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 70 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 soonThe Worst Journey in the World, published in 1922, is Apsley Cherry-Garrard's account of the Antarctic expedition that Robert Falcon Scott led between 1910 and 1913. The title refers not to the march on the South Pole but to a winter journey the author made in July 1911 to collect emperor penguin eggs, and the book is known for its unsparing account of what the expedition cost the men who were on it.
Rating coming soonVerity is a psychological thriller by the American writer Colleen Hoover, self-published in December 2018 and later reissued by Grand Central Publishing after it became a best-seller. Lowen Ashleigh, a writer who is struggling to make a living, is hired to finish a popular series for Verity Crawford, its author, who can no longer write, and the house she goes to stay in holds an unfinished manuscript that changes what the job means.
Rating coming soonAngela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, published in 1979, is a collection whose ten pieces are all built on fairy tales and folk tales, from Bluebeard to Little Red Riding Hood. Carter said that her aim was not to write new versions or adult fairy tales but to draw out what had been latent in the old stories all along.
Rating coming soonRoughing It in the Bush, published in London in 1852, is Susanna Moodie's account of settler life in Canada, where she had emigrated with her family in the 1830s. Written at her editor's suggestion as a guide for British readers who were thinking of making the same move, it mixes memoir with something closer to fiction and is arranged as a series of sketches in chronological order.
Rating coming soonMystery Walk is a horror novel by Robert McCammon, first published in 1983. Its central figure is Billy Creekmore, a boy who can see the dead and help troubled spirits move on, and the book follows him as he learns what his gift is for. Billy grows up in rural Alabama with a mother who shares the gift and a devoutly Christian father who cannot bear it.
Rating coming soonIn Cold Blood is Truman Capote's account of a quadruple murder in Kansas. He read about the deaths of the Clutter family in the farming town of Holcomb before the men responsible had been caught, travelled there to report on the case with his friend Harper Lee, and spent six years turning their interviews and notes into a book.
Rating coming soonGeorgette Heyer's Arabella, a Regency romance from 1949, belongs to the spring of 1817. Its heroine, a country vicar's beautiful daughter, goes up to London for a season in search of a good marriage, and when an accident strands her at the house of a man of enormous fortune, she claims to be an heiress in order to put him in his place.
Rating coming soonThe Golem's Eye, published in 2004, is the middle volume of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. It belongs to an alternate-history London where magic is a commonplace and the people who practise it hold most of the power, and its story turns on a golem and on the magical eye that brings such a creature to life.
Rating coming soonV. S. Naipaul's In a Free State took the Booker Prize for 1971. Three stories sit inside a frame that opens on a ferry to Egypt and closes many years later, and the parts are arranged like movements in a piece of music, each one edging towards the same unstated subject: what freedom costs the people who have it.
Rating coming soonGeorgette Heyer's The Quiet Gentleman, a Regency novel from the beginning of 1951, belongs to the spring of 1816, the year after Waterloo. It tells what happens when the Seventh Earl of St Erth comes home from the wars to claim an inheritance that his stepmother and half-brother, who are living in the house, had hoped never to see him take up.
Rating coming soonCraig Thompson's Habibi, a black-and-white graphic novel of more than six hundred pages, appeared in September 2011. The setting is an invented Islamic country, and the book follows Dodola and Zam, two children who escape slavery together and are then separated, taking on new names and new selves as the years pass before they meet again.
Rating coming soonTerry Brooks closed his Word and Void sequence with Angel Fire East, the third of its three books, in 1999. Its Christmas-season story is set in 2012, a decade on from A Knight of the Word, and the action comes back to Hopewell, Illinois, where Nest Freemark and John Ross are trying to unlock a magic that could change the world they live in.
Rating coming soonSexual Personae is Camille Paglia's long argument about sex and decadence in Western art and literature, which Yale University Press brought out in 1990 after seven New York publishers had turned it down. Her account of Western culture turns on the opposition she draws between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, with Apollo standing for order, culture and reason and Dionysus for chaos, nature and emotion, and she tests that idea against a long line of artists and writers, from the ancient world to Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde.
Rating coming soonAura is a short novel by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, first published in 1962 and translated into English by Lysander Kemp three years later. It is told throughout in the second person, and it is usually read as an example of magic realism. A young historian answers an advertisement for a live-in assistant, takes a job in a dark house in Mexico City, and finds himself caught between the old widow who has hired him and her young niece, in a house where the two of them are not as separate as they first appear.
Rating coming soonThe Songs of Distant Earth is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1986 and built out of a short story he had written nearly thirty years earlier. It is set in the far future, after the Sun has destroyed the Earth, and it follows a ship of sleeping colonists who stop for repairs at a world that was settled seven hundred years before and has long since lost touch with its origins.
Rating coming soonSkeletons on the Zahara is Dean King's account of the loss of an American merchant brig on the coast of North Africa and of what became of the men on board, who were captured by tribesmen and forced into slavery. King builds the story from two journals written by survivors, checking one account against the other, and he travelled the same desert himself to see the ground they crossed nearly two centuries earlier.
Rating coming soonThe Emperor's New Clothes is a literary fairy tale by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. Its emperor cares only for fine clothes, and the tale turns on the way he is exposed in front of his own subjects. It came out in 1837 alongside The Little Mermaid, as the last part of a collection of his tales, and the phrase it gave to the language has been in use ever since.
Rating coming soonThe Great Gatsby was published by Scribner's in April 1925, and it is the book on which F. Scott Fitzgerald's reputation now chiefly rests. Nick Carraway tells the story, it is set on Long Island during the Jazz Age, and its subject is Jay Gatsby, a wealthy man of mysterious origins whose parties are famous and who is fixed on the idea of winning back the woman he lost years before.
Rating coming soonThe Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes gathers the last twelve of the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, which had all run in the Strand Magazine across the years from October 1921 to April 1927. The collection itself was issued in book form in June 1927 in Britain and the United States, in editions that differ over how the title should be punctuated, and it closes the Holmes canon.
Rating coming soonGeorgette Heyer's Venetia is a Regency romance set in England in 1818. Its heroine has grown up in the country at her family's seat in Yorkshire, kept there by a reclusive and over-protective father, with no company but her bookish younger brother, until a rakish neighbour arrives to disturb the quiet. She and Lord Damerel become friends and then something more, and the second half of the book turns on the question of whether a man with his reputation can marry a woman with hers to protect.
Rating coming soonAnd Another Thing... is the sixth Hitchhiker's Guide book and the only one not written by Douglas Adams. Eoin Colfer was asked to write it by Adams's widow, Jane Belson, and it appeared in hardback on 12 October 2009, thirty years to the day after the first book in the series. It begins where Mostly Harmless left off and follows the surviving characters on from there.
Rating coming soonThe Electric State is an illustrated novel by the Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, published in 2018. In Swedish it is called Passagen, and the English edition came from Skybound Books. The story is told in short passages attached to large paintings of landscape, machinery and people travelling through them, and it follows a teenage orphan and a robot as they cross a ruined America looking for the brother she lost.
Rating coming soonTrung Le Nguyen wrote and drew The Magic Fish, his first graphic novel, and Random House Graphic published it in 2020. The book is semi-autobiographical: the family at the centre of it is a Vietnamese family living in the United States, the mother and son in that family read fairy tales together as a way of practising English, and the boy is trying to work out how to tell his parents something about himself.
Rating coming soonJoe Hill's first book was 20th Century Ghosts, a collection of short stories, several of them ghost stories, that began as a limited edition from a small British press and reached the general public two years later. It has taken awards both as a collection and for the individual stories inside it, and in 2021 it was reissued under a new title.
Rating coming soonThomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater describes his own addiction to laudanum and what it did to his life. It appeared anonymously in a magazine in 1821, was the first of his works to make his name, and was published as a book the following year, in a text he revised and reissued much later.
Rating coming soonThe Devil in the White City sets two stories side by side in Chicago at the time of the 1893 world's fair: that of Daniel Burnham, the architect who had to get the fair built, and that of H. H. Holmes, whose crimes have led him to be described as the first American serial killer.
Rating coming soonI Too Had a Love Story is Ravinder Singh's first novel, an autobiographical story about a young engineer in India who looks for a wife through a matrimonial website and falls in love with a woman he has not yet met. It came out in 2008 and stayed on best-seller lists in India for years afterwards.
Rating coming soonMostly Harmless is the fifth Hitchhiker's Guide novel, and the last one Douglas Adams wrote. Its cover called it the fifth book in an increasingly inaccurately named trilogy, and the story it tells follows Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect through another round of mishaps, with the two of them apart for most of the book.
Rating coming soonThe Nigger of the Narcissus is a novella by Joseph Conrad about a voyage from Bombay to London aboard the merchant ship Narcissus, and about a West Indian sailor on board who is dying of tuberculosis. The American edition of 1897 came out under a different title, and the book carries a subtitle describing it as a tale of the forecastle.
Rating coming soonPatricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, published in 1974, took the World Fantasy Award for best novel the following year. It is the story of Sybel, who has lived alone on a mountain with the mythical creatures her father summoned, and of what happens when a child is left in her care and she is made to promise that she will love it.
Rating coming soonEdgar Allan Poe printed The Murders in the Rue Morgue in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It is a short story in which a man in Paris sets out to solve the killing of two women in a house that was locked up, and Poe called it a tale of ratiocination; it is usually named as the first modern detective story.
Rating coming soonI'll Be Gone in the Dark is Michelle McNamara's true crime book about the long investigation of the man she named the Golden State Killer, and about her own years of work on the case. It was published in 2018, two years after her death, and its title comes from a threat spoken to one of his victims.
Rating coming soonSally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You came out in September 2021. It follows Alice Kelleher, a novelist, and her oldest friend Eileen Lydon, an editor, through their work, their friendships and two new relationships, and it is told in alternating chapters and in the emails the two women write to each other.
Rating coming soonThe First Men in the Moon is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells about two Englishmen who travel to the Moon and find an advanced civilisation of insect-like creatures living inside it. It appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic in 1900 and 1901, and came out as a book in 1901.
Rating coming soonThe Climb is Anatoli Boukreev's account of the 1996 disaster on Everest, in which eight climbers died, written with the journalist G. Weston DeWalt. It is also a reply to criticism of Boukreev's own conduct during the climb, and it was published in the same year as Jon Krakauer's account of the same events.
Rating coming soonThe Farthest Shore is the third of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea novels, published in 1972 and awarded the National Book Award for children's books the following year. Something is wrong with the world: magic is failing, songs are being forgotten and people and animals are falling ill, and the Archmage Ged sets out from Roke Island with a young prince to find the cause of it.
Rating coming soonOperation Chaos is a science fantasy novel by Poul Anderson, published in 1971 and made up of stories that had appeared separately before. It belongs to an alternate world in which the existence of God has been proved and magic is a working technology, and it follows a werewolf and a witch who meet during a war and stay together afterwards.
Rating coming soonEl Señor Presidente is a novel by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, first published in Spanish in 1946 after the manuscript had been held up for years by censorship. It is one of the founding works of the dictator novel, and it examines what living under a totalitarian government does to the people who are subject to it.
Rating coming soonEverything I Know About Love is a memoir by the British journalist Dolly Alderton, published in 2018. It follows a young woman through her twenties, from school to shared houses and on through friendships, bad relationships, work and grief, and it mixes straight narrative with other material, among it lists, conversations in text messages and recipes.
Rating coming soonDiamond Dogs, Turquoise Days brings together two science fiction novellas by Alastair Reynolds. Both of them are set in the same universe as his Revelation Space novels, though they stand apart from those books' plots and from one another, and the volume was published by Gollancz in 2003. The first of the pair is a story about a maze, a team and a very old alien structure.
Rating coming soonFreckle Juice is a short chapter book for young children by Judy Blume, illustrated by Sonia O. Lisker and published in 1971. Its hero is a second-grade boy who longs for freckles, and the story turns on what a classmate charges him for a recipe that is supposed to produce them, and on what happens once he drinks it.
Rating coming soonThe Light Fantastic is the second of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, published in 1986. It picks the story up exactly where The Colour of Magic left off, with Rincewind the wizard, Twoflower the tourist and the Luggage falling off the edge of the world, and it turns on a threat to the whole Disc.
Rating coming soonFlight or Fright is an anthology of horror stories about flying that Stephen King and Bev Vincent put together, published in 2018. Every story in it has to do with the fears and disasters of air travel, and the idea for the book came out of a conversation between King and some friends about how much he dislikes flying.
Rating coming soonGene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, published in 2006 with colouring by Lark Pien, tells three stories that look separate until the end of the book. One of them retells the Monkey King from the Chinese classic Journey to the West, and all three are concerned with what it is like to want to be someone else.
Rating coming soonOrson Scott Card's Ender in Exile, published in 2008, is part of the Ender's Game series. It fits into the gap between the first novel of the series and its first sequel, and it expands the last chapter of the earlier book into a volume of its own while drawing on the Shadow Saga as well.
Rating coming soonGwyn Hyman Rubio's first novel takes the form of a grown woman's memories of her childhood in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where she grew up in her grandparents' house and began to be taken over by movements she could not control. It appeared in 1998 and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 2001.
Rating coming soonHomeland is the first book of R. A. Salvatore's Dark Elf trilogy, and the story it tells begins before the better known adventures of its hero. It follows Drizzt Do'Urden from his birth in the underground city of the drow, through an upbringing in a society where kindness is a weakness, and out towards the principles he decides to live by.
Rating coming soonThe Wager is David Grann's account of a British warship lost off Patagonia in the 1740s, and of what the survivors did to stay alive. It is a story of shipwreck, mutiny and survival that ends in a court martial, and it was a best-seller in 2023; the ship had sailed in search of a Spanish treasure galleon, and the men who came home told two irreconcilable stories about what had happened to them.
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.
