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All free summaries — page 389
34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 389 of 714.

The Claw
Cynthia Stockley
A young Englishwoman ventures into the rugged, dangerous wilderness of pioneer South Africa, where war, heartbreak, and a fateful romantic triangle test her spirit to its limit.

The conquest of Rome
Matilde Serao
An ambitious provincial deputy arrives in Rome to conquer its political world, only to find himself consumed by the city's seductive inertia and a ruinous, unrequited passion.

The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. 01
Unknown
An extraordinary, unvarnished look at the birth of American foreign policy reveals a fledgling nation fighting for its life not only on the battlefield, but across the mahogany tables of European diplomacy.

The documents in the case
Dorothy L. (Dorothy Leigh) Sayers
A quiet London suburb hides an affair, a delusional houseguest, and a death by poisonous toadstools that looks entirely accidental.

The Follies of a Day
Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
A restless Spanish estate turns into a battleground of wits as a valet outsmarts his master to save his wedding day.

The Free Rangers: A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi
Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander) Altsheler
A young wilderness runner steps into a virgin forest where Kentucky's pioneers face spanish plots and tribal armies along the wide Mississippi.

The German Army in Belgium, the White Book of May 1915
Germany. Auswärtiges Amt
A nation’s wartime self-defense hardens into a dense dossier of sworn affidavits, legalistic countercharges, and desperate justifications.

The Golden Scorpion
Sax Rohmer
A sinister shadow falls across London as brilliant minds die of unknown causes, leaving behind only the broken fragment of a golden scorpion's tail.

The Grey Room
Eden Phillpotts
A grand English manor house conceals an elegant bedroom that leaves its occupants dead by morning with no sign of violence, baffling police, scientists, and clergymen alike until an old Italian nobleman uncovers its centuries-old, lethal origin.

The Historic Thames
Hilaire Belloc
Great rivers shape the destiny of nations, and none more so in Britain than the quiet, tidal waters of the Thames.

The Humour and Pathos of Anglo-Indian Life: Extracts from his brother's note-book, made by Dr. Ticklemore
J. E. Mayer
A sharp-eyed tour of British military and civilian stations in nineteenth-century India, framed through the genial banter and shared yarns of shipboard travelers.

The humour of Italy
Unknown
A vibrant journey through centuries of laughter reveals how Italian satire uses sharp wit, irreverent trickery, and human vulnerability to illuminate society.

The Jenolan Caves: An Excursion in Australian Wonderland
Samuel Cook
Deep beneath the Australian mountains lies a hidden labyrinth of towering stone arches, underground rivers, and dazzling alabaster palaces created over centuries by the quiet work of dripping water.

The Lamp of Fate
Margaret Pedler
A young woman born to an English aristocrat and a French-Russian dancer navigates the heavy expectations of her family, her own meteoric rise as a world-famous artist, and the destructive fallout of her refusal to love.

The Lovels of Arden
M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon
A father's financial ruin forces his daughter into a mercenary marriage with the wealthy buyer of her ancestral home, kindling an agonizing conflict between duty, love, and maternal devotion.

The Maid of Maiden Lane
Amelia E. Barr
A courtship disrupted by secret longings and misunderstandings unfolds against the backdrop of 1790s New York, where post-revolutionary pride and lingering European ties clash.

The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South
Dixon, Thomas, Jr.
A family tears itself apart over a cause built on human bondage, while a nation marches toward the bloody anvil of war.

The Mistakes of Jesus
William Floyd
Questioning traditional authority often demands a calm, rigorous examination of long-held assumptions rather than mere empty skepticism.

The moonshiners at Hoho-hebee Falls: 1895
Charles Egbert Craddock
A runaway mountain boy, a hidden still behind a waterfall, and a hypocritical uncle seeking a free clerk converge in the high Smoky Mountain ridges.

The Most Extraordinary Trial of William Palmer, for the Rugeley Poisonings, which lasted Twelve Days
Anonymous
When a young turf enthusiast dies in agony at a provincial inn, suspicions of foul play immediately point to his closest companion, a debt-ridden country surgeon whose financial salvation depends entirely on the dead man's fortune.

The Motor Boys in Strange Waters
Clarence Young
A trio of teenage chums launch their motorboat into the uncharted, shiftless waterways of the Florida Everglades, where shifting islands, hostile local factions, and unpredictable wild weather threaten to swallow them whole.

The Pioneer Boys of the Missouri
St. George Rathborne
Two teenage cousins ride into the untamed American West to secure a vital land signature before a scheming rival robs their families of their homesteads.

The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales")
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Before a young colonial couple weds, a brilliant European painter captures a terrifying future in their portraits—a dark glimpse of human passion that threatens to fulfill its own dark prophecy.

The Pursuit of the House-Boat: Being Some Further Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades, under the Leadership of Sherlock Holmes, Esq
John Kendrick Bangs
When a band of historical rogues abducts the afterlife's favorite club, the greatest minds of the past must team up with Sherlock Holmes to navigate chaos on the high seas.

The Reclaimers
Margaret Hill McCarter
Jerry Swaim leaves her comfortable Philadelphia home for a windswept Kansas homestead, determined to turn a dusty claim into a thriving estate.

The Rescue
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
In an old-fashioned drawing-room, a fastidious man falls in love with the photograph of a woman taken thirty years before, setting out to find the living original.

The Road to the Open
Arthur Schnitzler
A young Austrian aristocrat moves through late-nineteenth-century Vienna, indulging his musical ambitions and gentle romances while the world around him slowly fractured into personal tragedies and ideological divides.

The Slaves of the Padishah
Mór Jókai
Trapped between the crushing ambition of the Ottoman Empire and the cold expansion of the Habsburgs, a small seventeenth-century principality turns its court, its battlefields, and its prisons into a high-stakes arena of survival.

The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q"
Arthur Quiller-Couch
A classic Latin hymn to love pairs with original verse and dramatic theater to celebrate human devotion against the relentless passage of time.

The Wheel of Life
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
A sensitive woman's ideal of love fractures against the reality of a selfish world, driving her through heartbreak toward an quiet, enduring self-discovery.

The Wild Olive: A Novel
Basil King
A fugitive in the Adirondacks finds shelter in a judge's home, escaping through the courage of a mysterious girl who hides his true identity.

The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X)
Unknown
A vibrant mosaic of early twentieth-century American humor, gathering satirical verse, parlor comedies, tall tales, and political roasts into a single slice of turn-of-the-century popular culture.

Those barren leaves
Aldous Huxley
A grand Italian villa gathers privileged cynics, self-styled romance addicts, and exhausted intellectuals to talk endlessly of art, passion, and meaning, while life quietly slips past them.

When the Holy Ghost is Come
Samuel Logan Brengle
Spirituality is not an abstract theory but an immediate, life-altering reality that demands total surrender and yields absolute inner transformation.

When William Came
Saki
A man returns from a long illness abroad to find his homeland conquered, his society comfortably collaborating, and the burden of resistance left entirely to the young.

Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, Heredity
Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg
Parenting requires moving beyond unguided instincts, replacing rigid discipline with a thoughtful study of childhood psychology and individual development.

Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance
Frances Cavanah
A long-legged boy sits in a frontier cabin, holding a borrowed book close to the hearth fire while the night rain leaks through the log walls.

Adventures of Bindle
Herbert George Jenkins
A cheerful London furniture mover navigates marital squalls, wartime air raids, and tedious religious zealots by turning everyday life into a series of harmless, inventive pranks.

American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History
John Fiske
A self-governing town assembly contains the seed of a global federation. When local liberty pairs with broad representation, human history finds its way out of perpetual warfare.

American Slave Trade
Torrey, Jesse, active 1787-1834
In a nation priding itself on liberty, free citizens are dragged from their beds and bound in chains for southern markets. Jesse Torrey’s early nineteenth-century treatise exposes the domestic slave trade operating in the very shadow of the American Capitol.

Ascanio
Alexandre Dumas
A maestro’s hammer strikes an anvil inside a stolen cardinal’s refectory, where rivalries, royal caprice, and pure passion collide in the shadow of the Renaissance French court.

Atalanta in Calydon
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Bound by ancestral duty and the inescapable wrath of the gods, a royal family fractures as a mother’s devotion turns into a fatal curse.

Birds in London
W. H. (William Henry) Hudson
A natural history of the capital reveals how wild birds adapt to urban sprawl, surviving amid manicured lawns, felling axes, and dense human crowds.

Books Condemned to be Burnt
James Anson Farrer
A history of state-sanctioned fire and official panic, showing how monarchs, prelates, and parliaments tried to silence inconvenient truths by destroying the paper they were printed on.

Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 1
Bonnycastle, Richard Henry, Sir
Unmapped forests, booming frontier towns, and stormy inland seas shape a sweeping nineteenth-century survey of a nascent nation defining itself against both the Canadian wilderness and American ambition.

Captain Macklin: His Memoirs
Richard Harding Davis
A soldier dismissed in disgrace seeks a fresh war to prove his worth, finding that true command requires more than raw ambition.

Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton
Anonymous
Driven by greed, delusion, or sheer nerve, opportunistic pretenders have repeatedly stepped into dead men’s shoes to snatch fortunes, titles, and thrones.

Child Songs of Cheer
Evaleen Stein
Bright observations of nature and gentle childhood play fill a verse collection that celebrates the changing seasons.