a county sheriff who is trying to understand what has happened to the place he has spent his life policing.
Rating coming soonA woman whose physician husband has taken a country house for the summer is installed in an upstairs nursery, and told to rest. She is forbidden to work and forbidden to write, so she writes anyway, in secret, and the entries record her days in the room and the pattern in the wallpaper she has begun to study more closely than anything else in the house.
Rating coming soonThe American minister to the Court of St James's buys a country house in England and is warned by the man selling it that Canterville Chase is haunted. Mr Otis says he will take the furniture as well as the ghost at a valuation, and moves in with his wife, his eldest son and his twin boys. The ghost, who has been frightening people there for three hundred years, has never met a family like this one.
Rating coming soonTwenty-seven years ago the sun failed, and since then vampires have taken the world and rebuilt it in their own image. The last living vampire hunter is a prisoner awaiting execution for killing a king, and the empress has not finished with him. She sends her historian to take down the story of his life, and he tells it.
Rating coming soonLestat is in one of his long sleeps, so the vampire David Talbot asks Armand to tell him the story of his life. Armand begins in the Kyivan Rus in the fifteenth century, where he was called Andrei and painted icons in a monastery. Slave traders take him out of that life and carry him to Constantinople and then to Venice, and what happens in Venice makes him what he is.
Rating coming soonDiana Bishop is a historian from a family of witches, and Matthew Clairmont is a vampire who has been alive for centuries. They are looking for a manuscript whose contents could explain what they are. To find it they travel back to Elizabethan London, where Matthew's old acquaintances are waiting and where a woman who is not supposed to practise magic needs to be taught how.
Rating coming soonZoey has come back from the Otherworld and is on the Isle of Skye, where the queen wants her to stay and learn what she is capable of. In Tulsa, Neferet has been cleared by the vampire council and returned to her position at the House of Night, and she has a list. Stevie Rae is holding things together at school while working out what her connection to Rephaim means.
Rating coming soonMaura Isles comes back from a conference in Paris to find her luggage missing and her street taped off as a crime scene. In her own driveway is a car, and in the car is a woman who looks exactly like her and shares her birthday. Maura takes a tissue sample from the dead woman and one from herself, and asks a detective she knows to run the comparison.
Rating coming soonMartie Rhodes drives her friend Susan to appointments with a psychologist, because Susan's agoraphobia makes it impossible for her to go alone. Martie's husband Dusty is trying to keep his brother Skeet, just out of rehabilitation, out of trouble. Then Martie develops a terror of her own reflection, and the fear starts to spread to the rest of her life.
Rating coming soonPip Mackenzie is eleven and has already lost most of the people she had, and her mother Ophélie has retreated into a grief she cannot climb out of. Left to herself on the beach below their house, Pip begins talking to a man walking his dog. Matt Bowles is an artist, divorced, and he has his own reason to notice a lonely child. Her mother does not approve at first.
Rating coming soonAru Shah is fourteen and has just met a girl called Kara who says she is the Sleeper's daughter as well, which would make them sisters. Kara also claims to be a Pandava, and Aru is sure there are only five of those. Before anybody can settle the question, the two of them and their friends have to find their mentors in Lanka, the city of gold.
Rating coming soonWilliam Laurence wakes on a shore in Japan with no memory of the years he has spent as an aviator, or of the dragon he serves. He is taken for a foreigner who has broken the rules about where Europeans may go, and the local magistrate keeps him in comfortable confinement at Nagasaki. Temeraire, meanwhile, is repairing the transport that has run aground on a reef, and has no idea where his captain is.
Rating coming soonMost people in this near future live inside gated communities or travel in armed groups, and nobody who can avoid the desert goes into it. A physician named Blake Maslin is driving across the Mojave with his sixteen-year-old twin daughters when the three of them are taken by a man who has been out there for years. His name is Eli Doyle, and what he carries is not a weapon.
Rating coming soonThe Dynize have unlocked the Landfall Godstone, an object that could put gods back into the world, and the three people who have been fighting them for two books are running out of options. A spy is sent back into the occupied capital to stop the stone being used. A general who has been relying on an ancient weapon has lost most of her people and her eyesight. A mercenary has twenty riders left and a fleet that has scattered in a storm.
Rating coming soonThe capital has fallen to the invading Dynize, and the refugees from the city are following the only army still in the field. Three Godstones are said to exist, and whoever finds them decides whether the old gods walk the world again. One of them is missing, and three people are looking: a spy, a general with a shrinking command, and a mercenary with a head injury and a talent for violence.
Rating coming soonThe Sovan Empire has been a republic and is now an empire again, and two hundred years of government by argument left it with a problem: magic has been outlawed, so its enemies have something it does not. Sova is at war with Casimir and Sanque. A young diplomat is sent to look into reports of a cult of necromancers who believe an apocalypse is approaching, and a lieutenant on the frontier is dealing with something worse than soldiers.
Rating coming soonTea is thirteen when she accidentally raises her older brother from the dead, which tells her family two things: that she is a bone witch, and that they cannot keep her. She is sent away to train as an asha, and the training is long, expensive and political. Somewhere far ahead of that beginning, in a different narrative, an older Tea has been exiled for what she did with the power she learned.
Rating coming soonHazel and her brother Ben live in a town where the folk of the forest are part of ordinary life, and where a horned boy has been asleep in a glass coffin in the woods for as long as anyone can remember. Hazel grew up believing that she and her brother were destined to be heroes. Then the coffin is broken open, and Hazel has a good reason to think she is the one who did it.
Rating coming soonEdward Cullen has been seventeen for most of a century and has learned to keep away from human beings, whose blood he can smell. Then Bella Swan arrives at his school and he cannot decide whether he wants to save her or kill her. This is the story of Twilight told from his side, including what he can hear inside the heads of everybody in the room except hers.
Rating coming soonPhillip Enright survived being blinded and shipwrecked on a small island in the Caribbean with an old sailor called Timothy, and he has been rescued. Now there is an operation that might give him back his sight. Between the chapters about what Phillip does with the rest of his life are the chapters about Timothy's, beginning with his childhood on St. Thomas and ending with how he came to be on that island.
Rating coming soonThe war between Manticore and the Republic of Haven has started again, and the terms are worse than before: the Star Kingdom's shipyards were hit while a government more interested in politics than strategy was in charge, and it will be two years before the losses can be made good. Honor Harrington is given Eighth Fleet, the Alliance's main striking force, and orders to make the other side cautious.
Rating coming soonPern has not recovered from the plague that killed holders and craftsmen less than fifteen years earlier, and now the dragons themselves are falling ill. Fiona of Fort Weyr, the only surviving child of Lord Holder Bemin, is caught up in it when she impresses a gold dragon she was not expecting. The story takes place in the winter of 508 After Landing, weeks into a new Pass of Thread.
Rating coming soonFirestone is the mineral that lets the dragons of Pern breathe flame, and the mine that produces it has exploded, killing the men inside. A young man called Cristov volunteers to go back for the rock the dragons need, and the work is as dangerous as the accident that started it. His story is told alongside those of Pellar and Halla, who are the same age.
Rating coming soonVerity Jane is a talented software tester in San Francisco, and she is hired to try out a new kind of assistant built by the military for a start-up. In another version of the same year, the 2016 American election went the other way, and people in a much later century are watching what happens next with more than academic interest. They can reach into 2017, and they do.
Rating coming soonDane Thorson finishes trade school and is assigned as apprentice cargo master on the Solar Queen, a free trader that hauls cargo between the planets and takes whatever contracts it can find. At the end of his first flight the captain gets the chance to bid on a newly opened world, and the crew puts everything they have into winning the contract for a planet called Limbo. The information that comes with the contract is not encouraging.
Rating coming soonOwen is a high school teacher with an implant in his head, put there when he was a boy to control epilepsy, and he has always thought of it as a medical device. In the society of the near future, that is no longer a neutral fact: neural implants have made the people who carry them equal or superior to everybody else, and the Supreme Court has just ruled that those people are no longer a protected class.
Rating coming soonRamón Espejo left Earth for a colony world and found the same poverty he had run from. He is a prospector with a temper, and one night a fight outside a bar becomes a murder and sends him into the wilderness to hide. What he finds out there is a hidden installation and a race of aliens, and they do not intend to let him go home with what he knows.
Rating coming soonJames Bond has been hunting Ernst Stavro Blofeld since the business in the Bahamas, and the trail has gone cold. Then he meets Teresa di Vicenzo, the daughter of a Corsican crime boss, whose own difficulties give him a way in. Bond is closer to a settled life than he has been in any of the earlier books, and he is about to be sent to Switzerland.
Rating coming soonSix high school seniors take a borrowed motorhome to South Carolina for spring break, and one of them is Red Kenny, who has had a bad year and would like one ordinary week. Somewhere in a desolate stretch of the state the vehicle stops, the mobile signal is gone, and it becomes clear that this was arranged. There is a shooter outside, and the group has to work out what is wanted.
Rating coming soonJules Keegan, a magazine publisher in London, is marrying Will Slater, a television presenter, on an island off the coast of Ireland. The guests have been carried over by boat and the weather is turning. Somebody on the island has been waiting for a chance like this for a long time, and by the end of the weekend one of the wedding party is dead.
Rating coming soonKeshav Rajpurohit graduated from the Indian Institutes of Technology and now teaches at a coaching centre for the entrance examinations, which he dislikes. He turns up on his ex-girlfriend's birthday to wish her well and finds her dead in her room. He has an obvious motive and no alibi, so the investigation he begins is partly an attempt to keep himself out of it.
Rating coming soonAdam and Amelia Wright have been married for ten years and the marriage has not been going well for most of them. Amelia wins a weekend away in Scotland and decides it is a chance to repair something. Adam is a screenwriter who cannot recognise faces, including his wife's, and the chapel they are staying in is not the comfortable retreat the prize described.
Rating coming soonMiles Ryan is a deputy sheriff in New Bern, North Carolina, where he grew up, and he has been grieving for two years: his wife Missy was killed by a driver who did not stop. He is raising their son Jonah alone and has never stopped trying to find the person responsible. Then Miles meets Sarah Andrews, Jonah's second-grade teacher, who has moved to the town after a divorce.
Rating coming soonPaul Formain is a mining engineer in the late twenty-first century, and over a short period he survives several accidents that should have killed him, losing an arm in one of them. The pattern draws the attention of a guild that believes the human species has become a dead end and that the only way forward is to clear space for what comes next. Formain wants to know why he is still alive.
Rating coming soonMagic has made the city of Tiran an industrial utopia, and the magic is worked by the High Magistry. Sciona has been an orphan since she was four and has spent twenty years studying to be admitted to it, and she becomes the first woman ever to hold the rank of highmage. Her colleagues' welcome is to give her a janitor instead of a qualified lab assistant.
Rating coming soonEmmy Harlow is a witch of modest power who left the magical town of Thistle Grove years ago and has avoided going back. The spellcasting tournament her family has always arbitrated is approaching, and tradition, or her parents, brings her home. On her first night in town she runs into Talia Avramov, and the two of them discover a shared grievance against the heir of the most powerful family in Thistle Grove.
Rating coming soonRobin Blyth is a baronet with a younger sister to raise, an estate emptied by his parents and no idea what to do with either. An administrative mistake puts him in the civil service post that liaises with a hidden magical society. His counterpart is Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly opposite number in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were somewhere else.
Rating coming soonThree sisters disappeared from a suburban street in Scotland when they were children and came back a month later with no memory of where they had been. Afterwards their hair grew white, their eyes darkened, and people found them disturbingly beautiful and slightly dangerous to be near. Ten years later the eldest, Grey, vanishes again, and the clues she leaves behind are strange.
Rating coming soonRingil Eskiath carries a broadsword forged by the kiriath, has been disowned by his family and is wanted by the slave traders of Trelayne. He is also being noticed by the dark gods, who are taking an interest without making any more sense than usual. With nowhere else to go he travels south, to the city at the heart of the Empire, where his old comrade Archeth advises the emperor.
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.
