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 54 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 soonJimmie Blacksmith is an Aboriginal man in nineteenth-century New South Wales, caught between his own family and culture and the world of white settler colonialism. The novel is written from his perspective, and it follows him on a mission of revenge. It is based on the life of the bushranger Jimmy Governor and was written from Jimmie's point of view.
Rating coming soonTheodora Goodman is a lonely middle-aged woman who travels to France after her mother's death and then goes on to America, where she experiences what may be either a gradual mental breakdown or an epiphanic revelation. The novel is her story from beginning to end. It follows her from Australia to France and then to America, and it never explains what she is looking for.
Rating coming soonLucinda Vane is born into a wealthy Melbourne family, and she spurns the love of a distinguished family friend to marry the dashing aide-de-camp to the Governor, Hugo Brayford. Her life of ease ends when Hugo takes her to England just before the First World War. The novel spans the early 1900s to the Second World War and moves between Melbourne and England.
Rating coming soonShortly after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones learns that she has inherited a large townhouse in Chelsea, London. Adopted as an infant, she knows very little about her biological family, and what she learns is that she was found alive in the house as a baby after the police uncovered the bodies of three adults. Libby's own birth name was Serenity Lamb.
Rating coming soonA Boeing 777 arrives at John F. Kennedy International Airport and stops while it is taxiing, with all its window shades closed except one, its lights out and its communication channels silent. Dr Ephraim Goodweather, who runs the CDC's rapid-response team for biological threats, boards the plane and finds everybody aboard dead except four people.
Rating coming soonAt the age of eleven, Abraham Lincoln learns from his father Thomas that vampires are real. A drunken Thomas explains that a vampire killed Abraham's grandfather in 1786, and that his mother Nancy did not die of milk sickness but was given a fool's dose of vampire blood after Thomas failed to repay a debt.
Rating coming soonZoey's friends have her back again and the red fledglings are no longer Neferet's secret, but an unexpected danger has emerged: Neferet is guarding her powerful new consort, Kalona, and nobody at the House of Night seems to understand the threat he poses. Kalona looks gorgeous, and he has the House under his spell.
Rating coming soonSomeone has put a price on Anita Blake's head, and dating both a vampire and a werewolf was not the hardest part of her life. Love cannot save her this time, so she turns to Edward, a hitman, for help in finding out who is behind the threat. The buyer is not somebody she knows, and the reason for the contract is not obvious.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden, Chicago's preeminent wizard, is coping with his new roommate, his vampire half-brother Thomas, when a bigger problem arrives. One of his vampire foes summons him and threatens his friend, the police lieutenant Karrin Murphy, unless he finds the Word of Kemmler. If he does not produce it within three days, his friend will be framed for a murder she did not commit.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse witnesses the firebombing of Merlotte's, the bar where she works, and because Sam Merlotte is now known to be two-natured the suspicion falls on the anti-shifters in the area. Sookie suspects something else and works with Sam to find the culprit and the motive. The answer is not the one the neighbours assume it is.
Rating coming soonJody wakes up in an alley under a dumpster with a badly burned arm and a pain in her neck, and she knows it is not going to be one of her better days. She feels awful, looks worse, her clothes are torn and her sense of smell has become as sharp as an animal's.
Rating coming soonBefore Owen Michaels disappears during an embezzlement investigation, he smuggles a note to his wife of one year: protect her. Hannah Hall knows exactly who he means, and it is Owen's sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey, who lost her mother as a child and wants nothing to do with her new stepmother.
Rating coming soonNew York City is under siege by a secret militia group, and two people are in a position to stop it: a federal agent and a woman lawyer. The group has threatened to destroy Wall Street with a series of explosions, and it makes no demands and will not negotiate. Those two are the only people who might be able to stop it in time.
Rating coming soonDombey and Son is both a firm and a family, and the ambiguous connection between public and private life is at the heart of the novel. Paul Dombey runs his domestic affairs the way he runs his business, calculatingly and coldly. His relations with his son, his two wives and his neglected daughter Florence are the substance of the book.
Rating coming soonJohn Peerybingle is a slow but honest carrier, and he lives with his young wife Dot, their baby boy and their nanny, Tilly Slowboy. A cricket chirps on the hearth and acts as a guardian angel to the family, and then a mysterious elderly stranger comes to visit and takes up lodging in the house.
Rating coming soonPip is an orphan, and the novel follows his education from a graveyard in Kent where he is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch to the London life that a mysterious benefactor pays for. It is a coming-of-age story told entirely in the first person. It was Dickens's second novel narrated in that way, after David Copperfield.
Rating coming soonThe book is presented as a nine hundred and ninety-nine line poem called Pale Fire, written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, a lengthy commentary and an index supplied by his neighbour and academic colleague Charles Kinbote. Together the parts make a narrative in which both fictional authors are characters.
Rating coming soonThe narrative is a frame story about a reader who is trying to read a book with the same title as the novel. Each chapter, apart from the last, is divided into two sections: the first describes the reader's attempts to get hold of and read the next part, and the second is the opening chapter of a completely different book.
Rating coming soonGadsby is a novel written without a single word containing the letter E, which is the most common letter in English. Its plot turns on the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalised by the efforts of its protagonist, John Gadsby, and a youth organiser. The constraint applies to the whole book, which runs to over fifty thousand words.
Rating coming soonJoe Saul is an ageing man who badly wants a child, and his young wife, Mordeen, who loves him, suspects that he is sterile. In order to give him the child he craves she decides to seduce his young assistant, and when her husband discovers the truth he has to come to terms with his pride.
Rating coming soonGeorge Hall is an unobtrusive man, a little distant and a little cautious, and not quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything, and his view is that the secret of contentment lies in ignoring many things completely.
Rating coming soonDelia Grinstead is forty, and on a family holiday she is last seen walking down the Delaware shore with a beach tote holding five hundred dollars inside. To her husband and her three nearly grown children she has vanished without trace or reason. Her family has no explanation for the decision, and neither, at first, does she.
Rating coming soonThe Western Lands is the final book of the trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night and continues with The Place of Dead Roads. Its title refers to the western bank of the Nile, which in Egyptian mythology is the land of the dead. The book takes its inspiration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Rating coming soonThe novel moves back and forth through American history and follows Hailey and Sam, two wayward teenagers who crash parties in New Orleans, barrel up the Mississippi and make their way through the Badlands towards other adventures. The story alternates between two narratives, both involving the same pair of teenagers.
Rating coming soonSleep Has His House combines autobiography with surrealist experiment, setting an account of a life against sections of subconscious wandering. It was first published in New York in 1947 as The House of Sleep, and it is a dark coming-of-age narrative rather than a conventional memoir. It mixes a semi-autobiographical account of a life with sections of subconscious wandering.
Rating coming soonThe generation ship Peerless was launched in The Clockwork Rocket and travelled into the void in The Eternal Flame, and this novel describes its return journey, the construction of a device that can receive messages from its own future, and the arrival at a world where time runs in reverse.
Rating coming soonDerek Vandeveer is a pioneering expert in computer and network security with a traditional hacker personality, and his life changes irrevocably after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Within months his fortune is gone to a scandal of the kind that ruined Enron, and he is recruited into a new wing of the government.
Rating coming soonAn experimental memory-modification device goes wrong and affects the President of the United States, and the race begins to establish whether somebody has obtained his memories, including secret military plans. The novel opens with a war veteran arriving at a Washington hospital for memory treatment. The device was built to edit memories rather than to share them, and what happened was not planned.
Rating coming soonDaryn Alwyn is the younger son of one of the richest families in the world, augmented with nanites and tuned before birth by DNA manipulation into what his society calls a pre-select. He does not go to work for the family media corporation, choosing the military and then freelance writing instead.
Rating coming soonPrincess Rose and her eleven sisters are bound by a curse that carries them out of the palace every third night to dance in the kingdom of the King Under Stone, and forbids them to speak of it. Twelve princes have tried to learn the secret, and none has survived. Galen, a soldier's son home from the war, takes work in the king's gardens and is warned by an old woman that he will need the cloak and yarn she gives him.
Rating coming soonDaystar has grown up at the edge of the Enchanted Forest with his mother Cimorene, who has taught him swordwork and spells but never told him who his father is, though she has raised him on legends of the forest. When the wizard Antorell attacks them, Cimorene melts him with a spell and sends the boy into the forest with a sword, a talking lizard and orders not to come back until he can say why he had to leave.
Rating coming soonA merchant loses his fortune with his ships at sea and takes his three daughters to Rose Cottage, a country house that was left to his youngest, Beauty, and so cannot be seized by his creditors. The garden turns out to be full of roses, and a single rose picked at a strange castle brings the anger of its owner down on the family.
Rating coming soonOn the princess's name-day the fairy Pernicia lays a curse on the baby: that she will prick her finger on a spindle and fall into a poisoned sleep. That same day a young fairy, Katriona, carries the child away and hides her in a village, where she grows up as an ordinary girl called Rosie with no idea who she is.
Rating coming soonAs a small girl Dakin announced that she meant to travel to the Farthest-Away Mountain, meet a gargoyle and marry a prince. Two days before her fifteenth birthday she hears the mountain call to her in a dream and sees it nod, and leaves her valley for a place nobody she knows has ever reached, where a magician's son rules and a frog keeps watch.
Rating coming soonMark Dunn's third novel tells the life of Jonathan Blashette, a circus performer born with three legs who makes a fortune in the deodorant business and becomes a celebrated philanthropist. The biography itself does not survive: letters between the author and his editor explain that the only manuscript was knocked into a bathtub, leaving the endnotes to be published alone.
Rating coming soonFaye Smallwood grew up on Demoth, a colony world that humans share with the winged Oolom, and helped nurse the plague that killed millions of them before her father found the cure. In her forties she joins the Vigil, an order of monitors who investigate official corruption, and the link it gives her to the planetary datasphere brings her a vision that assassins want stopped.
Rating coming soonA charity dinner at a San Francisco hotel is broken apart by the strongest earthquake the city has felt since 1906, and four guests come out of the wreckage into lives they did not expect: Sarah Sloane, whose financier husband's fraud is exposed when the power fails, the singer Melanie Free, the photographer Everett Carson and a nun named Maggie Kent, who works with the city's homeless.
Rating coming soonSeventy-year-old John Sidney Howard is on a fishing holiday in France when the German army overruns the country. Asked by an English couple at his hotel to take their two children home to safety, he agrees, and every delay on the road adds another child to his charge until he is leading six of them through occupied France towards the sea, with the Nazis close behind.
Rating coming soonDouble or Nothing is told by a writer who plans to shut himself in a room for a year with nothing but food and supplies, on the theory that the isolation will force a book out of him, and by the book he keeps failing to produce. The second narrative follows a Jewish man arriving in America and keeps changing as the first narrative reshapes it.
Rating coming soonEtienne Steward wakes as a clone whose memories are fifteen years out of date, because the original never had the copy brought up to date. In the years he has lost, the corporation that employed his original has collapsed after a war over alien artifacts, most of his friends are dead, and the man he was grown from has been murdered.
Rating coming soonAt the Stahlbaum house on Christmas Eve, Marie is drawn to an ugly nutcracker, and when her brother cracks a nut too hard and breaks its jaw she bandages the toy with a ribbon from her dress. That night the toys in the cabinet come to life and fight a battle against the Mouse King's army.
Rating coming soonSusan Hayes grew up on Sullivan's Island off Charleston and returns there in middle age with an unfaithful husband, a resentful teenage daughter and a long store of painful memories. Her sister's house on the beach, the sea and the island's storms give her somewhere to look back at the childhood and the family secrets she has carried with her.
Rating coming soonOmakayas is seven years old in 1847 and lives with her Ojibwe family in a birchbark house on an island in Lake Superior. The book follows the household through four seasons of hunting, fishing, gathering and storytelling, and into the winter when smallpox reaches the island and takes one of her brothers. She takes her share of the work and resents a good deal of it.
Rating coming soonAlec Ramsay is travelling home by ship when a black stallion is loaded aboard. A wreck in a storm leaves the boy and the horse the only survivors, and they wash up on a deserted island where each of them has to trust the other to stay alive until a passing ship takes them off. Back in America the stallion is still wild.
Rating coming soonAntonio is an Italian immigrant living in Sydney's working-class western suburbs, where he has lived for decades, forced into early retirement after an accident at work and left with too much time to think. Around him the city is convulsed by the Tampa affair, in which more than four hundred refugees were left stranded at sea, and his wife Rose and their drifting children find the family's own unravelling colliding with the crisis.
Rating coming soonMexico City is an oasis in a sea of vampires, policed to keep the creatures out. Domingo, a teenage trash-picker, attaches himself to Atl, the last descendant of a line of Aztec blood drinkers, who is hiding in the city from other vampires and from the authorities hunting her, drawing police, crime bosses and the vampire community into the search.
Rating coming soonCommander Elena Shaw is chief engineer aboard a Central Corps ship, and when her crewmate Danny is murdered on the colony world of Volhynia the authorities arrest her lover Treiko Zajec, who she knows was with her at the time. Retracing Danny's last hours, the pair uncover a link to a starship explosion the government has lied about for twenty-five years and may go to war with the outlaw PSI to protect.
Rating coming soonZarek has been a Dark-Hunter, one of the soulless guardians who stand between humanity and what would destroy it, for nine hundred years, and long ago he was exiled for something he wants to understand. Astrid, a woman who sees straight to the truth, becomes a point of light in a dark existence he has made for himself, and the two of them are drawn together as he looks into what was done to him.
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.
