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 51 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 soonNASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is building a probe to be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. During testing something goes wrong and an explosion kills seven scientists, and the powerful self-modifying artificial intelligence inside the probe, called Dorothy, escapes into the internet. Wyman Ford is asked by the president's science adviser to find the software, with the help of the woman who created it.
Rating coming soonAlex Lomax is the only private investigator working the mean streets of New Klondike, the Martian frontier town that grew up after two prospectors found fossils on the Red Planet. On Earth almost anything can be synthesised, so the remains of alien life are the most valuable collectibles there are, and shiploads of treasure hunters came to Mars in the Great Martian Fossil Rush. Lomax works a lawless town where everything is cheap and life is cheaper.
Rating coming soonMaya Andreyeva is a camera: a reporter in a future Russia whose virtual reality broadcasting equipment is implanted in her brain, so that what she sees millions see and what she feels millions feel. In a twenty-fourth century where the United States has fallen as a world empire and most nations are third-rate powers beside a hypertechnological Africa, what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre.
Rating coming soonIn a universe protected by the Three Laws of Robotics, humans are safe from their machines: a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow one to come to harm. Then an experiment with a new kind of robot brain goes wrong, and Caliban is created, a robot with no knowledge of and no compassion for humanity, and no Three Laws at all.
Rating coming soonThirty thousand years before the events of A Fire upon the Deep, Pham Nuwen is living in anonymity among the Qeng Ho interstellar trading fleet. In high orbit above the planet Arachna they wait for the awakening of its dormant population, the Spiders, who have burrowed deep into the world waiting for the On/Off star their planet orbits to relight and for Arachna to enter a golden age of technology and commerce. Another fleet has other plans.
Rating coming soonAza is the adopted daughter of innkeepers in Ayortha, a kingdom with a narrow idea of beauty that she does not fit: she is large, milk-white in colouring, and her hair looks frying-pan black to humans although gnomes see it as the dark purple they call htun. What Ayortha admires in her is her voice, which can mimic anyone and throw itself without her moving her mouth, and the new queen hears it at the royal wedding.
Rating coming soonKahlen belongs to a sisterhood of sirens, and the same speech has been given to every girl who joins it: she must never do anything that might expose the secret, she cannot form close bonds with humans because she is deadly to them, and she pays for her eventual freedom with obedience and time. She has kept those rules for years, and then Akinli, a human, enters her world.
Rating coming soonAgatha and Sophie have returned to the village of Gavaldon as heroes, and their escape from the School for Good and Evil is being celebrated as the end of a curse. Agatha secretly wishes her story had finished differently, and the wish reopens the gates to a school that has changed: witches and princesses now share the School for Girls, while Tedros and the boys camp in the towers that used to belong to Evil.
Rating coming soonAfter her father dies, Ash is left at the mercy of a cruel stepmother and works as a servant in the house that used to be hers, and her only comfort is rereading the fairy tales her mother once told her by the fire. She meets the dark fairy Sidhean and believes he might take her away, and then she meets Kaisa, the King's Huntress, and begins to want something else.
Rating coming soonPlatform 13 at King's Cross has been closed for years, and every attempt to change it fails for reasons nobody explains, because it hides a gump: an opening that appears once every nine years for nine days and leads to the Island, where magical and ordinary creatures live side by side. During the last opening the infant prince was stolen, and now a rescue party is being put together.
Rating coming soonMiryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father is a poor one: free with loans and reluctant to collect them, he has left the family close to poverty. She takes the work over, hardens her heart and gains a reputation for turning silver into gold. Then a boast reaches the cold creatures who haunt the wood, and they bring her silver they expect back as gold.
Rating coming soonTwo years after The Princess and the Goblin, Curdie the miner's son has grown old enough to hunt for pleasure and has begun to doubt the story Princess Irene told him about her great-great-grandmother. Then he shoots a white pigeon, remembers whose bird it must be, and is led by a light to the old Princess, who burns his hands clean in her fire of roses.
Rating coming soonPrincess Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne of Phantasmorania is given the fairy gift of ordinariness at her christening, so unlike her six beautiful sisters she grows up with mousy hair and freckles and would rather have adventures than embroider tapestries. When her parents try to marry her off, she runs away and becomes fourteenth assistant kitchen maid at a neighbouring palace.
Rating coming soonAlice Sun is the only scholarship student at an elite international boarding school in Beijing and has always felt invisible among her rich and influential classmates. Then she starts turning invisible, uncontrollably and for real, and when her parents tell her they can no longer afford the tuition she works out how to sell the condition, discovering the secrets her classmates will pay to know.
Rating coming soonA year has passed since an unlikely alliance saved the Tressian Republic from fire and darkness at great cost. Thousands died, and Viktor Akadra, the Republic's champion, has disappeared. The ruling council struggles to mend old wounds while other factions sense opportunity: the Parliament of Crows schemes in the shadows, and to the east the Hadari Emperor gathers his armies.
Rating coming soonDrizzt Do'Urden sets out to destroy the evil Crystal Shard at last and looks for the scholar-priest Cadderly to help him do it. Instead his worst fears come true: Crenshinibon falls into the hands of the dark elf mercenary Jarlaxle and his unlikely ally Artemis Entreri, and the weapon Drizzt wanted unmade is loose in the world again.
Rating coming soonFive hundred miles beyond the Mississippi, five hundred miles into the Louisiana Purchase, a party of squatters crosses the prairie in 1805 looking for somewhere to settle. Among them are the rough Ishmael and Esther Bush and their grown sons, Esther's brother Abiram White, a niece called Ellen Wade and an eccentric naturalist, Dr Obed Bat, and they are watched by an old trapper who knows the country better than they do.
Rating coming soonIn 1855 Jane Peck sails from Philadelphia to Shoalwater Bay in Washington Territory to join William Baldt, the man who proposed to her. Her passage is on a ship called the Lady Luck and she is accompanied only by her Irish maid Mary, and the voyage costs her more than she expected. Nothing at Miss Hepplewhite's finishing school prepared her for the frontier.
Rating coming soonPhilippe Charboneau is the illegitimate son of James Amberly, the sixth Duke of Kent, and in November 1770 he travels with his mother Marie from Auvergne to England to stake his claim to his inheritance. The Duke's family refuses to recognise him, an altercation leaves the Duke's legitimate son crippled, and mother and son flee to London.
Rating coming soonBen Cowan and Bijah Catlow have been bound as friends since childhood, but they grew into different men: Catlow became a top cowhand with a wild streak, and one disastrous confrontation with a band of greedy ranchers turned him into an outlaw. That left it to Cowan, now a United States marshal, to bring him in alive, if Catlow will let him.
Rating coming soonMarian Forrester and her husband, Captain Daniel Forrester, live in the western town of Sweet Water, on the line of the Transcontinental Railroad, where he belongs to the age of the pioneers and she is the socialite everyone watches. Niel Herbert grows up in the town and falls in love with what she represents, and her slow social decline comes to stand for the end of the American frontier.
Rating coming soonAlvin Miller, a seventh son of a seventh son, is staying at a boarding house where mixed-blood children are cared for when he uses his knack to clear the mosquitoes and the disease out of a well. A young woman the people call Dead Mary asks him to heal her mother, who has yellow fever, and the cure spreads through Nueva Barcelona and heads off a war over slavery.
Rating coming soonIn the middle of the 1840s a thirteen-year-old English boy named Gemmy Fairley is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by a group of Aboriginal people. Sixteen years later, when white settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans and is given shelter by the McIvors, but fear and mistrust are already at work in the settlement.
Rating coming soonOscar Hopkins is an Anglican priest from Devon and Lucinda Leplastrier is a young heiress from Parramatta who owns a glass factory in Sydney, and they meet on a ship from England to Australia. Both of them gamble, one obsessively and one compulsively, and Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot carry a glass church to a remote settlement four hundred kilometres up the coast.
Rating coming soonThe Talamasca, the order that documents paranormal activity, is hunting for the newly born Lasher. Mayfair women are dying of haemorrhages, an unusual genetic anomaly has turned up in Rowan and Michael, and Lasher, who was born from Rowan, belongs to another species altogether and is now in a physical body.
Rating coming soonBarnabus Pike is no gunfighter and not much of a street fighter, and Eddie Holt is a black boxer in a white man's world, and both of them have taken their share of hard knocks. They mean to survive a brutal winter in a remote Montana line shack and then settle down, until they meet an Irish immigrant and his sister, who have been burned off their land.
Rating coming soonDoby Kernohan and his father have travelled a long way looking for a new start, and the abandoned cabin they find seems like a good place to settle until they see the dead man in the front yard. The killing turns out to be an omen of darker events, for a cycle of violence that began long ago is about to reach its end.
Rating coming soonWilliam Tell Sackett is carrying thirty pounds of gold from the Arizona goldfields to the booming town of Los Angeles when Dorinda Robiseau asks him for safe passage. Sackett is no ladies' man but he can spot trouble easily, and he agrees reluctantly, which leaves him crossing the most brutal desert on the continent with a companion he does not trust.
Rating coming soonThe year after Simon Kelleher's death, Bayview High has dozens of imitations of the gossip app that made him notorious, and none of them matter until an anonymous texter starts a game instead of an app: truth or dare, sent by message, with twenty-four hours to answer. Three students, Maeve Rojas, Knox Myers and Phoebe Lawton, are the ones it chooses.
Rating coming soonNewlyweds Tricia and Ethan are looking for their dream house when they visit a remote manor that once belonged to Dr Adrienne Hale, a psychiatrist who vanished without trace four years earlier. A violent winter storm traps them there with no way out, and while Tricia is looking for something to read she finds a secret room full of transcripts of every interview Dr Hale ever conducted.
Rating coming soonNear an isolated mansion lies a garden of flowers and shady trees, and among its ornaments are young women who have been kidnapped and intricately tattooed to resemble the butterflies they are named for. The man who keeps them calls himself the Gardener, and when the garden is discovered a single survivor is brought in for questioning by two FBI agents.
Rating coming soonPip Fitz-Amobi is not a detective any more. With Ravi Singh she made a true-crime podcast about the murder case they solved together, and it went viral, but she insists her investigating days are behind her. Then someone she knows goes missing on the night the town holds a memorial, the police do nothing, and Pip starts looking into it herself.
Rating coming soonTwo years after millions of people vanished in an instant, a new world order has risen from the rubble and the strangely persuasive leader Nicolae Carpathia has consolidated his power over the Global Community. Heads of state, financiers, religious leaders and the media have been reduced to instruments of his regime, and only a small group knows what he really is.
Rating coming soonMarried FBI agents Savich and Sherlock are summoned back to Washington from a weekend away when a prominent judge is murdered in the Supreme Court's third-floor library, the night before the court is to hear arguments in a controversial death-penalty case. More killings follow, each one targeting another brilliant and successful figure in the capital.
Rating coming soonOn her thirty-fourth birthday, Daisy Minor decides to remake her entire life: she is tired of her boring clothes, her ordinary looks and nearly a decade without a date. The small-town librarian turns herself into a party girl who dances and flirts at clubs, and then she witnesses a murder and becomes the target of a killer.
Rating coming soonNina Bloom is a successful lawyer and a loving mother who would do anything to protect the life she has built in New York, including lying about her past to everyone, her daughter included. When an innocent man is framed for murder she cannot let him pay for somebody else's crime, which means going back to the identity she abandoned nineteen years earlier.
Rating coming soonSixty years ago an eccentric Hungarian genius worked out how to trigger a shift of the polar ice caps artificially, with eruptions, earthquakes and climate changes to follow, and then his work disappeared. Now the leader of an anti-globalisation group intends to use it on the industrialised nations, and the process cannot be reversed once it has begun.
Rating coming soonAn officer is shot at point-blank range inside the Grant County police station and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver is wounded, which sets off a hostage situation with the medical examiner Sara Linton at the centre of it. Outside, a newly reinstated officer and Jeffrey's second in command must work out who the shooter is before Jeffrey dies.
Rating coming soonOn the eve of her graduation from an exclusive private school, the shy Semantha Heavenstone is caught up in scandal and betrayal, and she returns to the family's grand Kentucky mansion where memories of her mother and her older sister Cassie are still sharp. Wherever she goes, Semantha is haunted by her sister's voice.
Rating coming soonThe Knights Templar once held untold wealth and power over kings and popes, until the Inquisition destroyed the order and its hidden riches were lost. Now two rival groups have learned that the treasure is not what they assumed it to be, and that its real nature could change the modern world. Cotton Malone is pulled back from his Copenhagen bookshop into that search.
Rating coming soonIn the kingdom of Geall, the scholarly Moira has taken up the sword of her people and, as queen, has to prepare them for the greatest battle they will ever fight. Lilith, the most powerful vampire in the world, has followed the circle of six through time to Geall, and vampires killed Moira's mother, so she has a personal account to settle as well.
Rating coming soonAudrey Rose Wadsworth leaves London and its memories after discovering the identity of Jack the Ripper, travelling with Thomas Cresswell to Romania, to one of Europe's best schools of forensic medicine and to the country of Vlad the Impaler. Bizarre murders are then found in the castle of the prince known as Dracula.
Rating coming soonAlexia Tarabotti has several social problems: she has no soul, she is a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead, and she has just been attacked by a vampire, which breaks every standard of etiquette. Then she kills the vampire by accident and Lord Maccon, a loud and untidy werewolf, is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate.
Rating coming soonHarry Keogh can talk to the dead, which is how he learns what is buried in the mountains of Romania: a master vampire called Thibor Ferenczy, held between death and life, who is plotting an unearthly revenge. The vampire's instrument is Boris Dragosani, an agent of a secret Russian service who wants to learn the vampire's skills for himself.
Rating coming soonAfter Hurricane Katrina and an explosion at the vampire summit, everyone in Louisiana, human or otherwise, is under strain, including the cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse, whose boyfriend Quinn has gone missing. The werewolves and vampires of her corner of the state are changing how they do things whether they like it or not.
Rating coming soonThirteen-year-old Vladimir Tod hates junior high: bullies harass him, the principal is watching him and the girl he likes prefers his best friend. He also has a secret, because his mother was human and his father was a vampire, and with no idea how far his powers go he struggles daily with blood cravings and his enlarged fangs.
Rating coming soonManolito De La Cruz knows he is dangerously close to turning into a vampire when Prince Mikhail calls him back to the Carpathian homeland, and there he catches the scent of his destined lifemate in MaryAnn Delaney. MaryAnn is human, a counsellor for battered women, and she knows the aggressive instincts of Carpathian males well enough not to want one bound to her for life.
Rating coming soonAs a young girl, Destiny let a vampire into her home without understanding what he was; he slaughtered her family and kept her captive, forcing her to become like him. The vampire's blood still lives inside her and calls to others of his kind, which she uses as bait while she hunts vampires in Seattle, and all the while she believes herself to be evil in the same way her captor was.
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.
