Gallery to manage categories

So my site publishes articles based on books. We have over 100 titles in our main store, and each title has 5-6 corresponding posts. Since each one of these titles is a category by which the reader can sort, implementing drop downs would get pretty unruly. Does anyone know of a good plugin that can help me display these categories on a page?

I was thinking this could be accomplished gallery style, with each cover photo linking to the category page for that book. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any plugins that would allow me to easily link the book cover. Any thoughts?