Book library

Stories for the midnight shelf

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.

RomanceFantasySci-FiHorrorMystery & ThrillerHistorical FictionLiterary FictionAdventureRomantasy tagContemporary Romance tag3473 booksEdited by Baby Bat

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Cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

The shelf

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 9 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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Showing 48 of 3473 books

Rating coming soon

Cujo

Stephen King · 1981

A large Saint Bernard belonging to a family of mechanics is bitten by a bat in a field and contracts rabies, and the novel follows the disease through the dog over the weeks while the people around him get on with their lives. The family at the centre of the book has its own problems: the marriage is in trouble, the wife has been seeing somebody else, and a decision to have the car serviced is made for reasons that have nothing to do with the animal. By the time the dog is dangerous, the only people who do not know it are the ones closest to him.

Modern horrorCreature feature

Rating coming soon

Jaws

Peter Benchley · 1974

A great white shark begins attacking swimmers off a summer resort town on the coast of Long Island, and the town has a problem that has nothing to do with the animal: the season is starting, the businesses depend on it, and closing the beaches would ruin the people who vote for the officials making the decision. The police chief who wants the water closed is overruled, the attacks continue, and the novel's second half leaves the shore behind for a boat and three men who do not like each other. The shark is hunted by a police officer, a scientist and a professional fisherman.

Creature featureModern horror

Rating coming soon

Welcome to Dead House

R. L. Stine · 1992

The Benson family moves from the city to an old house in a town called Dark Falls, which the parents have chosen because the house was cheap and the air is supposed to be healthier. Amanda and her younger brother Josh are the only members of the family who can see that something is wrong with the place, and their parents put the complaints down to the move. The neighbours are friendly in a way that does not quite work, and the children who want to be friends with Amanda and Josh are extremely persistent about it. The town's name turns out to be a clue.

Modern horrorGhost story

Rating coming soon

Night of the Living Dummy

R. L. Stine · 1993

Lindy finds a ventriloquist's dummy in a dumpster behind the family's house and teaches herself to work it, which turns out to be something she is good at. Her twin sister, Kris, is annoyed enough by the attention to want a dummy of her own, and the second one comes with a different personality attached. The pranks between the sisters get worse, and the tricks that cannot be explained get worse than that. The novel is the book that introduced Slappy, and it keeps the possibility open for most of its length that the trouble is one of the girls rather than the wood.

Modern horrorMonster horror

Rating coming soon

Swan Song

Robert R. McCammon · 1987

The United States and the Soviet Union go to war, and within hours the country has been turned into a wasteland under a sky that will not clear. The novel follows a group of survivors across the years after the exchange: a girl with a glass ring and a talent nobody can explain, a professional wrestler who has been travelling the country, and a former soldier who finds that the end of the world has given him permission to be himself. Meanwhile something older than the bombs is moving through the ruins, hunting for the child.

Post-apocalypticModern horror

Rating coming soon

The Tale of the Body Thief

Anne Rice · 1992

Lestat de Lioncourt has been a vampire for two hundred years and has decided that he is bored of it. He is rich, powerful, protected and miserable, and when a man who claims to be able to move a consciousness from one body to another offers him a trade, he takes it. The body he gets is human, mortal and unwell, and the man who took his body has plans of his own that do not involve giving it back. The novel follows Lestat through the consequences of the most careless decision he has made in a long career of them.

Vampire horrorOccult and possession

Rating coming soon

Memnoch the Devil

Anne Rice · 1995

Lestat has been following a mortal woman he cannot explain his interest in, and the Devil has been following Lestat. The novel begins with an offer: the being who calls himself Memnoch wants a companion, and what he proposes is not a bargain over power or money but an argument about the whole arrangement of the world. To make the case he takes Lestat through the history he claims to have been part of. The result is a vampire novel that spends most of its length inside a theological dispute, with heaven, hell and the reader's patience all tested.

Vampire horrorOccult and possession

Rating coming soon

Boneshaker

Cherie Priest · 2009

In an alternate version of the 1860s, Russian prospectors bring in an inventor called Leviticus Blue to build a machine that can mine through the ice of Alaska, and the machine instead tears a path through Seattle, collapses the city's foundations and releases a gas that turns people into the walking dead. Sixteen years later the survivors live behind a wall, and Blue's widow Briar keeps her head down and works in the factory. Her son, who was a baby when the disaster happened, decides to find out what his father was doing, and goes over the wall.

Post-apocalypticScience fantasy

Rating coming soon

Heart-Shaped Box

Joe Hill · 2007

Judas Coyne is a retired heavy metal singer with a ranch, a bad back and a long-running habit of collecting objects associated with death. When his assistant shows him an online auction for a dead man's suit, advertised as haunted, he buys it for a thousand dollars because he cannot resist the gesture. The suit arrives in a heart-shaped box, and so does its owner: an old man who is now living in Jude's house, who has a reason to be there, and who is not going to be bought off, reburied or reasoned with. Jude takes his girlfriend and his dogs and runs.

Modern horrorGhost story

Rating coming soon

Midnight

Dean Koontz · 1989

Moonlight Cove is a small town on the California coast where people have started dying and where the streets are not safe after dark. Four people arrive in the middle of it from different directions: a woman who does not believe that her sister killed herself, a federal agent working undercover, a young girl who has run away from her parents, and a veteran who uses a wheelchair and has reasons of his own for being there. What is happening in Moonlight Cove is not supernatural, and the novel's horror comes from what a group of ordinary citizens agreed to have done to themselves.

Modern horrorBody horror

Rating coming soon

Stuart Little

E. B. White · 1945

Stuart Little is born to a human family in New York City and is a mouse, which nobody in the household treats as a problem requiring explanation. He is small enough to be lost in a hotel bed, to be posted through a mail slot and to sail a toy boat on the pond in Central Park, and he is polite, well dressed and resourceful in the manner of the era's children's fiction. He lives with his parents and his older brother George, and with Snowbell the family cat, who regards him as a snack and is not shy about saying so. The novel ends with him travelling north to look for a friend.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy

Rating coming soon

Psycho

Robert Bloch · 1959

Norman Bates runs a small motel on a back road, and his mother lives with him in the house on the hill behind it. A woman who has taken money from her employer and left town stops for the night, and the motel's register gets its first guest in a long time. What follows is the novel that introduced one of the most recognisable figures in American horror, and it does its work in fewer than two hundred pages, with a plot that turns on what the reader has been told about a family rather than on what they have seen.

Modern horrorPsychological horror

Rating coming soon

Petals on the Wind

V. C. Andrews · 1980

The second Dollanganger novel picks up where Flowers in the Attic leaves off, with the four children out of the attic and on a bus heading south. Cathy narrates what follows: a decade of trying to build ordinary lives while the inheritance, the family that imprisoned them and the brother she loves all remain unresolved. The book runs from their escape in November 1960 to 1975, and it moves through a ballet career, a marriage and a plan for revenge that takes years to carry out.

Southern gothicDomestic horror

Rating coming soon

The Subtle Knife

Philip Pullman · 1997

Lyra Belacqua walks out of her own world and into a city on a coast she does not recognise, following the trail of the thing she has been told is called Dust. There she meets Will Parry, a boy from our own version of Oxford who is looking for his father and who has killed a man on the way out of his house. Between them they find a knife with an edge that cuts openings between worlds, which is the most dangerous object either of them has handled. The trilogy's second volume is where the two stories join.

Young adult fantasyPortal fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

C. S. Lewis · 1952

Lucy and Edmund are staying with their unpleasant cousin Eustace when a painting of a ship comes to life and takes all three of them into the sea off Narnia. The ship is the Dawn Treader, and its captain is Caspian, now king, who is sailing east to find the seven lords his uncle banished and to see what lies at the edge of the world. The voyage visits islands where the water turns things to gold, where dreams come true and where a man keeps a table set for a feast. Eustace is the character who changes most.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Return of the King

J. R. R. Tolkien · 1955

The last volume of The Lord of the Rings begins with the war arriving at Gondor. Sauron's armies march on the city while its own leadership is divided, and the beacons that call Rohan for help are lit in the first chapters. Far away in Mordor, Frodo and Sam are still walking, with the Ring getting heavier and their guide less reliable every day. The book contains the battle at the Black Gate, the destruction of the Ring, the crowning of a king and several endings in succession, which is the structure readers either love or find hard to leave.

Epic fantasyClassic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut · 1963

A writer working on a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped goes looking for the family of one of the scientists who made it, and finds a research laboratory, a Caribbean island and a religion invented by a calypso singer. The island is called San Lorenzo, its people are poor, its ruler is a tyrant, and the scientist's legacy includes a form of ice that freezes at room temperature. The novel is short, made of very short chapters, and it treats the end of the world as an administrative matter.

DystopianClassic science fiction

Rating coming soon

The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster · 1961

Milo is bored by everything and cannot see the point of school, so one afternoon a tollbooth arrives in his room with a map and a set of instructions. He drives through it in his toy car and arrives in the Kingdom of Wisdom, where the cities are called Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and where the two princesses, Rhyme and Reason, have been exiled by their brothers. To restore them, Milo has to travel with a dog that ticks and a large beetle-like insect called the Humbug, collecting words, numbers and arguments along the way.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown · 2003

A curator at the Louvre is found dead inside the museum with his body arranged as a message, and the police call in Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor who works on symbols and who happened to be in Paris for a lecture. He is joined by Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist with the police who recognises the message as being intended for her. The trail runs from the museum into a set of codes left by a painter, and into a dispute between two organisations that have been keeping a secret for centuries. Langdon is wanted for the murder.

Conspiracy thrillerHistorical mystery

Rating coming soon

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie · 1926

Hercule Poirot has retired to the village of King's Abbot and is spending his days growing marrows while the narrator, the local doctor, watches him with amusement. Then a wealthy neighbour is found stabbed in his study, a man who had been about to be married and who had been receiving letters that frightened him. The doctor is drawn into the investigation as both a witness and, for the reader, the person through whom everything is seen. The novel's solution is one of the most discussed in detective fiction.

Golden age mysteryDetective fiction

Rating coming soon

Paper Towns

John Green · 2008

Quentin Jacobsen has lived across the street from Margo Roth Spiegelman for most of his life and has spent most of it watching her from a distance. One night, a month before graduation, she climbs through his window and takes him on a campaign of revenge against the people who have wronged her. The next morning she is gone, and the clues she has left behind are addressed to him. Quentin and his friends spend the rest of the novel working out where she went and what they were supposed to understand from it.

Young adult mysteryAmateur sleuth

Rating coming soon

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892

The first collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories brings together twelve cases, starting with a scandal involving a king and a photograph and running through a red-headed man's strange employment, a bet about a goose, a locked room in an old house, and a case that introduces Irene Adler. Dr Watson narrates all of them and moves into Baker Street in the second story, which sets the arrangement the rest of the series depends on. The collection established the form the detective story would take for the next century.

Classic crimeDetective fiction

Rating coming soon

The Sign of Four

Arthur Conan Doyle · 1890

A young woman asks Sherlock Holmes for help because she has been receiving a pearl every year from an unknown source, and this year the sender has written to say he will visit her. The man who arrives is missing a leg and brings news of a fortune in treasure, a dead man in an empty house and a set of footprints that include a bare foot and a wooden leg. Holmes and Watson investigate the locked room, the Indian servants who are involved and the years-old betrayal that connects all of them.

Classic crimeDetective fiction

Rating coming soon

Roadwork

Stephen King · 1981

Barton George Dawes works at a laundry, lives in a house he bought with his wife and son, and is about to lose all of it to a road extension. The city has decided to run a new highway through the neighbourhood, the compulsory purchase paperwork has been served, and the deadline for moving is fixed. Dawes does not move. He has already lost his son to a brain tumour and his marriage to the aftermath, and the machinery closing in on his house gives him something to fight, which he does with increasing violence.

Psychological thrillerCrime thriller

Rating coming soon

Casino Royale

Ian Fleming · 1953

British agent James Bond is sent to a casino in northern France with one job: to ruin a Soviet paymaster called Le Chiffre at the baccarat table. The man has lost money that belongs to his employers, and the service has decided that taking the rest of it is cheaper than killing him. Bond arrives with a colleague from the CIA and a French contact, plays the game over several nights, and finds that winning makes him a target rather than a winner. The first Bond novel is short, cold and much darker than the films.

EspionageSpy thriller

Rating coming soon

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 2014

Lydia Lee is dead, and the novel's first line says so before anybody else in the family knows. She was the middle child of a Chinese-American family in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, and she was the one her parents had decided would have the life they did not get. Her father teaches at the college because the college would not hire him for anything else. Her mother gave up medical school in a way that everybody has agreed not to discuss. The investigation into what happened to Lydia is also an examination of what the family asked of her.

Domestic suspenseFamily saga

Rating coming soon

The Virgin Suicides

Jeffrey Eugenides · 1993

The Lisbon family lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where the father teaches mathematics at a private school and the mother keeps the house. They have five daughters, the eldest seventeen and the youngest thirteen. Over the course of a year all five die, and the novel is written from the point of view of the boys who grew up across the street, who spend the rest of their adult lives collecting the evidence and trying to work out what was happening inside the house. The neighbourhood watches, and does very little.

Domestic suspensePsychological thriller

Rating coming soon

Red Dragon

Thomas Harris · 1981

Will Graham was an FBI profiler until one of the cases went badly and put him in hospital, and he has been living quietly since. The Bureau asks him to come back for a killer who has murdered two families, and Graham's method is the thing that makes him valuable and also the thing that broke him: he works out where a murderer lives by thinking the way the murderer thinks. To catch this one he needs help from a man he already caught, a psychiatrist and a cannibal who knows exactly what Graham is doing and enjoys it.

Serial killer thrillerCrime thriller

Rating coming soon

Big Little Lies

Liane Moriarty · 2014

Pirriwee Public is a beachside primary school where the parents organise fundraisers and learn each other's business. On the night of the school trivia quiz, somebody dies. The novel is told partly from that night and mostly from the months leading up to it, through the eyes of three mothers: one who has just moved to the area with her son, one who has never quite fitted in, and one whose marriage looks perfect from outside. None of them are telling the whole truth, and the police interviews between chapters make that plain.

Domestic suspenseAustralian crime

Rating coming soon

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle · 1905

Holmes is dead at the start of the collection and back by the end of the first story, and the thirteen cases that follow take him from a reopened tomb to a school, a university, an actress's house and a train. Watson is married and practising medicine, and the cases are fitted around his diary rather than the other way round. The volume includes the investigation of the empty house where Holmes returns and the mystery of a young woman who cannot stop laughing, and it is the collection that re-established the character after the author had killed him off.

Classic crimeDetective fiction

Rating coming soon

Pretty Little Liars

Sara Shepard · 2006

Five girls are close until the summer when their leader, Alison, disappears, and then the group comes apart. Three years later, Spencer, Hanna, Aria and Emily each receive a message signed with Alison's nickname, and each of them is keeping something that the messages refer to. The stranger communicating with them knows about the family secrets, the stolen boyfriends and the night nobody discusses, and will trade silence for obedience. The first book in the series establishes the four girls and the question of who is sending the messages.

Young adult mysteryDomestic suspense

Rating coming soon

The Westing Game

Ellen Raskin · 1978

Sixteen people are summoned to the reading of the will of Samuel W. Westing, a paper manufacturer who has died and left a fortune with strings attached. The heirs are paired off, each pair is given ten thousand dollars and a set of clues that no other pair has, and the first pair to solve the puzzle inherits everything. One of the heirs is also the person responsible for Westing's death, and the will says so. The contestants move into a building where they can watch each other, and the game begins.

Amateur sleuthYoung adult mystery

Rating coming soon

The Boxcar Children

Gertrude Chandler Warner · 1942

Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny are orphans, and they are determined not to be separated. Rather than be sent to a grandfather they have been told is cruel, they run away and make a home in an abandoned railway boxcar in the woods, where the eldest two find work, the youngest two keep the place running and all four learn to live on very little. A doctor in the nearby town notices them, and the question of what to do about the grandfather resolves in a way none of them expected. The first book established a series that ran for generations.

Amateur sleuthYoung adult mystery

Rating coming soon

The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett · 1911

Mary Lennox is a ten-year-old brought up in India by servants and parents who did not want her, and when a cholera outbreak kills everybody in the house she is sent to England to live with an uncle she has never met. Misselthwaite Manor is a large, cold house on the Yorkshire moors, and her uncle is away most of the time. Mary is unpleasant and lonely until she finds a walled garden that has been locked for ten years, and a boy who lives in the house and cannot walk. The garden and the boy are connected.

Classic fantasy

Rating coming soon

Words of Radiance

Brandon Sanderson · 2014

The second Stormlight novel continues the story of a world where storms sweep the continent on a schedule that shapes every building, every crop and every army. Kaladin has become a captain and can draw on the powers of a Radiant, which the people around him do not understand and his enemies are beginning to suspect. Shallan travels to the Shattered Plains to find a scholar and ends up using an ability she has been hiding. Dalinar tries to hold a coalition together while the storms get more dangerous. The book also introduces the Parshendi's own account of what has been happening.

Epic fantasy

Rating coming soon

City of Bones

Cassandra Clare · 2007

Clary Fray is fifteen and has just started seeing things she cannot explain, beginning with a group of teenagers in a club that nobody else notices. Within days her mother has disappeared, her apartment has been wrecked and a stranger with strange markings has saved her life and told her that the world she grew up in is only part of the picture. The people who can see what she sees call themselves Shadowhunters, they hunt the things that come from elsewhere, and they tell Clary that she is one of them.

Urban fantasyYoung adult fantasy

Rating coming soon

Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift · 1726

Lemuel Gulliver is a ship's surgeon who takes to the sea and keeps coming back with accounts of impossible countries. He is shipwrecked among people six inches tall, then left behind in a land of giants, then washed up among philosophers who have solved everything except how to live, and finally abandoned in a country ruled by horses where the human-shaped creatures are the animals. Each voyage is described in the flat, practical language of a travel report, and the four accounts together make up a book that has been read to children and argued about by adults for three centuries.

Classic fantasyPortal fantasy

Rating coming soon

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon · 2007

The novel is set in an alternative present in which a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in 1941 and the State of Israel did not survive its first years. The settlement is about to be dissolved, which means the people living there are waiting to find out where they will be sent. A homicide detective works a murder in a run-down hotel while his own future is being decided by a committee in Washington. The case looks like a small death and turns out to be connected to the community's politics.

Detective fictionNoir

Rating coming soon

One for the Money

Janet Evanovich · 1994

Stephanie Plum has lost her job as a lingerie buyer in Trenton, New Jersey, sold most of her furniture and is two months behind on the rent. Her cousin gives her work as a bail bondsman's file clerk, and the reward for bringing in a fugitive turns out to be the only money she can see. The fugitive is a local cop accused of murder, a man she went to school with and has a history with, and he does not want to be found. Stephanie has no experience, no weapon and no idea what she is doing.

Amateur sleuthCrime thriller

Rating coming soon

A Time to Kill

John Grisham · 1989

A young lawyer in a small southern town takes on a murder case in which his client has already admitted what he did. The defendant is a father who shot the men accused of attacking his daughter, the trial has the whole county watching it, and the defence is not about whether the act happened but about whether the law will accept the reason. The prosecution has the evidence, the local mood is dangerous and the lawyer's own family is not safe. The novel established the courtroom thriller as a genre readers would buy in enormous numbers.

Legal thrillerCrime thriller

Rating coming soon

Bunnicula

Deborah Howe · 1979

The Monroe family brings home a rabbit found in a cinema during a Dracula film, and the household's animals notice two things about him: he has fangs, and vegetables in the kitchen have started turning white and losing their juice. Harold the dog narrates and is prepared to believe the best of everybody. Chester the cat has read too many books and is not prepared to believe anything at all. Together they investigate the newcomer, and the case against him depends on evidence that keeps pointing in two directions at once.

Amateur sleuthYoung adult mystery

Rating coming soon

4:50 from Paddington

Agatha Christie · 1957

A woman travelling home for Christmas looks out of the window as her train draws level with another one on a parallel track, and sees a man strangling a woman in the carriage opposite. By the time the trains separate and she reaches a station, the other train has vanished and nobody believes her. Miss Marple is her friend, and believes her. The investigation has no body, no name and no crime scene, and it has to be found in a countryside where the only evidence is a set of schedules.

Golden age mysteryDetective fiction

Rating coming soon

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen · 1813

Mrs Bennet has five daughters and no son, which in the England of the novel means that the family estate is entailed away from the women and that all five will need to marry well or live on very little. When a wealthy young man rents a house nearby, the neighbourhood's mothers go to work on him. His friend, Mr Darcy, is richer still and worse at being liked. Elizabeth Bennet, the second daughter, is quick, stubborn and prepared to think badly of him, and he is prepared to think badly of everybody.

Historical romanceLiterary historical fiction

Rating coming soon

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck · 1937

George Milton and Lennie Small travel together from ranch to ranch in California during the Great Depression, looking for work and carrying one plan between them. Lennie is very strong and does not understand his own strength, and George has spent years keeping him out of the trouble he keeps finding. They take jobs on a farm where the other workers are paid a dollar a day, and they plan to save enough to buy a smallholding of their own. The dream is the part they keep repeating to each other, and the novel is short enough to read in one sitting.

Literary historical fictionFrontier fiction

Rating coming soon

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · 1884

Huck Finn has been taken in by the Widow Douglas, who is trying to educate him, and his father has come back to claim him and the money Huck found in an earlier adventure. Huck fakes his own death and gets away, and on an island in the Mississippi he meets Jim, a man escaping from slavery who used to work for the family he knows. The two of them build a raft and travel downriver, which means travelling south into the country where Jim's situation gets worse rather than better. The novel is told entirely by Huck, in his own voice, and it is one of the first American novels to work that way.

Literary historical fictionFrontier fiction

Rating coming soon

Catch-22

Joseph Heller · 1961

Yossarian is an American bombardier stationed on a Mediterranean island in the closing months of the Second World War, and he has decided he does not want to fly any more missions. The rule that governs his problem is the one that gives the novel its title: a man who asks to be grounded for insanity is demonstrating that he is sane, because caring about his own survival proves it. His commanding officers keep raising the number of missions that count as a tour of duty. The novel moves backwards and forwards through the squadron's history rather than in order.

War fictionWorld War II fiction

Rating coming soon

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens · 1859

Doctor Manette has been a prisoner in the Bastille for eighteen years when he is released, and by then his wife is dead and his daughter Lucie has been raised in England without knowing he was alive. Father and daughter are reunited in London, where Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his family and moved away, falls in love with Lucie. When Darnay returns to Paris out of duty during the Revolution, he is arrested and put on trial in a city where the courts are run by former servants and the sentences are fixed. The last act of the novel is about what one other man decides to do about it.

Literary historical fictionHistorical adventure

Rating coming soon

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

Agatha Christie · 1962

St Mary Mead has been through a great deal of change, and the newest thing about it is the film star who has bought a local house and invited the village to a garden party for a charity. Miss Marple is old, unwell and dependent on a new housekeeper, and she watches the arrangements with the interest of somebody who has known every family in the parish for sixty years. A guest dies at the party, apparently poisoned, and the question the police cannot answer is who was the intended victim. The title comes from a mirror and a fragment of poetry, and the answer depends on a woman's face.

Golden age mysteryCosy mystery

About the book library

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.

From our books editor

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Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.

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Browse by genre

Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.

Primary genre

Romance

The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.

676 books Primary genre

Fantasy

Epic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.

685 books Primary genre

Sci-Fi

Generation ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.

536 books Primary genre

Horror

Haunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.

381 books Primary genre

Mystery & Thriller

Detectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.

599 books Primary genre

Historical Fiction

Cathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.

580 books Primary genre

Literary Fiction

Novels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.

575 books Primary genre

Adventure

Shipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.

324 books

One 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.

Browse by tag

Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.

Tag

Romantasy

Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.

70 books Tag

Contemporary Romance

Modern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.

155 books

Romantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.