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 72 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.
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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 soonCards on the Table is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, published in Britain in November 1936 and in the United States the following year. Four detectives and four suspects play bridge with a host who is then found murdered, and the solution depends on what the behaviour of the players reveals about them.
Rating coming soonBig Cherry Holler is a novel by Adriana Trigiani, published in 2001, and it continues the story begun in Big Stone Gap. Eight years into her marriage, Ave Maria Mulligan finds her life at a crossroads, and the town she lives in has no shortage of advice to offer her about it.
Rating coming soonThe Last Continent is the twenty-second of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, published in 1998. It sends Rincewind to the lost continent of XXXX, a place that resembles Australia in every way Pratchett could think of, and it has fun with the paradoxes of time travel along the way; the wizards of Unseen University spend much of the book trying to work out where he has gone.
Rating coming soonThe Ionian Mission is the eighth of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, first published in 1981. It begins with a marriage and a spell of blockade duty off Toulon, and it ends with the two of them sent to the Greek islands to look for a new ally among the pashas.
Rating coming soonDavid Mitchell's second novel, number9dream, was published in 2001. It is set in Japan and narrated in the first person by a nineteen-year-old called Eiji Miyake, who has come to Tokyo to find the father he has never met, and it alternates between what happens to him and what he imagines happening.
Rating coming soonLord Edgware Dies is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in September 1933 and in the United States later the same year as Thirteen at Dinner. Hercule Poirot, Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp are all in it, and it turns on a request for help that comes a day too late.
Rating coming soonA Time of Changes is a science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg, published in 1971 and the winner of the Nebula Award for that year. It takes place in a culture where the first person singular is an obscenity, and it is told as the autobiography of a man who breaks that rule and leads a revolution against it.
Rating coming soonRoughing It is Mark Twain's account of his years in the American West, published in 1872. It covers the overland journey from Missouri to Nevada, an unsuccessful attempt at prospecting, and the newspaper work in Virginia City and San Francisco that turned him into a national figure, and it is one of the books that made his name as a humorist.
Rating coming soonBlood of the Fold is the third book of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, published in 1996. It takes up the story where Stone of Tears left it, with Richard Rahl deciding that the only way to stop the advance of the Imperial Order is to take power into his own hands.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Gold is the second of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels to be published, though ninth in the series' internal order, and it is set in August 1810. Sharpe is sent behind enemy lines after a hoard of Spanish gold, and the story ends with the destruction of the fortress at Almeida. It belongs to the early part of the series, when its hero is still proving himself to the people above him.
Rating coming soonBlankets is an autobiographical graphic novel by Craig Thompson, published in 2003 by Top Shelf Productions. It tells the story of his childhood in an Evangelical Christian family, his first love and his early adult life, and it runs to some six hundred pages of black-and-white drawing. It is one of the books that established the graphic novel as a form for adult autobiography.
Rating coming soonMurder in Mesopotamia is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in July 1936 and in the United States later the same year. It sets Hercule Poirot down among the archaeologists at an excavation in Iraq, a world Christie knew at first hand. Much of it is told by a nurse hired to look after the archaeologist's wife, which gives the reader an outsider's view of the whole expedition.
Rating coming soonBecause of Miss Bridgerton is a Regency romance by Julia Quinn, published in 2016 and the first of her books about the Rokesby family. Billie Bridgerton is expected to marry one of the neighbouring brothers, and the one she cannot abide is the one she ends up thrown together with. The series takes place a generation before the Bridgerton novels.
Rating coming soonSarek is a Star Trek novel by A. C. Crispin, published in 1994 and set shortly after the events of the film Star Trek VI. The Vulcan ambassador Sarek finds evidence of a plot against the Federation and has to work out who is behind it while grieving for his human wife, and the book is as much about that loss as about the conspiracy.
Rating coming soonTrek of the Mountain Man is a western by William W. Johnstone, published in 2002. A bounty hunter who still believes there is money in an old warrant takes the wrong person when he cannot find Smoke Jensen, and Jensen goes up into the Rocky Mountains after him. Most of the book is the pursuit itself, across country that both the hunter and the hunted know.
Rating coming soonMany Moons is a picture book by James Thurber, published in 1943 with illustrations by Louis Slobodkin, and it won the Caldecott Medal the following year. A young princess is ill and can only be cured by being given the moon, and the court has to work out how to get her one. The king's experts all explain that the thing is impossible; the person who solves it asks her the right question instead.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Trafalgar is the fourth of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, published in 2000, and the first of them to take its hero into the wars against Napoleon. Sharpe is on his way home from India as a passenger, and the voyage takes him to the fleet that fought at Trafalgar. He is aboard as a traveller with no business in the fighting at all, which is part of the joke.
Rating coming soonCandide is a satire by Voltaire, first published in 1759, and one of the most widely read works of the French Enlightenment. It follows a young man who has been taught that this is the best of all possible worlds and who then has every reason to doubt it.
Rating coming soonDumb Witness is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in July 1937 and in the United States later that year under the title Poirot Loses a Client. It features Hercule Poirot and is narrated by his friend Captain Hastings, and it is the last of the books in which Hastings appears until the final Poirot novel.
Rating coming soonTitan is a science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter, published in 1997 and shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award the following year. It describes a crewed mission to Titan, the moon of Saturn, whose thick atmosphere and chemistry have led some people to think it may hold the building blocks of life.
Rating coming soonThe Maid's Version is a novel by Daniel Woodrell, published in 2013. It is set in a small town in Missouri, and it turns on an explosion at a dance hall in 1929 that killed forty-two people, on the question of who was responsible, and on what one woman's pursuit of an answer cost her and the people around her.
Rating coming soonKender, Gully Dwarves and Gnomes is an anthology of fantasy stories published by TSR in 1987, the second of the three Dragonlance Tales books. All ten of the stories are set in the world of Krynn, and together they range across races and places that the novels of the period never got round to, with a cast that changes from story to story.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Rifles is the sixth of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels in the series' internal order, though the ninth to be published, and it came out in 1988. It follows Sharpe and his riflemen through the French invasion of Galicia in January 1809, during the retreat to Corunna, and it is the book in which he first meets the soldier who becomes his closest companion.
Rating coming soonI, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, published in 1986 and winner of that year's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme. It takes the historical figure of the West Indian slave accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, and gives her the life the records never bothered to hold.
Rating coming soonThe Power is a science fiction novel by the British writer Naomi Alderman, published in 2016 and winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017. Its premise is that women develop the ability to release electrical jolts from their hands, which turns them into the dominant sex. The book is framed as a history written thousands of years after the events it describes.
Rating coming soonPeril at End House is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, published in the United States in February 1932 and in Britain the following month. It is the sixth novel to feature Hercule Poirot, and it begins with him on holiday in Cornwall, being told by a young woman that somebody is trying to kill her.
Rating coming soonIn the Ocean of Night is a science fiction novel by Gregory Benford, published in 1977 as the first book of his Galactic Center sequence. It was put together from novellas and novelettes he had published between 1973 and 1977, and it was nominated for the Nebula Award for best novel and for the Locus Award the following year.
Rating coming soonThe SAS Survival Handbook is a guide to surviving in difficult circumstances by John Wiseman, published in 1986 and based on the training of the Special Air Service. It covers everything from accidents and escape procedures to living off the land in polar, tropical and desert climates, and it is illustrated throughout.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Fury is the eleventh of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, published in 2006 and set in 1811 during Wellington's campaign in the Iberian peninsula. It places Sharpe in the middle of the politics as well as the fighting, with Cadiz the last Spanish city still holding out. Sharpe is caught between the French in front of him and the politics of his own side behind him.
Rating coming soonAmerican Gothic is an anthology edited by Charles L. Crow, published in 1999, which gathers Gothic writing from nineteenth-century America. It sets stories, novellas and poems by a wide range of authors into conversation with one another, and it takes the fears of that society as its subject, along with the arguments that those fears provoked among the writers who lived through them.
Rating coming soonThe Vast Fields of Ordinary is a young adult novel by Nick Burd, published in 2009 and his first book. It follows a closeted suburban teenager through the summer after he leaves high school, along with his openly lesbian new best friend and the two boys he is drawn to, and it was among the books that widened what the form could carry.
Rating coming soonOne, Two, Buckle My Shoe is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in November 1940 and in the United States in February 1941 under the title The Patriotic Murders. Poirot investigates the death of his own dentist, and it is the last of the novels to feature Chief Inspector Japp.
Rating coming soonFive students at the University of Toronto are singled out of a lecture by a visiting professor and offered a journey to another world. Their host is Loren Silvercloak, a mage from Fionavar who has come to this world for five guests to mark the fiftieth year of a High King's reign. Four of them reach the kingdom of Brennin; a fifth breaks free during the crossing and arrives somewhere nobody planned. Fionavar, they learn, is the first of all worlds, where the old stories are still being played out, and each of the five turns out to have a part in what is coming.
Rating coming soonBartimaeus is a mid-ranking djinn with a long memory and no patience left for magicians, and in this prequel to the Bartimaeus trilogy he is serving in King Solomon's Jerusalem, where a magic ring commands spirits a great deal more powerful than he is. His master there is a cruel magician with a grudge, and the assignment is the Temple Mount. Into the same city comes Asmira, captain of the guard of the Queen of Sheba, sent to kill the king. Her mission and the djinn's servitude are on a collision course.
Rating coming soonPeter Grant, London's resident police wizard, is pulled into a case that begins with a dead teenager in a luxury flat and stops being ordinary almost immediately. The girl was the daughter of Lady Tyburn, a river goddess who has never had much time for Peter and now wants a favour from him, and the pathologist finds magic in the death as well as drugs. As Peter and Sahra Guleed work their way through the very rich, traces keep surfacing of a manuscript that has been missing since the eighteenth century.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden, Chicago's professional wizard, takes on two problems at once in the fifth Dresden Files novel. A priest asks him to recover the Shroud of Turin, stolen and on its way to a private sale, and a noble of the Red Court vampires challenges him to a duel that would settle a war by single combat. Neither job stays separate for long, and the people who took the Shroud turn out to belong to an older and considerably worse kind of trouble.
Rating coming soonJack Morgan is fourteen, recently orphaned and wanted over a robbery he had nothing to do with, so he is hiding in the starship his uncle left him when another vessel crashes nearby. The only survivor is Draycos, a warrior of a dragon-like species who cannot stay alive for long without a living host to ride on. Draycos needs a body and a pilot, Jack needs someone who can clear his name, and the arrangement they make is meant to be temporary.
Rating coming soonEric Thursley is thirteen, a would-be demonologist, and certain that his three wishes deserve a proper demon. What his summoning produces is Rincewind, the least competent wizard on the Discworld, at that moment stranded in the Dungeon Dimensions and entirely unable to grant anything at all. Since the spells that bind demons work on him regardless, Rincewind has to make the wishes happen, which is how a boy, a wizard, a parrot and a very large walking luggage end up touring the Disc.
Rating coming soonFassin Taak is a Slow Seer, one of a dynasty of researchers who spend their working lives among the Dwellers, the ancient species that occupies the galaxy's gas giants. Seers slow their own metabolisms to hold conversations with beings who measure their lives in millions of years. Then his system is cut off, he is drafted into a religious and military order, and he is sent back among the Dwellers to find something he once glimpsed in their archives: a list of coordinates that may lead to their private network of wormholes.
Rating coming soonMiles Vorkosigan has spent years commanding a mercenary fleet for his home world's security service under a rank that exists mostly on paper, and in Memory the medical problem he has been hiding finally catches up with him. The falsified report he files to cover it costs him the career he built. Back on Barrayar, cut off from the only work he was ever good at, he watches his former employer collapse and finds himself the one person able to look into why.
Rating coming soonRoy Malcolm is sixteen and knows the history of aviation better than anyone else on his television quiz show, which is how he wins a prize he insists on taking five hundred miles up. The Inner Station orbits inside the limit that the law of the time treats as Earth, so his trip to it is technically covered, and he spends two weeks living with the apprentices who run the place. Then a secretive ship anchors off the station and the apprentices go looking for a crime.
Rating coming soonFour scientists travel fifteen light years from Earth to study four worlds that might support life, sleeping through the decades between them and waking in bodies their own DNA has been prepared for. Ariadne, the crew's engineer and leader, records their work in a series of letters home. The mission is designed as a gift to the people who sent it, on the understanding that whatever the crew discovers belongs to everybody. What they cannot plan is what is happening on Earth while they sleep.
Rating coming soonA disaster leaves a handful of survivors stranded on an unknown planet with no way home, no useful technical skills between them and very little food. Most of the men in the group decide that their duty is to found a colony, which would make the women in the party responsible for populating it, and one survivor wants no part of a plan she is convinced cannot work. Joanna Russ tells the story through her audio diary as the argument gets worse.
Rating coming soonShannon McFarland is a fashion model whose life ends the day someone shoots her in the face while she is driving, and the novel she narrates is scrambled out of order on purpose. Her career, her boyfriend and her best friend are all gone, and she hides what is left of her jaw behind a veil until she meets Brandy Alexander in speech therapy, a woman one operation away from completing her transition. Brandy teaches Shannon how to invent a new life, and the two of them set out to settle accounts.
Rating coming soonIn a small Mississippi town, a nine-year-old boy called Robin Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree on his family's property, and nobody was ever charged. Twelve years later his younger sister Harriet is twelve herself, brilliant and difficult, and the rest of the household has never recovered: her mother spends her days in a chair and her father is long gone. Harriet decides to find out who killed her brother, and recruits her friend Hely and a great deal of nerve.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher steps off a train in a small town in the middle of the wheat fields for one reason: he wants to know why it is called Mother's Rest. Nobody will tell him, and the locals watch him while he asks. Then a woman named Michelle Chang mistakes him for a colleague of hers who has disappeared while working a case she knows almost nothing about, and Reacher decides to stay and help. Curiosity turns into a rare thing in his life, which is a job.
Rating coming soonMurderbot is a security unit that hacked its own governor module years ago and has been quietly doing as it pleases ever since, most of which involves watching soap operas. In the first full-length novel of the series, it is escorting a research expedition when a hostile ship attacks, and Murderbot and one of its humans are taken aboard by force. The transport turns out to be one it has travelled on before, and the artificial intelligence running it has plans.
Rating coming soonProfessor Ravi Mohan Saini is a historian whose childhood friend, an archaeologist who had just deciphered the script on the Indus Valley seals, is found dead, and the police settle on Saini as the murderer. Clearing his name means following his friend's work: four pieces of an ancient seal held by different families, a treasure connected with Krishna, and a killer who believes he is the final avatar of Vishnu and is working through a list of descendants. Saini has to stay ahead of both of 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.
