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 69 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 soonFred Fitch is a credulous man: wherever there is a scam, he finds it or it finds him, from his rooming house to the people collecting in the street outside. He has a standing file with the Bunco Squad. Then a lawyer tells him an uncle he has never heard of has left him three hundred thousand dollars, and with it come a devoted friend of the deceased and a crowd of claimants.
Rating coming soonJohn Flory is a timber merchant in Kyauktada, a district of British Burma in the 1920s, and he is the only European in the place who does not share the prejudices of the club he belongs to. He is also lonely, and the arrival of a young Englishwoman gives him something to hope for in a society with no room for the life he wants.
Rating coming soonOne day the village of Midwich loses consciousness: every person inside a hemisphere two miles across simply drops, and the army cannot get near it. The next day the effect stops, the object photographed on the ground is gone, and the villagers wake with no apparent harm done. Some months later, every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant.
Rating coming soonTony Last is a contented but shallow English country squire with a large house, a wife and a son, and he is fond of the life he has. His illusions are taken from him one at a time, and once they are gone he goes looking for comfort somewhere else: an expedition into the Brazilian jungle, where he ends up trapped in a remote outpost.
Rating coming soonSolar radiation has melted the polar ice caps, temperatures at the equator have become unbearable, and London is now a flooded tropical lagoon. Robert Kerans is a biologist working there, and the novel follows him as he is drawn further into the drowned city and the world that has replaced it, and further away from restoring what was there before.
Rating coming soonSilas Marner is a linen weaver living near the village of Raveloe, and before that he belonged to a small congregation in a town where he was falsely accused of stealing its funds. The lots were drawn against him, the woman he was going to marry married his accuser, and he left. What he does with the rest of his life is what the novel is about.
Rating coming soonCaroline Meeber, known at home as Sister Carrie, is eighteen and unhappy with life in rural Wisconsin, and she takes the train to Chicago to live with her sister and brother-in-law. On the way she meets Charles Drouet, a travelling salesman. She discourages him from calling at her sister's flat, but he is not finished with her, and she is not finished with the city.
Rating coming soonFirdaus is in a prison in Egypt, sentenced to death for killing a man, and she has agreed to tell the story of her life before she is executed. It is the story of what a patriarchal society did with her from childhood onwards, told in her own voice, and the novel came out of the author's research in the prison where she met her.
Rating coming soonWilliam Boot lives in genteel poverty in the country and writes nature notes for a national newspaper, the Daily Beast. When the paper's editors confuse him with a fashionable novelist who is a remote cousin of his, he is sent as a foreign correspondent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on a crisis his proprietor is certain will be a very promising little war.
Rating coming soonThe novel presents itself as a memoir, but its narrator is so effusive and so fond of digressions that he begins with his own conception and does not get as far as describing his birth until the third volume. He is trying to explain four accidents in his early life that he believes have doomed him to unhappiness, and he keeps wandering away from the subject.
Rating coming soonDarrell Rivers is going back to Malory Towers for her third year, but her best friend Sally Hope is in quarantine with mumps and will be late. On the way the girls collect a new pupil, Zerelda Brass, an American who has been staying with her grandmother and who at fifteen looks several years older with her make-up and extravagant hair. The other girls are shocked by her.
Rating coming soonWhen Golden Walter's wife betrays him for another man, he leaves home on a trading voyage rather than stay for the feud that would follow with her family. Word reaches him on the way that her clan has killed his father. He has a vision of three figures, a stately Lady, her Maid and a Dwarf in a yellow hood, and then a storm drives his ship to an unknown country.
Rating coming soonMarnus Erasmus is eleven years old, and he lives in Cape Town in the early 1970s with his family: his father, who is an Army general, his mother and his younger sister. He narrates what he sees of the Afrikaner world around him, and the book gradually shows the reader a good deal more of it than the boy himself understands. It was first published in Afrikaans.
Rating coming soonThis is Henry Miller's own account of his years in New York, of the people he worked alongside, of the family he lived with and of the marriage that eventually took him to Paris. It is written as autobiography rather than as fiction, and it stands as a kind of prequel to Tropic of Cancer even though it appeared afterwards. It was banned in the United States for years.
Rating coming soonTom Crick is fifty-two years old and has taught history for some thirty years at a school in Greenwich, London. His wife has been arrested for taking a baby, the publicity reflects badly on the school, and he is told that he now has to retire. He uses his last lessons to tell his students a story instead of teaching the syllabus.
Rating coming soonThe Dog Woman is a giant living in seventeenth-century London, wrapped in a skirt large enough to serve a ship as a sail and strong enough to throw an elephant. With her is Jordan, the boy she has raised, and together the two of them travel: across the seas after bananas and pineapples, and across time, past references to Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. Their journey is a search for the self.
Rating coming soonIt is 1767, and Malachi McAsh is a young coal miner in Scotland who believes there has to be more to life than working down the pit. Under the system known as the Payment of Arles he is bound to the mine for the rest of his life, so he runs away to London to look for work and a new life there. What he finds instead is a political education.
Rating coming soonGeorge is fifty-eight, an Englishman who teaches at a university in Los Angeles, and he is still grieving the recent death of his long-term partner, Jim. The novel follows a single day of his life in Southern California in 1962, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, through the ordinary encounters that fill it and colour how he feels about being alive at all.
Rating coming soonCandy is a supermodel, Tammy a television producer, Sabrina a lawyer and Annie an artist, and they are four sisters living very separate lives until their mother is killed in a car accident and Annie loses her sight. All four leave what they were doing to look after one another and their father, and they move into a brownstone together to rebuild.
Rating coming soonAt dawn on Easter morning in 1343 a band of French raiders comes by boat to ambush the English coastal village of Hookton, and the only survivor is a young man called Thomas. He vows to avenge the killing of his neighbours and to recover the holy treasure that the raiders stole out of the village church, and to do any of that he first has to find a way to get himself to France.
Rating coming soonIn the autumn of 1881 a divorce affidavit arrives at Sally Lockhart's house, and it says that a commission agent named Arthur Parrish is her husband and the father of her daughter, Harriet. Sally has never been married. The affidavit also says that Harriet's father wants custody of the child, and Sally's lawyer has no sympathy at all to offer a woman with no power of her own.
Rating coming soonTriss has not been well since she was rescued from the Grimmer, a pond near her family's holiday cottage, and her memory of what happened there is hazy. Her dolls keep coming alive, she is endlessly hungry and wants to eat her belongings as well as her food, she finds dead leaves in her hair, and her tears come out as spiderweb. Her sister Pen hates her.
Rating coming soonThis novel chronicles the life of Richard III of England, beginning in 1459 with him as a young boy and ending in 1485 with his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It is set against the Wars of the Roses, and it argues for a Richard very different from the one tradition has handed down.
Rating coming soonRandall is an orphan, the son of a Breton soldier and a Saxon mother, and he works as a dog-boy at Arundel Castle. A knight called Sir Everard d'Aguillon takes him home, and he is brought up alongside Sir Everard's grandson, Bevis. The novel follows the two of them as they grow up in England thirty to forty years after the Norman conquest.
Rating coming soonHenry VIII was a charismatic and extravagant king obsessed with his own power and with getting a male heir, and the six women he married were bound for divorce, beheading or death. This novel tells the story of his court and of each of those queens in turn, from Katharine of Aragon to Kateryn Parr, with Henry's own account among them.
Rating coming soonMark Studdock has just been made a senior fellow in sociology at Bracton College, in the University of Edgestow, where the fellows are arguing about the sale of a piece of college land to a scientific body called the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments. The land is an ancient wood believed to be the resting place of Merlin, the sale is controversial, and the Institute already employs some of the college's own faculty. Mark's wife Jane has been having a nightmare about a severed head, and the book follows the two of them into what the Institute is really for.
Rating coming soonAtalantia au Grimmus, the dictator of the Society Remnant, has destroyed the Solar Republic's fleet in orbit and is besieging its Free Legions on Mercury. Three weeks after departing from Venus, Darrow of Lykos arrives on Mercury with his team to break the siege, and Atalantia agrees to an alliance with the Rim on the condition that two of its people take part in her attack on the planet.
Rating coming soonIt is 3172, and most human beings belong to one of two factions: the Earth-based Draco and the Pleiades Federation. Starship travel depends on Illyrion, a rare and valuable power source. The most important family in the Pleiades is the Von Rays, and the most important family in Draco is the Reds, who own the company that makes the interstellar drives. Lorq Von Ray means to fly his ship through a nova to get hold of it.
Rating coming soonA statue of a two-legged alien, recovered on Iapetus, one of the moons of Saturn, settled the long question of whether human beings were alone, and faster-than-light ships went on to find enormous Monuments circling other stars. The people who built them were never seen. Priscilla Hutchins, a starship pilot, and the scientists she flies for are still trying to explain the Monuments, where their makers put them and what they were for.
Rating coming soonIn July 1845 Henry David Thoreau built a small cabin beside Walden Pond, on land near Concord, Massachusetts that belonged to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and lived there for two years, two months and two days. Walden is his account of that stay, written up from the journals he kept while he was there, and it mixes close observation of the pond and the woods with an argument about how little a person needs.
Rating coming soonKissing the Witch is a collection of thirteen interconnected stories by the Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue. Each one retells a well-known European fairy tale, and several of them look at the familiar material through feminist and queer eyes. The stories are linked like a chain, with the narrator of one becoming the listener of the next, and none of the characters is ever given a name.
Rating coming soonMedieval England is usually remembered as a place of knights on horseback rescuing fainting damsels, of merciless kings and of peasants mired in superstition and ignorance. Terry Jones and Alan Ereira set out to show a livelier and more inventive country, and to explain where some of the best known ideas about the Middle Ages came from, from witch burning to the flat earth.
Rating coming soonBeowulf is an Old English heroic poem of just over three thousand alliterative lines, preserved in a single manuscript copied somewhere between the tenth and the eleventh centuries. Its hero, a Geat, sails to Denmark to help King Hrothgar, whose great hall has been terrorised for twelve years by a monster called Grendel. Seamus Heaney's verse translation was published in 2000.
Rating coming soonJhumpa Lahiri's first book, published in 1999, holds nine short stories about Indians and Indian Americans who live between the country their families came from and the country they now call home. The first of them follows a married couple whose house has gone quiet, and the collection took the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000.
Rating coming soonJohn Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, subtitled A Savannah Story, was published in 1994. The book follows the shooting of a young man at the home of the antiques dealer Jim Williams, the trials that came afterwards, and the wide cast of Savannah characters who surrounded both men.
Rating coming soonThe script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was written by Jack Thorne from a story he developed with J. K. Rowling and John Tiffany, and it was published as a book in 2016. It is set nineteen years after the last of the novels and follows Albus Severus Potter, Harry's second son, as he arrives at Hogwarts and struggles with the weight of the name he was born with.
Rating coming soonCyrano de Bergerac is a verse drama in five acts by the French writer Edmond Rostand, first staged in 1897 and brought out as a book a year later. It takes a seventeenth-century nobleman famous for his bold adventures and his enormous nose and turns him into a poet in love with the beautiful Roxane, who does not know it, and who is drawn instead to a handsome young guardsman.
Rating coming soonIan Fleming's For Your Eyes Only, published in 1960, is a book of five short stories and the eighth to feature the British Secret Service agent James Bond. It was a change of approach, because until then Fleming had written Bond at full novel length, and three of the stories began as ideas for a television series that was never made.
Rating coming soonThe Quiet American is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1955 and set in Vietnam in the last years of French colonial rule. Its narrator is Thomas Fowler, a British journalist, and its story turns on his young Vietnamese lover Phuong and on Alden Pyle, an earnest young American whose certainty about how the country should be remade draws all three of them in.
Rating coming soonDiana Wynne Jones's House of Many Ways, published in 2008, belongs to the same invented world as her earlier book Howl's Moving Castle. Charmain Baker, who was raised to be respectable and has never had to do a day's housework, is asked to look after the home of her great-uncle William, who is the Royal Wizard of Norland. The house does not behave like a house at all: its one front door opens onto other rooms, other countries and other times.
Rating coming soonLetters on Demonology and Witchcraft, published in 1830, was the work of Sir Walter Scott, who had been collecting folklore and stories of the supernatural since childhood. It is built out of ten letters that Scott addressed to J. G. Lockhart, who had married his daughter, and it works through what people had believed about demons, witches, ghosts and second sight from biblical times down to Scott's own day.
Rating coming soonPoirot's Early Cases gathers short detective stories by Agatha Christie that follow Hercule Poirot through the years before he was known beyond the cases he was working on. The stories had all appeared in magazines between 1923 and 1935, and the collection itself was first published in Britain in September 1974, with an American edition following later the same year under a slightly different title.
Rating coming soonThe French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel by John Fowles, published in 1969 and set in Victorian England. Charles Smithson, a gentleman with a taste for natural history, is drawn to Sarah Woodruff, a former governess whose reputation has been ruined and whom the town has nicknamed the French Lieutenant's Woman, and the book tells their story while keeping one eye on the Victorian novels it imitates.
Rating coming soonNine years after the Discovery One mission failed at Jupiter, a joint Soviet and American crew goes back to salvage the abandoned ship, to examine the monolith that Dave Bowman found, and to work out what became of Bowman himself. 2010: Odyssey Two is Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, published in 1982.
Rating coming soonUsually translated as the Hammer of Witches, the Malleus Maleficarum is the most famous of the many treatises written against witchcraft. The German clergyman Heinrich Kramer wrote it, the first printing appeared at Speyer in 1486, and it set out to prove that sorcery was heresy, to explain how witches might be found and convicted, and to tell the courts what should be done with them.
Rating coming soonVirginia Woolf published A Room of One's Own in 1929, and in it she asks what a woman needs in order to write fiction. The essay grew out of two lectures she gave at women's colleges in Cambridge in October 1928, and it is remembered above all for the answer that its title carries.
Rating coming soonTuf Voyaging is a science fiction book by George R. R. Martin, published in hardcover in 1986, and it is a fix-up of stories that had appeared separately over the decade before. Its central figure is Haviland Tuf, a solitary space trader who comes into possession of an ancient seedship with vast powers of ecological engineering and then travels from world to world offering to solve their problems.
Rating coming soonOscar Wilde put out a small book of stories for children in May 1888 under the title The Happy Prince and Other Tales. The best known of the five is the title story, in which a swallow who has been left behind by his flock meets the statue of a prince who never knew sorrow during his lifetime and who now looks down on a town full of suffering people.
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.
