The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 259
13,367 public-domain books, summarised. Page 259 of 279.

The Dragon and the Raven
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
The struggle between Alfred the Great and the invading Danes comes to life in this historical narrative. A young Saxon noble, loyal to his king, finds his courage tested across years of brutal, transformative warfare.

The Evolution Theory, Vol. 1 of 2
August Weismann
This rigorous synthesis of biological science serves as a foundational bridge between Darwin’s initial insights and the complex, microscopic reality of heredity. It maps the intricate mechanisms that drive the transformation of life across the ages.

The Gardens of the Sun: A naturalist's journal on the mountains and in the forests and swamps of Borneo and the Sulu Archipelago
F. W. (Frederick William) Burbidge
These accounts of a naturalist exploring the wild, sun-drenched landscapes of Borneo and the Sulu Archipelago offer a window into an era when the world’s most remote corners still held hidden botanical treasures.

The Harmsworth Magazine, Vol. 1, 1898-1899, No. 4
Various
This collection offers a vibrant snapshot of late Victorian curiosity, blending scientific wonder, dramatic fiction, and historical exploration. It captures the restless, expansive spirit of a turn-of-the-century magazine seeking to inform and entertain.

The Heart of the Alleghanies
Wilbur Gleason Zeigler
This account offers an immersive, turn-of-the-century window into the rugged wilderness and storied culture of the North Carolina mountains. It serves as both a travelogue for the adventurous soul and a record of a disappearing frontier.

The Major
Ralph Connor
The sudden, violent intrusion of the Great War into the lives of a close-knit Canadian community tests the moral fiber of a young man and the steadfastness of the woman he loves.

The Mystic Will: A Method of Developing and Strengthening the Faculties of the Mind, through the Awakened Will, by a Simple, Scientific Process Possible to Any Person of Ordinary Intelligence
Charles Godfrey Leland
Master the hidden mechanics of your own mind through a simple, scientific process of self-suggestion. This practical guide reveals how to awaken the will and transform your internal life with surprising ease.

The Quaker Colonies: A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware
Sydney George Fisher
This chronicle traces the settlement and political maturation of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, framing their development as a pivotal experiment in religious liberty and self-governance. It explores how these territories moved from disparate frontier outposts to the bedrock of American constitutional…

The royal baker and pastry cook
Royal Baking Powder Company
An authoritative guide from the turn of the twentieth century, this manual elevates the home kitchen by pairing precise, foundational culinary techniques with the promise of reliable, modern leavening.

The Silent Watchers: England's Navy during the Great War: What It Is, and What We Owe to It
Bennet Copplestone
HOOK This work offers a vivid, contemporary portrait of the Royal Navy during the Great War, exploring the singular spirit of the men who guarded England’s seas.

The Sounds of Spoken English: A Manual of Ear Training for English Students: (4th edition)
Walter Ripman
This manual serves as a rigorous guide to the mechanics of English speech, training readers to observe, analyze, and master the precise physical production of sounds. It functions as both a scientific treatise and a practical drill book for the study of phonetics.

The story of the Iliad
Homer
This foundational legend of the Trojan War captures the brutal intersection of human pride and divine intervention, following the shifting fortunes of heroes and gods during the final days of a ten-year siege.

The Village in the Jungle
Leonard Woolf
A primal, claustrophobic struggle unfolds in a remote village where the surrounding jungle is not merely a setting, but a suffocating, lethal protagonist.

The Wave: An Egyptian Aftermath
Algernon Blackwood
A man haunted since childhood by a vision of a suspended, threatening wave finds his internal life upended when he finally meets the woman who embodies his lifelong, unattainable ideal.

Through the Land of the Serb
M. E. (Mary Edith) Durham
This travelogue captures a world on the threshold of modernity, where ancient tribal loyalties, religious devotion, and the shadow of the Ottoman Empire intersect in the rugged mountains of the Balkans. It offers a rare, immersive glimpse into the lives of people living in the "ever-simmering" borderlands of early…

Trees Every Child Should Know: Easy Tree Studies for All Seasons of the Year
Julia Ellen Rogers
This guide serves as a seasonal companion for observing the natural world, transforming the way one walks through a forest or down a city street by teaching the reader how to see the trees.

Wanderer of the Wasteland
Zane Grey
A man flees into the brutal, empty reaches of the Southwest, carrying the heavy burden of a crime he believes he committed, only to find that the desert demands a total transformation of his soul.

Ward Hill, the Senior
Everett T. (Everett Titsworth) Tomlinson
At the Weston school, a young man’s character is forged in the crucible of academic pressure, athletic rivalry, and the shifting loyalties of adolescence. This is a story of how a boy learns to navigate the weight of his own reputation and the complex demands of friendship.

What to See in England: A Guide to Places of Historic Interest, Natural Beauty or Literary Association
Gordon Home
This practical guide offers a structured, transit-focused map of historic England and Wales, designed to turn aimless wanderings into purposeful journeys. It serves as a time capsule of early 20th-century travel, balancing architectural appreciation with the grit of local legend.

Where Duty Called
George Waldo Browne
An American teenager and his companions find their professional journey in Venezuela derailed by civil war, forcing them to transform from observers into soldiers to survive a landscape defined by shifting loyalties and hidden dangers.

Woman on the American Frontier: A Valuable and Authentic History of the Heroism, Adventures, Privations, Captivities, Trials, and Noble Lives and Deaths of the "Pioneer Mothers of the Republic"
William Worthington Fowler
The history of the American frontier is often written as a masculine saga of statecraft and conquest, but the true foundations of the republic were laid by the hands, hearts, and endurance of its pioneer mothers.

A Girl of To-day
Ellinor Davenport Adams
An earnest young woman discovers that her family’s comfortable life is a brittle illusion, leading her to reconcile with a long-lost brother who works as a blacksmith.

A Half Century Among the Siamese and the Lāo: An Autobiography
Daniel McGilvary
A half-century of cultural immersion reveals the intricate, often arduous journey of establishing a religious presence in the isolated northern principalities of the nineteenth-century Siamese kingdom.

A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827
Augustus Earle
The roving artist’s account of life in 1827 New Zealand offers a rare, unflinching look at a society on the precipice of profound transformation. His keen eye captures both the savage beauty of the landscape and the unsettling volatility of a culture defined by shifting tribal allegiances and the encroaching…

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 396 October 1848
Various
This Victorian compendium captures a world in flux, blending serialized fiction with sharp political commentary and literary critique during the tumultuous revolutionary year of 1848.

Brian Fitz-Count: A Story of Wallingford Castle and Dorchester Abbey
A. D. (Augustine David) Crake
A fierce Norman baron and a mysterious peasant youth navigate the brutal landscape of 12th-century England, where ancient blood feuds and the shifting allegiances of a civil war collide with a father’s long-buried secret.

Buffon's Natural History. Volume 07 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &c
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
HOOK This sweeping survey of the natural world seeks to catalog the varied creatures of the earth, from the indomitable tiger to the industrious elephant.

Business Hints for Men and Women
A. R. (Alfred Rochefort) Calhoun
Practical knowledge of the mechanisms of commerce is the bedrock of individual security, shielding the prudent from preventable loss and ensuring that labor is justly rewarded.

Camp Fires of the Wolf Patrol
Douglas, Alan, Captain
The Hickory Ridge Boy Scouts leave the comforts of home to test their mettle in the wild, trading suburban safety for the unpredictable lessons of the deep woods.

Cobwebs from an Empty Skull
Ambrose Bierce
This collection of sketches and fables delights in subverting expectations, offering a dark, witty, and deeply skeptical tour through the absurdities of life and language.

Culinary Chemistry: The Scientific Principles of Cookery, with Concise Instructions for Preparing Good and Wholesome Pickles, Vinegar, Conserves, Fruit Jellies, Marmalades, and Various Other Alimentary Substances Employed in Domestic Economy, with Observations on the Chemical Constitution and Nutritive Qualities of Different Kinds of Food
Friedrich Christian Accum
This guide blends the rigor of a laboratory manual with the practical wisdom of a nineteenth-century kitchen, transforming the act of cooking from a vague tradition into a precise, scientific inquiry. It serves as a vital bridge between the chemistry of the era and the domestic necessity of preparing wholesome,…

Damaged Goods: The great play "Les avariés" by Brieux, novelized with the approval of the author
Upton Sinclair
A young man’s secret past collides with his pursuit of a respectable marriage, triggering a devastating chain of events. This narrative exposes the lethal consequences of social silence surrounding venereal disease.

Delacroix
Paul G. (Paul George) Konody
A fiery, restless spirit, Eugène Delacroix shattered the cold, rigid constraints of academic classicism to usher in the vibrant, emotional intensity of the Romantic era in French painting.
![Cover of Dialstone Lane [complete]](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/dialstone-lane-complete-w-w-william-wymark-jacobs.webp)
Dialstone Lane [complete]
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
The quiet monotony of a seaside town is shattered when the promise of buried treasure transforms three middle-aged men into adventurers. What follows is a series of schemes, deceptions, and maritime misadventures fueled by restless ambition.

Drawings and Pharmacy in Al-Zahrawi's 10th-Century Surgical Treatise
Sami Khalaf Hamarneh
This study explores the surgical precision and pharmaceutical wisdom of a foundational 10th-century medical text, restoring authentic detail to a legacy often obscured by later translations. Through a scholarly examination of original manuscripts, it highlights the technical brilliance of a physician whose work…

In Midsummer Days, and Other Tales
August Strindberg
These stories capture the fleeting, often bittersweet nature of human existence, finding magic in the mundane and beauty in the inevitable cycles of growth, decay, and loss.

In the Catskills: Selections from the Writings of John Burroughs
John Burroughs
The Catskill Mountains are not merely a backdrop for nature study, but a living, breathing laboratory where the observation of a bird’s nest or the tracking of a fox reveals the essential harmony between humanity and the wild. This collection of essays captures the meditative beauty and rugged vitality of a region…

Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
Charles Johnston
This panoramic history weaves the landscape of Ireland into its ancient myths and records, revealing a country defined by both its enduring stones and its tumultuous spiritual and political heritage.

"It's all real true"
Eglanton Thorne
A fragile, overlooked child navigates the harshness of poverty and her own physical deformity, discovering a sense of belonging in a faith that promises her a love beyond the reach of her difficult circumstances.

Last Enemy
H. Beam Piper
The last enemy is not death, but the human mind, which clings to its own prejudices even when confronted with the startling reality of reincarnation. In this world, the cycle of life is not a mystery, but a political battlefield.

London Films
William Dean Howells
An aging traveler arrives in London, seeking to capture the shifting, atmospheric impressions of a city that feels both intimately familiar and eternally beyond his full comprehension.

Miss Leslie's Complete Cookery: Directions for Cookery, in Its Various Branches
Eliza Leslie
A comprehensive nineteenth-century manual of American domesticity, this work serves as both a culinary guide and a social blueprint, transforming the kitchen into a space of rigorous, rational, and refined labor.

Miss Mackenzie
Anthony Trollope
When a middle-aged woman suddenly inherits a fortune, her quiet life is upended by a swarm of opportunistic suitors and meddling relatives. This is a story of resilience in the face of predatory social expectations.

Old Mexico and her lost provinces
William Henry Bishop
A sweeping survey of North American frontier life, this travelogue captures the fading echoes of old Spanish traditions and the rapid, industrial transformation of the landscape at the close of the nineteenth century.

Passages from the English Notebooks, Volume 2
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A restless observer wanders through the architecture, landscapes, and literary ghosts of mid-19th-century England, mapping his own displacement as both a foreign visitor and a private man.

Rimrock Trail
Dunn, J. Allan, (Joseph Allan)
A resolute cowboy and his two partners race to rescue a young woman from a predatory gambler, proving that loyalty and frontier grit can triumph over greed and corruption.

Secrets of Earth and Sea
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Nature’s complexity unfolds through a lens of curiosity, revealing the deep, interconnected history of life on Earth. These essays bridge the gap between rigorous scientific inquiry and the wonders of the natural world.

Shadows and sunbeams: Being a second series of Fern leaves from Fanny's portfolio
Fanny Fern
This collection of mid-19th-century essays offers a sharp, witty, and deeply empathetic look at the domestic and social tensions of American life. It is a portrait of a society caught between rigid expectations and the persistent, often humorous, reality of human nature.