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All free summaries — page 345
47,382 public-domain books, summarised. Page 345 of 988.
Dust
E. (Emanuel) Haldeman-Julius
A stark, unyielding study of Midwestern farm life, Dust traces the bleak intersection of human ambition, emotional barrenness, and the unsparing march of time on the Kansas prairie.
Explanatory Notes of a Pack of Cavalier Playing Cards, Temp. Charles II.: Forming a Complete Political Satire of the Commonwealth
Edmund Goldsmid
A forgotten deck of Restoration playing cards becomes a razor-sharp window into the bitter political satire of Interregnum England.
Frida
R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore
A tale of love, betrayal, and tragedy set in 17th-century England.
Henry IV, Makers of History
John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
Relentless religious strife and political intrigue tear through sixteenth-century France, leaving a fractured kingdom in their wake. Amidst this bloody chaos, one charismatic prince navigates war, betrayal, and shifting allegiances to claim a throne.
Hidden Hand
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
When an orphan girl disguises herself as a newsboy in nineteenth-century New York, her bold spirit catches the eye of a fiery Virginian, sweeping her into a wild world of hidden inheritances, blood feuds, and forest bandits.
'Jena' or 'Sedan'?
Franz Adam Beyerlein
German army life near the turn of the twentieth century exposes a deeply fractured peace.
Lachesis Lapponica
Carl von Linné
A journey through the subarctic wilderness reveals a world of extreme environments, specialized survival strategies, and unexamined natural phenomena.
Lectures on Art
Washington Allston
A foundational treatise on aesthetics, painting, and the human soul, exploring how true beauty reflects immutable moral truths rather than fleeting fashions.
Life on the Mississippi, Part 1
Mark Twain
A young dreamer abandons his wild ambitions of exploring the Amazon to pursue the true pinnacle of 19th-century American prestige: mastering the erratic, dangerous Mississippi as a steamboat pilot.
Lost in the Jungle
Paul B. (Paul Belloni) Du Chaillu
An American explorer leads young readers deep into the West African wilderness, braving gorilla attacks, treacherous rivers, and unmapped forests alongside his native guides.
Making His Way
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
A disinherited orphan is forced to make his own living in the city, unaware that a forged will stands between him and his rightful fortune.
Mosby's War Reminiscences
John Singleton Mosby
A sharp, firsthand reckoning with the cavalry skirmishes of Northern Virginia, where surprise, swift saddles, and raw nerve routinely overturned the textbook math of military power.
Mother West Wind's Children
Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess
A small meadow mouse learns that a short tail is a tiny price to pay for a life filled with daily sunshine, good neighbors, and gentle laughter.
Obiter Dicta: Second Series
Augustine Birrell
To read with real pleasure, a book needs no grand ambition beyond bringing light to quiet hours and life back to old favorites.
Old Junk
H. M. (Henry Major) Tomlinson
A quiet observer moves through a world shifting from the peaceful routines of early twentieth-century life to the sudden, horrifying ruin of the First World War.
Poor and Proud
Oliver Optic
A spunky young girl in antebellum Boston builds a small candy business to support her bedridden mother and learn the true meaning of pride.
Rosemary
Josephine Lawrence
When their mother leaves for a distant sanatorium to recover from an illness, three sisters navigate childhood, school, and household squabbles under the care of their older brother, learning that maturity requires balancing self-will with duty.
Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders
T. Eric (Thomas Eric) Peet
Across wind-swept hills, ancient coastal paths, and desert plains, massive stone slabs stand fixed in silence, guarding the forgotten graves and sacred gathering grounds of a unified prehistoric civilization.
Scott Greenwood and Co. Catalogue of Special Technical Works, 1903: For Manufacturers, Students, and Technical Schools, by Expert Writers
Greenwood & Co. Scott
A window into the industrial engine of 1903, this volume presents a comprehensive inventory of practical knowledge designed to equip the modern technician, chemical engineer, and trade student.
Snow-Bound at Eagle's
Bret Harte
A high-altitude snowstorm traps two wanted fugitives inside an isolated Sierran estate with three women who have no idea who their guests really are.
Stories of the Wagner Opera
H. A. (Hélène Adeline) Guerber
A guide to the sweeping grand operas of Richard Wagner, mapped scene by scene to reveal the myths, tragic loves, and heroic quests that define his stage works.
Tarzan and the Ant Men
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Deep in an uncharted African forest lies a world where human scale is turned entirely upside down, and survival depends on navigating miniature empires, monstrous insects, and fierce matriarchies.
That Lass O' Lowrie's: 1877
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Deep in the grim pit-towns of Lancashire, a fierce mine girl shields her heart against abuse and hardship until a quietly determined engineer shows her that a different life is possible.
The Adventures of a Forty-niner: An Historic Description of California, with Events and Ideas of San Francisco and Its People in Those Early Days
Daniel Knower
An easterner set out for the gold fields, only to discover that the real fortune of early California lay in the explosive, unpredictable pulse of San Francisco itself.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 54, April, 1862: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
Across essays, poetry, and war-era drama, this mid-nineteenth-century magazine issue captures an American republic in crisis while debating the enduring laws of literature, nature, and human society.
The Biological Problem of To-day: Preformation Or Epigenesis?: The Basis of a Theory of Organic Development
Oscar Hertwig
An egg cell divides, but whether its unfolding trajectory relies on a rigid internal blueprint or a flexible response to its environment remains one of biology's most provocative questions.
The Carpet from Bagdad
Harold MacGrath
A rare oriental carpet stolen from a palace in Cairo tangles an idealistic American merchant, a sharp-witted young woman, and a charming rogue in a desperate, globe-trotting Arabian desert adventure.
The Eruption of Vesuvius in 1872
Luigi Palmieri
When magma forced its way through the flanks of Mount Vesuvius in April 1872, one man refused to abandon his post at the edge of the crater.
The Fifth Queen: And How She Came to Court
Ford Madox Ford
Arriving from the countryside, a proud young woman enters the treacherous Tudor court to change its history.
The Galaxy, March, 1877: Vol. XXIII, No. 3
Various
A lively slice of Victorian public discourse, this mid-1870s periodical issue pairs sharp political and social commentary with serialized fiction, literary criticism, and scientific oddities.
The Gland Stealers
Bertram Gayton
A ninety-five-year-old millionaire restores his youth through a primate gland transplant, then leads a crowd of elderly men to Africa to harvest wild gorillas for their own operations.
The Imprudence of Prue
Sophie Fisher
An impoverished London beauty marries a condemned highwayman to dump her mountain of debt onto a dead man's grave—only to find the scoundrel escaped the gallows and is very much alive.
The Intrusion of Jimmy
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
When a charming young American millionaire accepts a ridiculous bet to commit a burglary, his ill-advised foray into crime plunges him into a tangled web of stolen jewels, mistaken identities, and unexpected romance.
The King's Mirror
Anthony Hope
A young monarch discovers that wearing a crown means trading every personal desire—for love, friendship, and self-determination—for the cold, exacting duty of the state.
The Lady of the Aroostook
William Dean Howells
A young woman from rural Massachusetts sails for Europe aboard a cargo vessel, unaware that she is the only female passenger among a crew and small circle of men.
The Legacy of Cain
Wilkie Collins
Two girls raised as sisters by a devout minister grow up unaware that one is an adopted orphan, born to a convicted murderess on the eve of her execution.
The Old Bush Songs
Unknown
A coarse, rowdy, and unexpectedly poignant choir of bushmen, convicts, and overlanders sings the true history of frontier Australia into being.
The One-Way Trail: A story of the cattle country
Ridgwell Cullum
A sudden surge of cattle rustling shatters the calm of a Montana ranch town, entangling an honest cowman and a vengeful outcast in a desperate struggle for love, honor, and survival.
The Parts Men Play
Beverley Baxter
A young American intellectual navigates London society during the First World War, torn between his passionate anti-war convictions and his growing love for an aristocratic English family.
The Personal Relation in Industry
Rockefeller, John D., Jr. (John Davison)
Industrial peace cannot be bought through traditional charity; it requires a genuine, structured partnership between capital, management, labor, and the public.
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2
Thomas De Quincey
A brilliant intellect turns its beam on classical antiquity, high literary philosophy, and the frailties of his own circle, extracting subtle truths from historical chaos.
The Sixth Sense: A Novel
Stephen McKenna
High society meets radical politics and uncanny intuition in a pre-war London where a young man’s strange inner vision alters every relationship it touches.
The Soul of John Brown
Stephen Graham
An English traveler journeys on foot through the American South to measure the living legacy of slavery against the promise of freedom.
The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: By One of the Firm
Anthony Trollope
A frantic satire of commercial puffery, this dry Victorian comedy tracks three ill-matched partners as their grand retail scheme collapses under absurd advertising claims and personal infighting.
Through the Postern Gate: A Romance in Seven Days
Florence L. (Florence Louisa) Barclay
A golden summer garden becomes the battlefield for a youthful aviator determined to win the heart of an older woman within seven days.
Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910: The New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad
Bertram Henry Majendie Hewett
Beneath the silt and currents of the Hudson River, engineers and laborers drove two massive iron tubes to connect New Jersey rail lines directly into the heart of Manhattan.
Trevlyn Hold: A Novel
Wood, Henry, Mrs.
In a quiet corner of Victorian England, a dispossessed heir fights for his life while the man who usurped his birthright finds that stolen land brings only fear and phantom shadows.
Turner
W. Cosmo (William Cosmo) Monkhouse
An intensely private prodigy paints his way from a Covent Garden barber's shop to the heights of European art, wrestling silently with his own genius, his critics, and the cold isolation of success.