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.
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Showing 48 of 3473 books
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Rating coming soonTorrey Peters's Stag Dance, published in 2025, holds three short stories and a short novel. The four pieces have little in common beyond their interest in trans lives, and Peters wrote them in different genres to show how varied that material can be, setting one in an apocalyptic Seattle, one at a boarding school, one at a logging camp and one at a gathering in Las Vegas.
Rating coming soonMargery Allingham's Dancers in Mourning, a crime novel first published in 1937, is the eighth to feature her detective Albert Campion. Campion is asked to find out who is playing practical jokes on a musical-comedy star, and what looks like a nuisance turns into something considerably darker; the book has also been published in America under the title Who Killed Chloe?.
Rating coming soonThe Longest Ride is a novel by Nicholas Sparks, published in 2013, and it tells two love stories that are some distance apart in time. An elderly widower is trapped in a wrecked car, remembering the life he had with his wife, while a college student falls for a cowboy whose work puts him in danger every time he rides.
Rating coming soonRobert A. Heinlein's Red Planet, published in 1949, is about two boys at a boarding school on Mars and the Martian creature one of them keeps as a pet. It is the first of his books to show the wise and ancient Martians that appear in his later work, and it also has a publishing history of its own, because the first edition was altered against his wishes and was later restored.
Rating coming soonThe Dragonbone Chair opens the trilogy that Tad Williams called Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. It takes place in Osten Ard, a land shared by humans and other thinking creatures, and it follows a castle servant called Simon from the last days of a long reign into a country that is coming apart.
Rating coming soonThe Diary of Samuel Pepys is the private journal he kept between 1660 and 1669, first published in the nineteenth century. It records his work at the navy office, his household and his pleasures day by day, it takes in the plague, a war and the Great Fire, and it is among the fullest eyewitness accounts of the English Restoration that survive.
Rating coming soonNorman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, a collection of three pieces, appeared in 1976. Two of them draw on his childhood in Montana, and the best known is a novella about two brothers, the fly fishing their father taught them, and the distance that opens between the brothers as they grow up.
Rating coming soonDeathwatch is a novel by the American writer Robb White, published in 1972 and awarded the Edgar for best juvenile mystery the following year. A wealthy hunter hires a college student as a guide in the Mojave Desert, and after a shooting the two of them become a hunter and a hunted man.
Rating coming soonThe Concubine is the first novel by the Nigerian writer Elechi Amadi, published in 1966 in the Heinemann African Writers Series. It is set in a village in eastern Nigeria that European influence has not yet reached, and it tells of a woman of great beauty whose lovers come to grief.
Rating coming soonWyrms is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, published in 1987. It is the story of a young woman raised in secret among people who mean to use her, it deals with desire, wisdom and will, and it turns on a prophecy that she has no wish to fulfil, and on a world where an entire religion has grown up around a birth that has not yet happened.
Rating coming soonKobane Calling is a comic report by the Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare about a journey he made to the Kurdish region of northern Syria. Parts of it were published in 2015 in the Italian weekly Internazionale, and the book appeared the following year, with an English edition calling itself Greetings from Northern Syria.
Rating coming soonThe Crystal Cave is a fantasy novel by Mary Stewart and the first of five she wrote about King Arthur and his world. It is told by Merlin himself, from his childhood until he is a young man, and it follows him across Wales, Brittany, England and Ireland as he looks for a place to belong.
Rating coming soonBritons is a work of history by Linda Colley about how a British national identity was made in the century after the union of England, Wales and Scotland in 1707. It was published in 1992, and it argues that war and empire did as much as anything else to give the peoples of the British Isles a sense of belonging together.
Rating coming soonEffi Briest, written by Theodor Fontane and published as a book in 1895, is a realist novel of Prussian society, and it is usually discussed together with Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary as one of the great nineteenth-century novels about a marriage that ends badly. Its heroine is seventeen when the story opens, and she is married off to a man more than twenty years older than herself.
Rating coming soonThe Bazaar of Bad Dreams is a collection of short fiction by Stephen King, published in November 2015. It was his sixth collection of short stories, and it brought him awards both for the book as a whole and for one of the individual stories inside it, with a later paperback adding one more.
Rating coming soonSelf-Made Man is Norah Vincent's account of an experiment in which she spent eighteen months living as a man, under the name Ned, and reported on what she found. It was published in 2006, and it is a work of journalism about the parts of life that men and women do not usually see of each other.
Rating coming soonTunnel in the Sky is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein for younger readers, published in 1955. A class of students is dropped on an uninhabited planet for a survival test that is supposed to last a few days, and the test turns into something much longer when nobody comes to collect them.
Rating coming soonInteresting Times is Terry Pratchett's seventeenth Discworld novel, published in 1994 and set in the Aurient, his version of the Orient. The title comes from the saying about living in interesting times, and the story sends Rincewind, the least successful wizard on the Disc, a very long way from home, and into a fight over an empire he has never seen.
Rating coming soonCharley Skedaddle is a children's historical novel by Patricia Beatty, first published in 1987 and based on records from the American Civil War. Its hero is a twelve-year-old New Yorker who runs errands for a street gang, runs away to join the army after his brother is killed, and then keeps running after he shoots a man.
Rating coming soonThe Fall of Gondolin, published in 2018, gathers the several versions J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of one of the central stories of Middle-earth. It is one of the three great tales of the First Age, and it describes the founding of the hidden city, the centuries in which it stood, and the treachery that brought it down.
Rating coming soonElizabeth the Great is a biography of Elizabeth I by Elizabeth Jenkins, published in 1958. It sets out to describe the woman as much as the queen, and it follows her from a childhood in which her position was never safe to a reign that gave its name to an age.
Rating coming soonAgainst Interpretation is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag, published in 1966, and it holds some of her best known pieces, among them Notes on Camp, On Style and the essay that gives the book its name. In that essay she argues that criticism has come to care more about meaning than about the way a work of art actually feels.
Rating coming soonDarker is an erotic romance by E. L. James, published in 2017 as the fifth book in the Fifty Shades series. Where the earlier novels were told by Anastasia Steele, this one retells the second of them from the point of view of Christian Grey, and it begins with him trying to win her back.
Rating coming soonRobert A. Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky, published in 1950, is about a teenage boy whose family emigrates to Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter that is being made fit for farming. A shorter version had appeared in a boys' magazine the same year under the title Satellite Scout, which is how many of its first readers met the story.
Rating coming soonUrsula K. Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea, published in 2001, is a book of stories and short essays that was designed to sit alongside the five Earthsea novels. Several of the pieces revisit the history of that world from the point of view of the women in it, and two of the stories had been published before.
Rating coming soonThe Ghost Map is a work of popular history by Steven Johnson about a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and about the physician whose investigation of it changed how people thought about disease. It also takes in the growth of cities in the nineteenth century and the beginnings of modern epidemiology.
Rating coming soonThe Ringworld Engineers is a science fiction novel by Larry Niven, published in 1979 as the first sequel to Ringworld. Niven had not intended to write a second book about the enormous ring, but readers kept pointing out problems with his engineering, and the novel is partly an answer to them.
Rating coming soonRobert A. Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, published in 1963 after being serialised the year before, takes the form of a diary kept by Podkayne Fries, a fifteen-year-old girl on Mars. She talks her way onto a luxury liner bound for Earth, travelling with her younger brother and their great-uncle, a senator, and the voyage turns out to be more than a holiday.
Rating coming soonCynthia Rylant's When I Was Young in the Mountains, published in 1982 with pictures by Diane Goode, remembers a childhood in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. It was based on the years Rylant herself spent there with her grandparents, and it is told in the voice of a child looking back rather than in the middle of things.
Rating coming soonPtolemy's Gate is the third and last of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus novels, published in 2005. It returns to the alternate London where magicians govern by summoning spirits, and it also goes back through a series of flashbacks to the Egyptian magician Ptolemy and the djinni he called up in 126 BC.
Rating coming soonUnderstanding Comics is a book about comics by the American cartoonist Scott McCloud, published in 1993, and it is itself drawn as a comic. It examines how the medium works, where it came from and what its basic vocabulary is, and it argues for comics as an art form and a way of communicating that is worth taking seriously.
Rating coming soonRobert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, published in 1957 after four issues of Astounding Science Fiction, follows a boy sold at a slave auction on a distant planet. It is about the old beggar who buys him and raises him as a son, and about the question of who the boy really is and where he came from.
Rating coming soonFrances O'Roark Dowell's Dovey Coe, published in 2000, is set in the mountains of North Carolina in the 1920s. It is narrated by a twelve-year-old girl who wants to set the record straight about a death in her family, and it won the Edgar Award in 2001 for the best children's mystery of that year.
Rating coming soonTerry Brooks's Magic Kingdom for Sale - Sold!, published in 1986, opens his Magic Kingdom of Landover series. It begins with a Chicago lawyer who has lost his wife and his unborn child, and who answers an advertisement in a Christmas catalogue offering a whole kingdom of magic in return for a million dollars.
Rating coming soonCathy Day's first book, The Circus in Winter, was published in 2004. It is a group of connected stories about the Great Porter Circus, which spends its winters in the invented town of Lima, Indiana, and they are presented as exhibits in a travelling display, each one introducing another of the people whose lives the circus has shaped.
Rating coming soonFire in the Night is Stephen McGinty's account of the Piper Alpha disaster, published in 2008. The platform stood 110 miles north-east of Aberdeen and was, for a time, the largest single oil producer in the world; on 6 July 1988 it caught fire with 226 men aboard, and sixty-one of them came home.
Rating coming soonThe Magicians' Guild is the first novel of Trudi Canavan's Black Magician series, published in 2001. It follows a girl from the slums of a walled city who turns out to have magic she cannot control, and the guild of magicians who have to find her before her untrained power does serious damage.
Rating coming soonBernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Waterloo appeared in 1990 under the title Waterloo, and it was the eleventh novel in the series. It puts its hero back in uniform for the campaign that ended the Napoleonic Wars, with his old friend Patrick Harper at his side, and it follows the days before the battle in close detail.
Rating coming soonThe Nightmare Reader is an anthology of horror stories edited by Peter Haining, published in 1973. Its stories are arranged in pairs of a kind, each one illustrating a different disturbance of the mind, and it draws on authors from the early nineteenth century to the twentieth for its examples.
Rating coming soonOne Corpse Too Many is a medieval mystery by Ellis Peters, published in 1979 and the second of the Cadfael Chronicles. It takes place during the civil war of King Stephen's reign, when a castle is taken, its defenders are hanged, and a monk of the abbey below finds one body among the dead that does not belong there.
Rating coming soonAgatha Christie's The Clocks came out in Britain in November 1963 and in the United States the following year. It features Hercule Poirot, and it is unusual among the Poirot books in that its detective never leaves his chair to visit a crime scene or question a witness; the puzzle turns on the times shown by a set of clocks found in the room with the body.
Rating coming soonBushcraft 101 is a guide to wilderness skills by the survivalist Dave Canterbury, published in 2014. It is arranged around the five things he calls the Cs of survivability, and it sets out the kit and the techniques he thinks a person needs to travel and camp comfortably in backcountry, for readers who want to spend longer out there rather than specialists.
Rating coming soonGordon R. Dickson's The Dragon and the George, published in 1976, was the first of his Dragon Knight books. Its hero is a medieval historian at an American university who follows his fiancee into another world and finds himself inhabiting the body of a dragon. It is a comic novel, and the joke is that his reading has prepared him for everything about the Middle Ages except the way things actually work there.
Rating coming soonThe Ballad of the White Horse is a long poem by G. K. Chesterton about the wars of Alfred the Great against the Danes, published in 1911. It is written in the form of a traditional ballad, and it tells how Alfred came back from defeat to win at Ethandun, with help, in the poem's account, from the Virgin Mary.
Rating coming soonUnder the Net is a novel by Iris Murdoch, published in 1954 and the first of her books to appear. It is set in London and follows a struggling young writer, Jake Donaghue, through a series of comic mishaps, and its mixture of philosophy with a picaresque plot has kept it among her most popular novels.
Rating coming soonAgatha Christie's Third Girl, first published in November 1966, brings back Hercule Poirot and the novelist Ariadne Oliver. It begins with a young woman who comes to Poirot to ask for help and then runs away because she thinks he is too old to be worth troubling, and it is among the later novels in which the detective works his way towards a crime rather than away from one.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Eagle is a historical novel by Bernard Cornwell, published in 1981, and it was the first of the Richard Sharpe books to appear. It is set in Spain in July 1809, during the campaign that ended at Talavera, and it puts its hero and his riflemen under a commander who has no business leading them.
Rating coming soonSalammbô is a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1862 and set in Carthage in the years around the Mercenary War. Flaubert worked from the ancient sources, above all Polybius, and the book was a great success in France and, in Eleanor Marx's English translation, in Britain and America too.
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.
