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1,474 public-domain books, summarised. Page 1 of 31.
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
A vengeful captain stalks a legendary leviathan, leading his crew into an abyss where the line between obsession and madness dissolves into the salt spray of the Pacific.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. This story tests that assumption, turning the marriage market into a high-stakes, deeply human comedy of manners.
A Room with a View
E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster
Sunlight and shadow, truth and pretense, collide on a hillside in Italy, forcing a young woman to choose between the life she is expected to lead and the one she actually desires.
The Odyssey: Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original
Homer
A weary hero drifts across the wine-dark sea, his heart set on the hearth he left behind two decades ago, while vultures circle the home he claims as his own.
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare
Two young people from warring families fall in love, only to find that their desperate attempt to defy their inheritance leads to a devastating end.
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A brilliant student convinced of his own superiority crosses a moral threshold into darkness, only to discover that the most agonizing weight of a crime is not the fear of capture, but the erosion of the self.
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Ward Radcliffe
Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns. The secrets of an ancient, crumbling castle await those brave enough to endure the shadows of the past.
Carmen
Prosper Mérimée
A chance encounter in the Spanish wilderness reveals a hidden world where law is a suggestion, passion is a death sentence, and the only path to freedom is to break every chain.
The Secret of Chimneys
Agatha Christie
The secret of a stately home, a lost fortune, and a string of international deceits await a man who only wanted a quiet life.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
A woman’s heart is a labyrinth of quiet endurance and wild expectation, but only those who learn to navigate both will ever find their way home.
The Green Mummy
Fergus Hume
A stolen relic, a brutal strangling, and a village hiding secrets behind its quiet garden walls—the search for an ancient treasure leads to a web of greed that threatens to destroy everyone involved.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
A brilliant mind turns the chaotic friction of human life into a series of solved puzzles, proving that the truth is often hidden in plain sight.
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
Charlotte Brontë
A plain, defiant voice chronicles a life defined by the refusal to be broken. An orphan’s journey through neglect, cold charity, and a haunting love leads to a final, hard-won sanctuary.
A Honeymoon in Space
George Chetwynd Griffith
When a reclusive nobleman kidnaps his own fiancée from the deck of an ocean liner, he launches her into the silent, terrifying, and awe-inspiring reaches of the solar system for a wedding trip that defies human history.
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in Solitude
Austin Bidwell
The allure of easy money is a siren song, but for those who follow it, the destination is often not a life of luxury, but a long, silent corridor behind iron bars.
The Misplaced Battleship
Harry Harrison
The galaxy is vast, but it is not big enough to hide a stolen battleship—or the brilliant, dangerous criminal who manipulated an entire planet into building it for her.
The Blue Castle: a novel
L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery
The courage to break free from a life of quiet desperation can be found in the most unlikely places, even in a small town where everyone knows your business and expects you to stay exactly the same.
My Life
Richard Wagner
A man of singular ambition recounts the turbulent decades of his rise, his exile, and his relentless pursuit of a new form of art, sparing neither himself nor those he loved in the process.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
A restless child follows a rabbit into a hole, tumbling into a world where gravity, logic, and size are merely suggestions. She emerges not in a garden, but in a landscape where the rules of reality are constantly rewritten.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
These works map the entire geography of the human heart, leaving no shadow unexplored and no triumph unexamined. To open these pages is to step into a mirror that reflects the world in its most heightened, devastating, and exuberant forms.
The Monk: A Romance
M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis
The path to hell is paved with public acclaim and the secret, rotting hungers of a heart that believes itself holy. Step into the shadow of a grand cathedral where divine devotion masks a descent into absolute ruin.
The Lady of the Lake
Walter Scott
The mist of the Highlands hides more than just mountains; it conceals a dangerous game of loyalty, where a king in disguise risks everything for the daughter of an outlaw.
Dracula
Bram Stoker
A young solicitor travels to the mountains of Transylvania to finalize a real estate deal, only to find himself trapped in a castle with a host who is not human. What follows is a desperate, global pursuit.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
The world is a precarious fortress, but the most dangerous enemy may be the one who wears your own face. In a landscape of shifting shadows and sudden, jarring revelations, a man finds that the fight against chaos is a mirror reflecting a terrifyingly orderly design.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar
Maurice Leblanc
The transatlantic steamship La Provence is a microcosm of high society, but beneath its polished veneer, a shadow moves. Among the passengers, a master thief hides in plain sight, turning the voyage into his own grand, invisible stage.
The String of Pearls
Thomas Peckett Prest
The barber is sharpening his razor, and you are sitting in his chair, unaware that the floor beneath your feet is designed to tilt—dropping you into a dark, subterranean grave.
Meditations
Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius
The life of an emperor is not a throne of ease, but a post of duty. These private notes reveal a ruler laboring to remain human, rational, and kind while holding the weight of a crumbling world upon his shoulders.
Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
Holman Day
The ocean holds no mercy for the weak, but for a captain with a steady hand and a stubborn heart, it offers a final, desperate chance to reclaim his name.
The Yeoman Adventurer
George W. Gough
A young Staffordshire farmer finds his quiet life upended when he crosses paths with a mysterious woman and her soldier father, plunging him into the dangerous, shifting loyalties of the 1745 Jacobite uprising.
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Great lives are rarely composed of grand, heroic gestures; they are built upon the quiet, persistent choices of ordinary people navigating a web of social expectations and personal failures.
Four Arthurian Romances
Chrétien, de Troyes, active 12th century
A knight is not merely a man of steel and blood; he is a vessel for the paradoxes of desire, duty, and the crushing weight of public reputation.
Thuvia, maid of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The romance of a distant world is never as simple as a sword’s edge, especially when the lines between memory, madness, and reality begin to blur.
Manon Lescaut
abbé Prévost
A young man abandons his prospects, his family, and his moral upbringing for a woman who repeatedly betrays him, only to find that his ruin is the only thing he truly owns.
Eloisa
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Two lovers seek to reconcile the raw, irresistible pull of human nature with the rigid demands of social order and personal virtue.
The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
A man who has mastered the shadows of his own soul discovers that some doors, once opened, can never be closed again.
The King in Yellow
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
The boundary between sanity and madness is a thin, decorative veil, easily torn by the weight of a single, terrible book. To glimpse what lies beneath is to invite a ruin that no power on earth can forestall.
The Home Book of Verse
Burton Egbert Stevenson
The sense of the world is short, long and various the report, to love and be beloved; men and gods have not outlearned it. This collection gathers the echoes of that ancient, unlearned truth, inviting readers to witness the myriad ways the human heart has tried to name its own devotion.
Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor
R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore
The shadows of the Doone valley are long, but the strength of a simple yeoman is longer. In the wild heart of Exmoor, where blood feuds and lawless outlaws rule the crags, a quiet farmer finds his destiny bound to the daughter of his family’s mortal enemy.
The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay
Mary Wollstonecraft
A woman of brilliant mind and fierce heart dismantles her own illusions, documenting the disintegration of a love affair against the backdrop of a revolution that mirrors her personal turbulence.
A farewell to arms
Ernest Hemingway
The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
A man betrayed by those he trusted finds a hidden fortune and transforms himself into an agent of divine justice.
Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Loue in a Dreame
Francesco Colonna
If you have ever wondered what a dream of the Renaissance might look like—not as a historical record, but as a fevered, architectural, and erotic hallucination—you will find it here. This text is a labyrinthine pilgrimage through the subconscious of a man obsessed with the aesthetic perfection of the past.
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
The secret to a life of consequence is not found in grand gestures, but in the meticulous, often humorous, cultivation of one’s own character and community.
The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
A man uncovers a secret so terrifying that it threatens to destroy the lives of everyone he holds dear. Beneath the surface of a gentleman’s life lies a shadow that refuses to stay hidden.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Charles Dickens
A haunting, unfinished symphony of suspicion, where the ancient stones of an English cathedral keep secrets that no living soul dares to name.
The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
How can a woman accustomed to city comforts find a soul-deep belonging in a landscape of limitless, lonely silence? This is the story of a marriage forged not in a parlor, but in the crucible of the wild.
The Confessions of St. Augustine
Augustine, of Hippo, Saint
You were made for something infinite, yet you spend your life chasing shadows. This is the search of a restless heart, tracing the path from a lost youth to a quiet, surrendered peace.
Modern English biography, volume 2 (of 4), I-Q
Frederic Boase
A ledger of lives lived in the shadows of greatness, capturing the meticulous, the eccentric, and the obscure who built the Victorian infrastructure of public life. This volume serves as a silent, encyclopedic monument to the men who defined an era by simply showing up and doing the work.