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 63 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 soonA brilliant Egyptologist translating a set of hieroglyphics comes across a message that describes the tomb of an unnamed pharaoh, one that has never been found. He cannot mount an expedition himself without alerting the Egyptian authorities, so he tells a freelance writer, and between them they assemble a crew. The odds are not in their favour.
Rating coming soonMelis Nemid runs a dive resort in the Caribbean and knows how dangerous the water can be, but she has never wanted anything to do with the treasure that is supposed to lie under it. Two men she has been close to have already been lost to the hunt, and now somebody is trying to pull her into it.
Rating coming soonPenn Cage was a prosecuting attorney who sent killers to death row, and now he is the mayor of the town he grew up in, where the arrival of casino gambling has changed everything. Beside the old slave market float five steamboats, and one of them is drawing gamblers away from Las Vegas.
Rating coming soonA marine archaeologist finds the keys to an ancient puzzle and takes a team of scientists and former soldiers out to look for what he believes could be the greatest archaeological discovery there has ever been. Somebody else is watching the expedition and waiting to strike, and neither party knows what is waiting in the water. It is a race against time as much as a search.
Rating coming soonWhen a sailing ship breaks up on the rocks off Cape Flattery, the authorities say there were no survivors, and the fourteen-year-old son of the lighthouse keeper refuses to believe them. Footprints on an empty beach and a wild figure glimpsed in the sea caves convince him that somebody is hiding out there. He is not supposed to go near the caves, and he goes anyway.
Rating coming soonBuried under the water, somewhere inside the Bermuda Triangle, there is a treasure worth killing for. Samantha Carlyle runs a dive resort on a small island and wants nothing to do with it, but unexplained events keep happening, her former lover arrives without warning, and somebody tries to take her. Two men she was close to are already gone.
Rating coming soonMicah Wilkins promises at the beginning of the book to tell the whole truth about what happened to her boyfriend, whose body has been found after he went missing. She is seventeen, she lives in New York with her parents, and she is, by her own account, a compulsive liar. Some of what she says is true, and working out which parts is the reader's problem.
Rating coming soonWill has finished his apprenticeship and is now a Ranger with a fief of his own, which turns out to be less peaceful than it looked. When the Skandians appear he has to deal with them, and then he is sent on a secret mission with his friend Alyss, into a country frightened of sorcery. Nobody there is sure who can be trusted.
Rating coming soonFor centuries the Others and human beings have lived side by side in an uneasy peace, and when humankind oversteps its bounds the Others have to decide how much of humanity they are prepared to tolerate. Since they allied themselves with the blood prophets, the arrangement has changed. It is the delicate balance between the two peoples that this book is about.
Rating coming soonAfter a human uprising was put down by the Elders, the few cities still under human control are far apart and the land beyond them is feared. Lakeside Courtyard came through the fighting more or less intact, and its leaders have to work with the humans who remain. The peace is fragile, and the people keeping it are few.
Rating coming soonA young Irish woman called Brida has been interested in magic for as long as she can remember, and what she is looking for now is something the books she has read cannot give her. Her search brings her to two teachers, a wise man who lives in a forest and a woman who knows how to dance to the music of the world.
Rating coming soonA young woman who has been dancing in nightclubs since she was sixteen to keep herself and her brother afloat learns that he has been found guilty of murdering a singer and is going to be executed. She sets out to prove that he did not do it, and she has very little time. There is nobody else to do it for him.
Rating coming soonAn escaped convict on the run after a stretch of work on a Louisiana drilling rig hires a call girl for a night, and then finds that he cannot shake her off. The two of them travel west together, and the plan he has been carrying since prison is a robbery.
Rating coming soonIn Rome in the year 70, an informer called Marcus Didius Falco meets a frightened young woman in the Forum and makes the rash decision to help her. She is carrying a burden that turns out to be connected to a pile of silver ingots stolen from Britain, and to the people who want them back.
Rating coming soonIn 1634 the investigator Samuel Pipps is put aboard a ship at Batavia to be taken back to Amsterdam, where he is to be tried and probably executed for a crime he may or may not have committed. His bodyguard Arent Hayes goes with him, determined to clear him, and the voyage begins badly. What follows happens almost entirely aboard that one ship.
Rating coming soonClaire is a medium of doubtful authenticity and her best friend Sophie has been dead since they were seventeen. The two of them take what looks like an easy job performing a seance at a crumbling manor house for the family matriarch's eightieth birthday, and a murder follows. Almost everybody in the house has something to hide.
Rating coming soonEmily agrees, at her friend's insistence, to go to a party at the country house of a man she dislikes and finds odious. Her host has also invited an Austrian countess who was once romantically linked with Emily's fiance, and by the end of the evening the host is dead and a friend's husband is under arrest.
Rating coming soonThe Amazing Arden is the best known female illusionist of her day, famous for the trick in which she appears to saw a man in half. One night in Iowa she uses a fire axe instead of a saw, her husband is found dead under the stage, and the policeman who catches up with her hears a story he cannot quite believe.
Rating coming soonIn 1718 a headstrong fifteen-year-old girl in a parish near Newcastle begins an affair that ruins her, and when the man denies that they were ever joined she has to leave for London. There she takes a position in the household of an apothecary, hoping to salvage what she can of her reputation. What she finds in that house is not what she was promised.
Rating coming soonYu Yuan is a young Chinese officer sent to Korea as one of the volunteers Mao contributed to the Communist side, and he is captured by United Nations forces. Because he knows some English he becomes the unofficial interpreter in the psychological warfare that runs through the prison camp, and the book is his memoir of what happened to him there. It is the camp, and the men in it, that the book is really about.
Rating coming soonA pregnant white woman arrives in a Mississippi town on foot, looking for the father of the child she is carrying, and a man who passes as white but believes himself to be of mixed ancestry is living in the same part of the country. The book follows the two of them and the people they are connected to. The town they are in has its own opinions about both of them.
Rating coming soonA famous novelist who has not been seen in public for years is working on a book that he refuses to finish, and the people around him are not sure he ever will. When a writer is taken hostage in Lebanon, he leaves the house he has been living in and goes to see whether he can do anything about it.
Rating coming soonA retired professor of classics in his seventies is accused of racism by two students after he uses a word they take as a racial insult, and the uproar ends his career. The writer who lives nearby and becomes his neighbour is the one who tells the story of what happened. What the neighbours make of him is only part of it.
Rating coming soonA man who is recovering from an emotional collapse caused by a sleeping pill travels to Israel to interview a writer, and learns while he is there that somebody with his own face and his own name has been passing himself off as him. What follows is partly an intelligence operation and partly a story about identity.
Rating coming soonAn unnamed woman in an Ohio town makes pies and tarts to sell to local restaurants while she looks after her four children, and the novel is made out of what goes on in her mind while she does it. It is written mostly as a single long sentence that runs for a thousand pages. Her thoughts are as ordinary as anybody's, and they go on for a very long time.
Rating coming soonA banker from the Netherlands finds himself living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York after his English wife takes their son back to London, and he is at loose ends in a city he had come to think of as home. Then he comes across a game of cricket, and through it a friendship that changes things. Cricket, it turns out, is one way of belonging to the city.
Rating coming soonOn an island in Puget Sound, where the people make their living from salmon fishing and strawberry farming, a Japanese American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a fellow fisherman. It is 1954, the war is recent, and the internment of Japanese Americans during it hangs over the courtroom. The case turns on what the islanders remember and what they would rather not.
Rating coming soonA professional thief in Toronto is asked by a woman he has befriended to steal objects from her brothers and sisters, because she believes that each of them holds one clue to where a large inheritance has been hidden. He takes the job, and then he has to solve the puzzle. What he is looking for may not exist at all.
Rating coming soonGeneral William Tecumseh Sherman marches sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then north into the Carolinas, in the last months of the American Civil War. His soldiers live off the land as they go, and a population of freed people and refugees follows them. It is the people in the path of the army that the novel follows.
Rating coming soonIn a mining town in southern Illinois, a man is tried and convicted of shooting his neighbour during a weekend gathering of the two families, and sentenced to be executed. Days before the sentence is to be carried out he is rescued by masked men and disappears, and what follows is the story of what became of him and of his family.
Rating coming soonFive years after the death of a celebrated New York painter, two biographers are competing to write his life, and both of them go to the women who knew him: his wife, his mistress and his sister, who is a painter herself. What each woman tells them does not add up to one story.
Rating coming soonAlmeyda grows up as a slave on a plantation in Brazil in the 1670s, with a mother who is stern and a grandmother who is not like anybody else. She hears about Palmares, a city governed by freed and escaped slaves, and her life becomes a long journey through the country. She is looking for her husband, and the country is very large.
Rating coming soonA young man leaves his family's hard-working farm in Vermont after killing his girlfriend by accident, and the only communication between him and the family he has left behind is the postcards he sends. He moves across the American West, and the family he left gets on with its life without him. He never tells them where he is, and he never hears back.
Rating coming soonGareth St. Clair has been left an old family diary by a father who detests him and who is determined to ruin what should have been his inheritance. The diary may hold the secret of his past, but it is written in a language he cannot read, and the woman he asks to translate it is Hyacinth Bridgerton.
Rating coming soonMaud finds a note in her own handwriting that reads Elizabeth is missing, and she cannot remember writing it. She is becoming forgetful, but she is certain that something has happened to her friend Elizabeth, and she sets out to find out what, while the people around her are not sure she can. Her memory is not helping.
Rating coming soonSebastian Wroth was turned into a vampire against his will centuries ago, and he has been alone with his hatred of what he has become ever since. A woman comes to kill him, and what she does instead saves him, which is not what either of them had planned. Neither of them expected to meet somebody worth keeping.
Rating coming soonThe Jinx Inc. treasure-hunting company has a new job, which is to find the cave pearls that are supposed to exist in the lowest chamber of an ancient cave. Its leader, an ex-Navy SEAL named Caleb Peach, first has to persuade an archaeologist to come along, and she is not easy to pin down. The pearls are not the only thing hidden down there.
Rating coming soonIn the underworld of Melbourne there is a nightclub for every taste, and one of them has become an obsession for Riley Jenson, a rare hybrid of vampire and werewolf who works as a guardian. She is not there for pleasure but for a killer using the club as hunting ground. The club is the only way in.
Rating coming soonThree wives of the immortal Armand Argeneau have died in ways that were neither natural nor timely, and a legend has grown up around him because of it. An enforcer is sent to find out whether he is a lover or a murderer, and she does not intend to be charmed. She does not put much faith in legends.
Rating coming soonNicole Phillips hires a housekeeper and gets a tall, dark and very good looking man named Jake Colson instead. He turns out to be indispensable in the kitchen and everywhere else, and he also turns out not to be mortal, which is a complication neither of them planned on. Nobody in the story is quite what they appear to be.
Rating coming soonBasha Argeneau would rather hide out in southern California than face the family she left behind, and she has been doing it successfully with a travelling carnival. Then an immortal in black arrives with orders to bring her back for questioning, and she has no intention of going. She can hear what he is thinking, and he knows it.
Rating coming soonCarolyn Connor has come to St Lucia to get away from a marriage she has just escaped, and she has made a vow not to think about men while she is there. Then she meets a woman who is famous in her family for arranging matches, and the holiday stops going according to plan.
Rating coming soonDante Notte has been run over by a motorhome, which is not how he expected to meet the woman he is supposed to spend the rest of his life with. He has a punctured lung, broken ribs, a brother to rescue and pursuers to keep away, and she is a stranger who has just become involved.
Rating coming soonA single mother takes her son into a shop called Dixie's Vampire Emporium to let him browse, and finds herself talking to the assistant, a man with a dark-eyed charm and an English accent that makes her heart skip. What she does not know is that he is not entirely a stranger.
Rating coming soonA captain in the Confederate cavalry is in the middle of a battle when the air around him turns to a strange mist, and he finds himself somewhere he does not recognise. A woman dressed in the clothes of a different century takes him prisoner, and neither of them knows how they came to be there.
Rating coming soonMarion Lafournier is a gay Ojibwe man living on a reservation in northern Minnesota, in a town he cannot seem to leave. One night he brings to life a dog from underneath the elementary school playground, and the animal leads him to the grave of a murdered Ojibwe basketball player. The town knows more about the dead boy than it says.
Rating coming soonHaven Ambrose, a nautical archaeologist, comes to Positano to look at the shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast, and she is also privately searching for a trove of gemstones her father saw on his last dive. Then maelstroms and misfortunes begin to trouble the town. The water off that coast has swallowed a great deal, and it is still taking things.
Rating coming soonOn the week of her wedding, a bride is visited by a bird that she recognises as her dead grandmother, and the bird tells her not to get married and to go and find her brother. What follows takes her away from the altar and into a journey that keeps turning strange. The bird stays with her.
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.
