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 57 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 soonHoyt Mac Cionaoith is a sorcerer who stands on a cliff above a raging sea and rails at the vampire who has taken his twin brother from the family. Her name is Lilith, she has existed for more than a thousand years, and she will not stop until she rules over everything, so Hoyt is enlisted into a battle for humanity.
Rating coming soonBrenna, a she-wolf, was abducted by a serial-killing Psy and came back changed into something she does not recognise. The only person who can help her is Judd Lauren, a telekinetic who defected from the Psy Council and whose dark abilities have made him the most deadly of assassins, and the passion between them could push them both over the edge of sanity.
Rating coming soonAnne and Marco Conti appear to have everything: a loving marriage, a good home and a baby daughter called Cora. One night, while they are at a dinner party at the neighbours' house, a crime is committed, and suspicion falls immediately on the parents, although the truth is more tangled than that.
Rating coming soonBank robbers in Washington are laying out precise demands when they enter a building and then killing the employees and their families when the instructions are not followed exactly. Detective Alex Cross takes the case and becomes convinced that a single criminal who calls himself the Mastermind is behind all of it.
Rating coming soonNevada Baylor is handed the most dangerous case of her career as a private investigator: bringing in a suspect who can set anyone and anything on fire. Before she can decide whether she is capable of it, she is kidnapped by Connor Rogan, a billionaire with powers as destructive as the target's, and the two of them have to work together.
Rating coming soonMiranda Ellis has been tormented since birth by a strange and powerful gift she has spent her whole life trying to control. One innocent but irreversible mistake has destroyed her family's fortune and forced her to marry London's most notorious nobleman, a man who hides his disfigured face behind masks and who stands accused of a series of gruesome murders.
Rating coming soonToni MacNally and her friends buy a run-down Scottish castle and turn it into a tourist attraction, complete with a re-enactment and an imaginary laird named Bruce MacNiall. Then the castle's actual owner arrives, a formidable Scot who shares the invented laird's name, and young women begin to be murdered nearby.
Rating coming soonLucy Snowe has neither friends nor family, and she sails from England to find work at a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she has to keep hold of herself among unruly pupils, a headmaster who does not trust her, and her own complicated feelings for two very different men.
Rating coming soonAfter years of torture at the hands of a vampire horde, Lachlain MacRieve, the leader of the Lykae clan, finds that the mate he has waited millennia for is part vampire. Emmaline Troy is a small half-Valkyrie, half-vampire woman who has just set out to learn the truth about her dead parents when a Lykae claims her.
Rating coming soonAt Ever After High the students are expected to pledge on Legacy Day that they will follow in their fairy-tale parents' footsteps, and Raven Queen, the daughter of the Evil Queen, refuses to sign the Storybook of Legends. Her refusal puts everyone else's future in question and splits the school into Royals and Rebels.
Rating coming soonEmmalynn inherits a dilapidated seaside mansion from Henrietta Stern and lapses into amnesia rather than remember the axe murder she witnessed there. The police closed the case when the accused man died in jail, but his brooding son wants his father's name cleared and is prepared to endanger Emmalynn to do it, while another man keeps pressing her for a kind of intimacy she does not want.
Rating coming soonMichael K is a poor man with a cleft lip who has spent his childhood in institutions and works as a gardener in Cape Town. When civil war and martial law close over the country and his mother falls ill, he builds a cart to carry her back to the rural birthplace she remembers, Prince Albert.
Rating coming soonThree people live in different kinds of isolation on the coast of New Zealand's South Island: a reclusive artist, a mute boy, and the boy's foster father. Over the course of the novel they form a tentative relationship, are driven apart by violence, and come back together, with Māori and Pākehā language and myth woven through the book.
Rating coming soonThe Liverpool Merchant is a slave ship working the triangular trade in the middle of the eighteenth century, and two cousins are bound up with it: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a wealthy Lancashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who sails on the voyage. The novel's subject is greed, and slavery is the medium it uses to examine it.
Rating coming soonVernon Gregory Little is a teenager in Martirio, Texas, whose life falls apart when his best friend shoots their classmates in the schoolyard and then kills himself. The town comes under a media siege, Vernon is taken in for questioning, and he finds himself blamed for the massacre and drawn into a series of increasingly strange events.
Rating coming soonAzaro is an abiku, a spirit child, living in an unnamed African city, and he is able to move between the spirit world and the world of people. The novel follows him and his family through poverty and political upheaval, with the two worlds running alongside each other rather than one being a figure for the other.
Rating coming soonThree of Molly Lane's former lovers meet at her funeral: the newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, the composer Clive Linley, and the Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony. Clive and Vernon are old friends, and the pact they then make with each other about how their lives should end becomes the engine of the story.
Rating coming soonClaudia Hampton is a seventy-six-year-old historian, terminally ill in a London hospital bed, who decides to write a history of the world and finds herself writing her own instead. The novel moves backwards and forwards through her life, from a childhood competing with her brother for fossils to the war and the people she has loved.
Rating coming soonSammy, a shoplifter and ex-convict in Glasgow, wakes in a lane after two days of drinking and is beaten badly by plain-clothes policemen. When he comes round he is blind, and the novel follows him as he learns to manage a city he can no longer see, in a working-class Scottish dialect that runs the whole length of the book.
Rating coming soonOskar Schindler is a member of the Nazi Party and a businessman in occupied Poland who, over the course of the war, ends up saving the lives of twelve hundred Jews. The novel was written by Thomas Keneally after a Holocaust survivor showed him his files on Schindler, and it mixes documented people and events with fictional dialogue.
Rating coming soonEdith Hope is a romantic novelist who has been sent by her friends to a hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva to think about the mess she has made of her life. She arrives determined not to change, and spends her time watching the other English guests, among them a wealthy mother and daughter and an attractive middle-aged man.
Rating coming soonMehring is a rich white businessman in apartheid South Africa who is not satisfied with his life. On a whim he buys a four-hundred-acre farm outside the city, and although he knows nothing about farming and the black workers run it, the land becomes the place where his wealth and his losses start to press on him.
Rating coming soonIn Munich in 1923 a young Australian woman, Ruth Becker, meets the journalist Hans Wesemann while visiting her cousin Dora, and the three of them take part in left-wing activism. Ten years later, with Hitler as chancellor, Ruth and Hans, Dora and the playwright Ernst Toller, flee to London and try to make the world understand the danger.
Rating coming soonCharles Arrowby is a successful London theatre director who decides to leave the world behind and write his memoirs in a house beside the sea. There he thinks he sees a sea monster and then meets his first love, Hartley Fitch, whom he has not seen since they were young, and he becomes determined to have her.
Rating coming soonThe Ghost Road is the last book of a trilogy about shell-shocked British officers at the end of the First World War. Its main figures are the real psychoanalyst William Rivers and the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior, who has been treated for shell shock and is preparing to go back to France.
Rating coming soonThe novel describes the siege of a fictional Indian town, Krishnapur, during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and it is told from the point of view of the British residents. As the siege tightens, the Europeans find themselves short of food and dignity, and the arrangement in which they govern an Asian population is turned upside down.
Rating coming soonThe novel is framed as a fictional oral history of the attempted assassination of a reggae singer in Jamaica in 1976 and everything that followed from it. It runs through the crack wars in New York in the 1980s and a changed Jamaica in the 1990s, and it is told by many voices rather than by a single narrator.
Rating coming soonA woman travels to India to find out about Olivia, the first wife of her grandfather, and she reads Olivia's letters as she goes. Through them, and through her own experience of the country, she learns what happened to Olivia in the 1920s, when a bored English colonial wife was drawn into the orbit of a minor Indian prince.
Rating coming soonLiam Hegarty, an alcoholic, has killed himself in the sea at Brighton, and his mother and eight of the nine surviving children gather in Dublin for his wake. The narrator is his sister Veronica, who is thirty-nine, and the novel follows her through the family's past and her own memory of what was done to Liam as a child.
Rating coming soonA group of men who have been friends since the Second World War travel from Bermondsey to Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds into the sea, as he asked them to do. The journey gives the novel its spine, and their memories of work, family, the racetrack and the pub, and of the women they married and the children they raised, fill it out.
Rating coming soonNorman is the clever one of a close-knit Jewish family in the East End of London: an infant prodigy, a brilliant barrister and the pride of his parents. At forty-one he is a drug addict confined to his bedroom, at the mercy of hallucinations and paranoia, and his committal to a mental hospital is where the novel begins.
Rating coming soonLola Bensky is nineteen, a high-school dropout who irons her hair straight and asks a lot of questions, and she has been sent by an Australian newspaper into the middle of the London music scene in 1967. She interviews musicians at the height of their fame and works out who she is at the same time.
Rating coming soonAfter her final year at college, a young writer takes a part-time job as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift she is dropped into hundreds of crises and hears only a piece of each, and the stress of listening to faraway disasters seeps into the rest of her life.
Rating coming soonJesse sees his baby sister Rachel in a blanket at the hospital and knows that he will be the one to look after her. Their mother is always moving on and always bringing trouble home, and when her appetite for destruction leads the little family into the arms of a man named Ray Crow, the charm comes off the arrangement and the children are left to manage what follows.
Rating coming soonIn the 1950s, in the Victorian town of Cohuna, Betty the nurse lives on the outskirts of town next door to Harry, a dairy farmer whose wife has left him for a man from the local bird fanciers' club. The novel follows the pair of them and Betty's son Michael through a year of small-town life.
Rating coming soonCoonardoo is an Aboriginal woman who has been prepared since childhood to be the housekeeper of Wytaliba station in north-west Australia, in an age when white settlers were taking control of more and more of the bare plains. She falls in love with the station's owner, Hugh Watt, a white man, and the novel describes the difficult relationship between them.
Rating coming soonJonah is a hunchback larrikin who lives in a Sydney slum and leads the local street gang, which is known as the Push. He is feared and respected in the neighbourhood, and his life changes when he becomes the father of a son, after which he sets out to break away from the world he has grown up in.
Rating coming soonG. is set in Europe before the First World War, and its protagonist, who goes by the initial G., is a lover of women in the tradition of Don Juan or Casanova. His affairs take him across the continent, through a series of misadventures and disguises, and as he goes he gradually arrives at a political consciousness.
Rating coming soonDetective Inspector Daniel Clement has left the homicide squad in Perth and come back to Broome, the town where he grew up, so that he can be near his daughter after separating from his wife. His work is petty theft and drunken violence until a body is found at Jasper's Creek with an axe wound to the head.
Rating coming soonAlun Weaver, a writer of modest celebrity, comes back to his native Wales with his wife Rhiannon, who was once a famous beauty. They move into a quiet retirement community that turns out to be full of people Alun used to know, and he takes up with a group of men who have stayed there all along.
Rating coming soonAt the start of the twentieth century Ellen Rimbauer, the young bride of a Seattle industrialist, begins to keep a diary. In it she records her anxieties about her marriage, her confusion about her own desires and the growing strangeness of her life, while the enormous house her husband is building, Rose Red, becomes a place where people disappear.
Rating coming soonIn 1687 sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler leaves Barbados after her grandfather dies and goes to live with her aunt's family in the Puritan community of Wethersfield, Connecticut. She finds the colony cold and narrow, and the only place she feels free is the meadow where she talks to an old Quaker woman the neighbours call a witch.
Rating coming soonWhen her little brother seems to be taken over by an evil spirit, fourteen-year-old Laura Chant goes for help to the older boy at school she is convinced has supernatural powers. What she asks for is a changeover: a deliberate move from one kind of life to another, which she has to be willing to make.
Rating coming soonThe witch Desiderata Hollow dies and leaves her magic wand to Magrat Garlick, who thereby becomes the fairy godmother of a young woman called Emberella in the distant city of Genua. Magrat and her fellow witches have to travel there to stop Emberella being married off to a man who is not what he appears.
Rating coming soonNorman Saylor, a professor at a small American college, considers magic to be superstition. Then he discovers that his wife is a practising sorceress, and he still refuses to accept what he has learned: that among women magic is an open secret, that it is being used against him, and that the occult warfare behind ordinary academic life is a matter of life and death.
Rating coming soonGeillis Ramsey has had a lonely childhood, made lonelier by a mother's cousin who taught her to see the world in an unusual way. When she grows up she inherits her cousin's house, along with her reputation in the neighbourhood as a white witch and an herbalist, and finds both the house and the community stranger than she expected.
Rating coming soonRiley Jenson is a rare hybrid of vampire and werewolf, and she works for Melbourne's Directorate of Other Races, which polices the supernatural and protects humans from it. Her twin brother Rhoan is a field guardian; she is an office worker, until he goes missing on a mission and she has to look for him herself.
Rating coming soonMacKayla Lane thought she and her sister were ordinary southern girls until she learned that they descend from a Celtic bloodline of sidhe-seers who can see the Fae. Her sister was found dead in a Dublin alley, and Mac has come to Ireland for answers and for revenge, which she now believes she has the power to take.
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.
