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 50 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 soonIris Catherine Villiers grows up at Belerion Hall on the coast of Cornwall, in the gardens and on the cliffs, under the judgement of her grandfather and the taunts of her governess. The old gardener, Marsh, warns her away from the ruins above the sea and tells her never to say a prayer at their door or make a vow by the Laughing Maiden stone. She is unhappy, and she has a brother she loves.
Rating coming soonWilson Lewis has been married to Jane for thirty years and has spent most of them at the office, leaving the raising of their children to her. Their daughter is about to be married, and Jane has begun to think about leaving him, which he recognises as his own fault. His wife's parents, Noah and Allie Calhoun, had a marriage the whole family measured itself against.
Rating coming soonPearl Andreas has been raised in a New Orleans mansion filled with kindness and laughter, and she wants to go to college and become a doctor. Her graduation party is almost as festive as Mardi Gras. What she keeps wondering about is the family history nobody discusses, and in the summer that follows she takes a job as a nurse's aide at an elegant old hospital, where an intern befriends her.
Rating coming soonMeredith stayed in Washington state to raise her children and run the family's apple orchard, and her sister Nina left to become a photojournalist. Their mother Anya has always been cold to both of them, and it was their father who held the family together. When he becomes ill he asks the women for a promise: that Anya will tell her Russian fairy tale one last time, all the way to the end.
Rating coming soonBetween 1979 and 1981 more than forty black children were taken and killed in Atlanta, in a city that had elected its first black mayor and liked to describe itself as too busy to hate. Zala Spencer holds down several jobs and is raising three children on her own. One Sunday morning in July 1980 she wakes to find her teenage son Sonny gone.
Rating coming soonConnor O'Dwyer is a falconer in County Mayo who takes visitors on hawk walks across the countryside, and Meara Quinn, his sister's best friend, guides the same visitors on horseback. They have known each other their whole lives, and Connor has never thought about her any differently until a brush with death changes the arrangement. Meara does not want to lose the friendship, or herself, to something more.
Rating coming soonMaud Blyth volunteers to serve as a companion to an elderly woman on an ocean liner so that she can help her brother with an investigation into a magical conspiracy. What she does not expect is for the old lady to be dead on the first day of the voyage. She is left with a body, a disrespectful parrot and Violet Debenham, an actress and magician returning to England.
Rating coming soonThe ruling families of the Tressian Republic have turned on one another, and their knives are metaphorical only some of the time. None of them has noticed the armies of the Hadari Empire gathering on their borders. Viktor Akadra is the Republic's champion and hides something that would have him burned as a heretic, and Josiri Trelan, his sworn enemy, is a political prisoner whose sister wants only to escape the family name.
Rating coming soonIsla Crown has won the love of two powerful rulers and broken the curses that had blighted the six realms for centuries. Almost nobody knows where her own powers came from. After a betrayal she would rather be distracted than crowned, and the rulers she beat have not accepted the outcome quietly. Something capable of killing everyone on Lightlark is also on its way.
Rating coming soonVanja Schmidt was the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune and the dutiful servant of Princess Gisele, until her otherworldly mothers demanded a price for their care that she refused to pay. Instead she took Gisele's life for her own, using an enchanted string of pearls, and left the real princess a penniless nobody. Vanja now lives as princess and jewel thief at once.
Rating coming soonPrince Oak is imprisoned in the icy north and bound to the will of a monstrous new queen, and the betrayal that put him there was his own. High King Cardan and High Queen Jude would use any means to retrieve their stolen heir. Oak has to decide whether to try to win back the trust of the girl he has always loved, or to stay loyal to Elfhame and give up the one thing that would end her reign.
Rating coming soonIn Caldwell, New York, a long war is being fought at night between vampires and the slayers who hunt them. Six vampire warriors, the Black Dagger Brotherhood, exist to defend their race, and their leader Wrath is the last purebred vampire alive. When one of his most trusted fighters is killed, Wrath is left with the man's half-breed daughter, who knows nothing about what she is.
Rating coming soonFour months after the Garden was broken up, the FBI agents who freed the women held there are still dealing with the aftermath. The thaw is coming, and it brings a guarantee: somewhere in the country a young woman will be found dead in a church, her throat cut and her body surrounded by flowers. The sister of one of the killer's earlier victims has been moving from town to town with her mother ever since.
Rating coming soonSuicide has become an epidemic among young people, and the country has one proven treatment for it. The Program erases the depression along with everything else, and the people who come out of it return as blank slates. Sloane knows better than to cry in front of anyone, and she knows that her parents have already lost one child and will do anything to keep her alive.
Rating coming soonHannah Shapiro is an American student whose life was saved eight years ago in Los Angeles by the head of a detective agency called Private. She has left her country but her past has followed her to London, and the agency's London office takes her case. At the same time, young women are being taken off the streets of central London and found days later, mutilated in ways the police cannot explain.
Rating coming soonAdam Black is immortal, arrogant and free to go wherever he likes, which has made him a great many enemies in the faerie courts. A curse strips him of his immortality and makes him invisible to everyone, which for a man like him is a sentence close to death. The only person who can see him is a law student called Gabrielle O'Callaghan, who has always been able to see both the mortal and the faery worlds.
Rating coming soonKeighly Barrow is seven when she looks into an antique mirror in her grandmother's ballroom in Redemption, Nevada, and sees a boy her own age looking back. He is standing in an old western saloon among women in gaudy dresses, and she learns that his name is Darby Elder and that he lived a hundred years earlier. Twenty years later she inherits the house, and she is engaged to somebody else.
Rating coming soonAt Ever After High, the children of fairy-tale characters are trained to take up their parents' roles, whether they want to or not. Every year on Legacy Day the students sign the Storybook of Legends and seal their destinies, and the village of Book End has always said that refusing to sign means the end of the story and of the life. Raven Queen is the daughter of the Evil Queen.
Rating coming soonFitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet leave Pemberley to travel through England, visiting friends and relations, and this is the story of the first part of their marriage. The weddings are over and the story that Pride and Prejudice left unfinished has to be arranged: a great estate to run, a household to establish, and a family that includes the relations Elizabeth's husband has spent years avoiding.
Rating coming soonA hurricane levels the estate of the Bas-Thornton family in Jamaica, and the parents decide that their children should be sent back to England for safety. On the way, the ship is taken by pirates, and the children end up aboard the pirate vessel instead. The captain, Jonsen, is a well-meaning man who has no idea what to do with his new passengers.
Rating coming soonWhen the bomb falls, places in the shelters go to a privileged few, the men and women judged best able to rebuild Britain. Fewer of them survive the blast than were admitted. In Portsmouth the survivors include Johnny Clayton, a marine engineer, his wife, and the weak infant son she gives birth to underground. They set out for London in the hope of finding some sort of headquarters.
Rating coming soonIn 2020 Reid Malenfant travels to the outer edge of the solar system and finds an artifact left behind by another civilisation. It is a gateway that works like a quantum transporter, moving cargo and people across interstellar distances almost instantly. Malenfant decides to find out what is on the other side, and the decision costs him everything he has.
Rating coming soonThe government of this country says the world is overcrowded, and a family may have two children. A third child is a shadow child, and a shadow child is killed when found. Matthias, Percy and Alia are taken from their school with a crowd of other children and put on a truck that is described as a work detail. What happens on the road gives them a way to fight back from inside the Population Police.
Rating coming soonLuke Garner has been working inside the Population Police from the stables, waiting for a chance to bring it down. When he is sent out to help hand new identification cards to citizens, a moment of refusal sets off a rebellion that sweeps the country, and the organisation that hunted children like him loses its grip. What replaces it turns out not to be what he had in mind.
Rating coming soonLuke Garner has been living at a school under a false name: that of Lee Grant, a boy who died in a skiing accident and whose family agreed to give his identity to another child. Then the Grants decide to send their younger son, Smithfield, to the same school, and he wants to talk about the brother he lost. Luke also finds two documents in Smithfield's room that have no explanation.
Rating coming soonThe People's Republic of Haven's attack on Manticore has failed, and its leaders are fighting each other over what is left of their authority. Honor Harrington comes home a hero to find that her own country has a problem she cannot fight with a fleet: an old enemy has become a peer of the realm, and a political crisis has her at its centre.
Rating coming soonHonor Harrington is on Hades, the prison planet the Republic of Haven uses for the prisoners it does not intend to release. The footage of her execution has already been broadcast, and state funerals have been held on two worlds. She is alive, she is not alone, and the question the book is built on is how many people she can take with her when she leaves.
Rating coming soonHonor Harrington has just been promoted and returns to her steading on Grayson, where a party in her honour turns into an argument with her superior that neither of them is ready to finish. To get away from her own feelings she takes a convoy escort mission to a system the Havenites have already taken. The operation is a trap laid for her, and what follows is a prison rather than a battle.
Rating coming soonJacques Dubrinsky, the younger brother of the Carpathian leader, is tortured and buried alive by the same fanatics who attacked his family twenty-five years earlier. He survives with little memory of himself, of his people, or of anything except the faces of the men who hurt him. An American surgeon researching a rare blood disorder finds herself drawn towards the Carpathian mountains.
Rating coming soonNora Grey has survived an attempt on her life and gained a guardian angel, which she considers a fair exchange. Patch has been evasive ever since, and now he is spending time with Marcie Millar, who is the last person Nora would want near him. An old family friend has moved back to town, and Nora finds herself drawn to him even though she is sure he is hiding something.
Rating coming soonThe world has been wrecked by a century of excess, and what is left of humanity is being hunted and enslaved. Logan Tom remembers the past and has sworn to protect the future: he carries a talisman and an oath to find a being born of magic who is supposed to lead the final fight against the darkness. Across the country, a survivor called Angel Perez has been given a mission of her own.
Rating coming soonPrincess Eilonwy, the latest enchantress born of the House of Llyr, is sent to the royal court of the Isle of Mona to be educated as a young lady, an ordeal she regards as entirely unnecessary. Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper, travels with her. Soon after they arrive she is taken by agents of the sorceress Achren, who has a use for her in a plan of her own.
Rating coming soonTaran goes looking for the truth about where he came from, because he wants to know whether he has any right to ask Eilonwy to marry him. He travels through the country with Gurgi and meets craftsmen, farmers and thieves, and finds that most of them have a better idea of who he is than he does. There is no war to win in this book.
Rating coming soonAnidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, who is called Ani, was going to be the queen of Kildenree, and then her father died and she was sent to Bayern to marry a prince she has never met. On the journey her lady-in-waiting turns on her and takes her place, and most of the guards go along with it. Ani's only advantage is that she can speak to animals.
Rating coming soonDougless Montgomery has been left on her own in England and is sitting in a church by a tombstone in tears when a man appears beside her in silver and gold. He says his name is Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck, and the stone she is sitting on records that he died in 1564. He is not a ghost who can be thanked and forgotten; he is looking for help.
Rating coming soonRaven Whitney is a telepathic hunter of serial killers, and the work has left her unable to be close to anybody and has worn out her body. She goes somewhere far away to rest. In the Carpathian mountains, the leader of an ancient nocturnal race is waiting for the woman whose mind he can hear, and he has been waiting a long time.
Rating coming soonRafael De La Cruz has hunted vampires with his brothers for centuries, and each year his capacity to feel has weakened, until only his will keeps him from becoming what he hunts. Colby Jansen has spent five years protecting her younger half-siblings and keeping their ranch going, and now the De La Cruz family claims the children belong with their father's people. Colby intends to fight them.
Rating coming soonHumanity has spread to other stars and met the Watchkeepers, a species of machines that nobody understands. A colony expedition sets out for a distant solar system that appears to hold something ancient and dangerous, and the voyage has to be made with the knowledge that the travellers will not come back to the world they left.
Rating coming soonBinti goes home to work out what she is. She is a harmonizer, which means her abilities are still new to her, and the situation she has returned to does not leave time for study: a war being waged by the Khoush threatens to destroy Okwu and the Meduse, and she is one of the few people with a reason to intervene.
Rating coming soonAn employer who does not ask too many questions about the past is hard to find, and the Garricks give the narrator a job cleaning their penthouse and cooking in their kitchen. She has a secret of her own to keep, and the arrangement is nearly perfect. Then she notices that she has never met the wife, that there are stains on the nightgowns in the laundry, and that she can hear somebody crying.
Rating coming soonThe narrator has moved into a house of her own with her husband and children, on a quiet street where the neighbours introduce themselves over the fence. She used to clean other people's houses and now she has one of her own, and she intends to keep the life that came with it. The first dinner with the people next door is where the trouble starts.
Rating coming soonAmy Peterson is a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating humanoid robot who has spent five years being grown slowly as part of a household that mixes organic and synthetic members. She knows very little about her android mother's past, and when her grandmother arrives and attacks the family Amy survives and leaves, carrying the damaged older machine with her. In Amy alone the failsafe that stops robots from harming humans has stopped working.
Rating coming soonNathan Arkwright is a science fiction writer who has outlived the era that made him famous and has become reclusive and difficult. What nobody outside the family understands is that he has been arranging his real legacy: convinced that humanity cannot survive on Earth, he has set his foundation the task of building a colony on an Earth-like world several light years away, and the generations of Arkwrights who follow are drawn together and pulled apart by the size of that promise.
Rating coming soonVerity grows up on an isolated farm in a world that plagues of engineered organisms have emptied out, after an earlier age of utopian nanotech cities. Her life changes when Blaze, the only other young person in the community and her closest friend, is shot; his body is wrapped in a nanotech cocoon and she sets out for the Enlivened City of Cincinnati, the legendary place where he might be brought back from the edge of death.
Rating coming soonTom Winter takes a secluded cottage in the Pacific Northwest hoping that the quiet will help him recover from lost love and happiness. The cottage turns out to hide a tunnel through time: at one end is the present, at the other is New York City in 1963, and the past looks like a simpler and safer place to start again. The tunnel is not empty, and something has come through it from a much worse future.
Rating coming soonChaz Koto is a citizen of Xanadu, a near-future society reserved for the wealthiest men and women on Earth, and he carries the burden of a secret that the outside world would be shocked to hear. Lenore Myles travels to Xanadu as a student and becomes involved with Koto; when he unwittingly lends her his access codes she stumbles onto the truth behind the settlement's glittering facade, and a pursuit follows.
Rating coming soonA bureaucrat from the Office of Technology Transfer, charged with restricting the flow of dangerous technologies, is sent to the planet Miranda to find a fugitive who holds forbidden technical knowledge. His quarry knows the world far better than he does, and the continent-inundating Jubilee tides are almost due, so the search is being run in a society that is already coming apart around it.
Rating coming soonKirsten is one of the best and brightest of the humans who have served the Citizens for generations, grateful to the race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship and gave them a home world. When a chain reaction of supernovae at the galaxy's core sends lethal radiation outward, the Citizens flee with their planets, and Kirsten's crew volunteers to scout the fleet's path and finds truths that shake the foundations of their worlds.
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.
