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 61 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 soonNeil Narayan grows up in the Atlanta suburbs with parents whose expectations of him are as high as the ones they have for his perfect older sister. What he wants is the girl across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal, and Anita has a secret: she and her mother have been brewing an alchemical potion out of stolen gold that carries the ambition of whoever owned it.
Rating coming soonGretel grew up on a canal boat with her mother, and the two of them made a language that belonged to nobody else. She has not seen her mother since she was sixteen, and she works now as a lexicographer, which suits a woman who lives alone. A telephone call from a hospital sends her back to the vocabulary and the river she left behind.
Rating coming soonLeda Foley runs a small travel agency in Seattle and has an inconsistent gift for knowing things she should not. When she rebooks a police detective's flight on impulse, she changes both their lives. He watches his original plane blow up from the airport terminal, and he starts to wonder whether her abilities could help him with a case he cannot close.
Rating coming soonJack Aubrey is ashore on half pay with no ship when Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders: he is to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant and take two strategic islands in the Indian Ocean from the French. Two of the captains under him, a pleasure-seeking dilettante and a disciplinarian whose severity nearly drives his crew to mutiny, make the commission harder than the enemy does.
Rating coming soonCaptain Jack Aubrey is given a new mission: to take his ship to the Pacific and protect the British whaling fleet there from an American frigate, which will mean his first voyage around Cape Horn. Dr Stephen Maturin has not yet identified the senior French agent who escaped him, and he does not know that the letter he sends his wife is going by the hand of exactly that man.
Rating coming soonIn January 1794, on the eve of the wars with France, a seventeen-year-old called Horatio Hornblower joins the Royal Navy as a midshipman. He is seasick, awkward and socially hopeless, and the other midshipmen decide he is a dullard. Then he is sent to board a French merchant ship and take charge of it, and something in him turns out to work properly at sea.
Rating coming soonHumphrey Van Weyden is a literary critic whose ferry collides with another vessel in the fog, and he is picked out of the water by the crew of a sealing ship. The captain who rescues him, Wolf Larsen, is a man of enormous physical strength and no moral restraint whatsoever, and he has no intention of putting his guest ashore.
Rating coming soonJim is a young British seaman with a romantic idea of the life he means to lead, and an early voyage gives him the chance to prove it. It goes the other way: he and the rest of the officers abandon a passenger ship in distress, the ship does not sink, and the crew are publicly condemned for leaving eight hundred people aboard.
Rating coming soonPhillip Enright is eleven and living on the island of Curacao when the war comes close enough for his mother to take him away by ship. The ship is torpedoed, and Phillip wakes on a raft in the middle of the sea with an old West Indian sailor called Timothy, a cat called Stew Cat and a head injury that has left him blind.
Rating coming soonSpensa has wanted to be a pilot since she was a child, and on the ruined world where what is left of humanity has taken shelter, pilots are the only heroes there are. The trouble is her father, who flew before her and who broke formation in the battle that made the survivors what they are, and nobody intends to let his daughter forget it.
Rating coming soonSeven years ago a ship called the Atargatis sailed for the Mariana Trench to film a documentary about legendary sea creatures and was lost with everybody aboard. Footage recovered from the vessel appeared to show mermaids killing the crew, and the world decided it was a hoax. Now a second expedition is being assembled, and the scientists on it are not out to entertain anybody.
Rating coming soonA Yorkshire whaling ship called the Volunteer is bound for the Arctic in the 1850s, in a trade that is being killed off by cheaper fuels. On board are a harpooner named Henry Drax, who is as dangerous as he is capable, and Patrick Sumner, a disgraced former army surgeon taken on as the ship's doctor for want of anything better.
Rating coming soonIn the early 1950s an eleven-year-old boy boards a ship in Colombo, bound for England, travelling on his own. At meals he is seated at the cat's table, the one furthest from the captain's, with two other boys and a collection of adults the rest of the passengers have no use for, and over three weeks at sea the three of them find out what is on board.
Rating coming soonIn the Judean desert, about two thousand years ago, five travellers are strung out along the road that a caravan took earlier that morning: three men, a woman, and someone too far behind for anyone to guess at, walking barefoot with no staff, no water and no food. They are all going into the wilderness for their own reasons, and the heat is the least of what they will find there.
Rating coming soonNhamo is eleven and lives in a Shona village in Mozambique, in a country in the middle of a war she only half understands. When a cholera epidemic and a proposed marriage to a man she does not want leave her with nothing to stay for, she takes her grandmother's blessing, some gold nuggets and a small boat, and sets out alone.
Rating coming soonDon Tillman is a professor of genetics who has decided that the time has come to find a wife, and being a scientist he approaches the problem the way he approaches everything else: with a sixteen-page questionnaire designed to screen out drinkers, smokers and anyone who arrives late. Then he meets Rosie Jarman, who fails every item on the list.
Rating coming soonJakarta, 1965. An Australian journalist, a Chinese-Australian photographer and a British diplomat are thrown together in the Indonesian capital in the summer and autumn of a year that ends in a coup attempt. Each of them is in the country for his own reasons, and each of them is being used for somebody else's.
Rating coming soonHenry Skrimshander is a shortstop at a small college on the shore of Lake Michigan who seems certain to play professionally, until a routine throw goes off course and the lives of five people around him change. The college president, the team captain, Henry's roommate and the president's daughter all have something at stake in what happens next.
Rating coming soonAnthony Cade is a cheerful drifter who takes a messenger job from a friend in Africa, and it looks like easy money: deliver the memoirs of a dead European count to a publisher in London. The manuscript turns out to be worth killing for, because it contains letters that bear on the restoration of a monarchy, and other people want it very badly.
Rating coming soonAnne Beddingfeld has just been left on her own and is looking for some adventure when a man falls onto the live rail at a London tube station and dies. A doctor who examines the body drops a piece of paper as he leaves, and Anne picks it up. The next day a woman is found strangled, and a fortune in diamonds has gone missing.
Rating coming soonAn architect called Thipps comes home to his flat and finds a dead body in his bath, wearing nothing except a pair of pince-nez. The same night, a financier named Sir Reuben Levy disappears from his bedroom without explanation. Lord Peter Wimsey, who has taken up criminal investigation as a hobby, decides to look into the first of these privately.
Rating coming soonTwo United States Marshals travel to an island in Boston Harbor where a hospital for the criminally insane occupies an old fortress, because a patient has disappeared from inside it. The patient is a woman who drowned her children, the island is cut off by weather, and the longer the two men stay the less the staff's account of anything holds together.
Rating coming soonIn twenty-third-century Thailand, the sea has risen, the oil is gone, and energy comes from springs that have to be wound by hand. Biotechnology is the dominant industry, controlled by the companies that own the calorie supply, and the people at the bottom of the arrangement include a manufactured woman who works in a club and is owned by the business that made her.
Rating coming soonChyna Shepherd is twenty-six and spending a weekend with the family of her best friend in the Napa Valley when a man lets himself into the house at midnight. He kills everyone in it, and Chyna, who has spent her life learning to survive people, escapes, and then learns the identity of the next person he means to kill.
Rating coming soonMitchell Rafferty is a landscape gardener planting beds for a client when a stranger telephones to say that his wife has been taken and that he can have her back for two million dollars. Mitch has no idea how to raise that kind of money, and the caller does not care, because he is confident that a man who loves his wife enough will find a way.
Rating coming soonEleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother are smoking a forbidden cigarette in a vacant lot near Memphis when a car pulls up and a lawyer parks beside them. What happens in the next hour leaves Mark knowing where a murdered senator's body is, and makes him the person both the federal prosecutors and the Mafia most want to find.
Rating coming soonMichael Brock is a young antitrust lawyer at a large Washington firm, billing his hours and one step away from partnership, and he has lost sight of why he does any of it. Then a homeless man takes hostages in the firm's offices, and when the siege ends Brock begins to ask what the man was actually angry about.
Rating coming soonKorede is a nurse in Lagos, sensible and used to cleaning up after her younger sister Ayoola, who is the favourite child, the beautiful one, and in the habit of killing her boyfriends. Three of them have died now, and it is Korede who arrives with the bleach and the large car boot while Ayoola goes about her ordinary business.
Rating coming soonVictor and Eli were college roommates, both of them brilliant and arrogant and lonely, and both of them recognised the same quality in the other. In their final year they began investigating whether a near-death experience could produce extraordinary abilities, and when the theory moved from the seminar room into practice, it went very badly wrong.
Rating coming soonDiscworld's Death has developed a personality, which the Auditors of Reality regard as a defect in the machinery, so they arrange for him to retire and hand him a timer with a fixed amount of sand in it. What nobody has allowed for is the effect on the world of taking away the person whose job it is to be there when it is somebody's time.
Rating coming soonNine-year-old David has lost his mother in an accident, and he has moved with his father and grandmother from Minnesota to Pennsylvania. Primrose is thirteen, cynical and bossy, and lives with her fortune-telling mother in a house where she is mostly left alone. The two of them meet at an Easter egg hunt neither of them wants to attend.
Rating coming soonEric Packer is twenty-eight and very rich. One morning he gets into a white stretch limousine that has been fitted out as an office and gives his driver an instruction: he wants a haircut, and the barber he uses is on the other side of Manhattan. Between his apartment and the barber's chair there is a presidential motorcade, a protest and a funeral.
Rating coming soonOne autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not go home from school. She gets on a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomas, a boy she hardly knows, partly because he seems to represent everything missing from her life and partly because he may help her find a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have walked out of a Soviet circus touring Mexico.
Rating coming soonJack Ryan, now deputy director of central intelligence, is working on a plan that might finally settle the long conflict in the Middle East. A group of terrorists has one card left to play, and what they do with it is designed to make two superpowers believe the worst of each other at the worst possible moment, with a president who cannot cope with the crisis.
Rating coming soonJohn Kelly is a former Navy SEAL living quietly near Chesapeake Bay, still grieving his wife half a year after her death, when he becomes involved with a woman whose past catches up with her. The men who take her away are drug dealers, and Kelly, who has every skill the Navy taught him and no reason left to hold back, decides to go after them.
Rating coming soonDolores Claiborne is a widow of sixty-five living on a small island in Maine, and the police suspect her of killing the wealthy elderly woman she worked for. Her answer is to sit down with the constable and a stenographer and tell the whole story, starting with her marriage, her husband's death thirty years earlier and the years she spent looking after Vera Donovan.
Rating coming soonBobbi Anderson is a writer of westerns who lives outside the small town of Haven, Maine, and one afternoon while walking in the woods behind her house she trips over a piece of metal. It turns out to be part of something enormous buried under the ground, and once the object is uncovered the people of the town begin to change.
Rating coming soonMorris Bellamy is a devoted reader of the novelist John Rothstein, who created a famous character and then stopped publishing, and Morris is angry about what happened to the character and about the silence. He and two accomplices break into the writer's house, and what they take includes a set of notebooks that have never been seen and are worth far more than the cash.
Rating coming soonTimothy Carrier is a stonemason having a beer after work when a nervous stranger sits down beside him, mistakes him for somebody else and hands him an envelope of cash with an instruction about a woman who is to be killed. Before Tim can explain the mistake, the man is gone, and shortly afterwards a second stranger arrives who takes Tim for the client who hired him.
Rating coming soonTracy Whitney is a successful bank manager in Philadelphia, engaged to a wealthy young man, when her mother kills herself after being cheated out of everything by a confidence trick run by organised crime. Tracy takes a gun to the man responsible in the hope of making him admit what he did, and within days her whole life has been dismantled.
Rating coming soonIn Chicago, Jack Reacher stops to help a young woman with an injured leg carry her dry cleaning, and three men with guns take them both. They are driven out of the city and across the country, and on the way Reacher works out that the woman is an FBI agent. Nobody has told him who her family is, and her colleagues have no idea he is there.
Rating coming soonA widow is suing a tobacco company over the death of her husband from lung cancer, and the trial is being heard in a Mississippi town chosen because its juries are thought to be sympathetic. Before the jury has even been sworn in, both sides are spending enormous sums trying to control who ends up on it, and one of the jurors is not who he says he is.
Rating coming soonA senator is found murdered in bed in his Georgetown apartment, and the only clue the police recover is a rhyme signed Jack and Jill, promising that this death is the first of many. Meanwhile Detective Alex Cross of the Washington police is called to a murder scene a few blocks from his own house, where a young girl has been beaten to death.
Rating coming soonEliza Cantrell has agreed to marry a man she has never met and to help him run a general store, and she sets off a week earlier than planned. Robbers take her dowry on the way, and when she finally arrives the man she is supposed to marry is not in town, leaving her with no money, no wedding and nowhere to go.
Rating coming soonRider is a half-breed Shoshoni wanted for murder among his own people, and his only interest is in staying alive. When he sees Emma Trent refused passage on a wagon train bound for Oregon, he offers to guide the train on one condition: that she is allowed to come with it.
Rating coming soonA small group of teenagers is hiding in the bush while an unnamed foreign power occupies their part of Australia. They have already lost two of their number and do not know what has become of either of them, and in this second summer of the war they decide that they have to find out, which means going back into the town they escaped from.
Rating coming soonBrian Robeson is thirteen and alone in the Canadian wilderness, living beside an L-shaped lake after the plane he was travelling in went down, and he has taught himself enough to last a summer there. In this telling the emergency transmitter in the wreck is never switched on, no rescue comes, and the season that follows is one he was not prepared for.
Rating coming soonA murder inside ThunderClan has split the Clan apart, and the cats who have taken it upon themselves to find out who was responsible are the three young warriors at the centre of the prophecy: Jayfeather, Hollyleaf and Lionblaze. Each of them is looking for something different, and one of them is about to learn something about their own parentage.
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.
