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1,474 public-domain books, summarised. Page 4 of 31.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete
Mark Twain
The world is a grand theater, and you are the star, provided you have the wit to trick your friends into painting your fence and the luck to survive your own imagination.
Paul Clifford
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
A boy is born to infamy and raised by the gutter, yet he dares to dream of a gentleman’s life—until the law, in its cold and calculated cruelty, decides exactly what kind of man he must become.
The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English
Unknown
The shadows of Victorian and Edwardian London stretch far, concealing secrets in hansom cabs, locked pavilions, and the quiet parlors of country estates. Here, the boundary between the rational world of the detective and the unsettling pull of the uncanny is thin, often disappearing entirely.
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
A quiet life of relentless curiosity reveals how one mind reshaped our understanding of the natural world through observation, patience, and doubt.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
A man long mourned as dead emerges from the shadows of an empty house, pulling his friend back into a world where logic must combat the most desperate and cunning of human impulses.
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
The past is never truly buried; it waits in the dust of forgotten archives and the hollows of ancient trees, hungering for the warmth of those who disturb its rest.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Edwin Lefevre
The pursuit of wealth in a volatile market is less about chasing tips than it is about mastering the cold, unyielding arithmetic of human behavior.
The Riddle of the Sands
Erskine Childers
Two men sail a tiny yacht into the treacherous, shifting sands of the German coast, only to discover a terrifying secret that threatens the future of the British Empire.
More Letters of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
To peer into these pages is to witness the slow, meticulous birth of a scientific revolution, told through the intimate correspondence of a man who never expected to be its architect.
The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
Joseph Conrad
In the smog-choked, gas-lit sprawl of Victorian London, a quiet shopkeeper who serves both foreign embassies and anarchist cells learns that his double life is about to collide with a devastating, unintended tragedy.
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
A man finds a corpse in his flat, a secret in a notebook, and a conspiracy that threatens the world—and he has only twenty days to stop it.
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Gaston Leroux
The case of the Yellow Room offers a puzzle so locked, so physically impossible, that it challenges the very nature of reality—until a young reporter decides to solve it.
The call of Cthulhu
H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft
The most merciful thing in the world is the human mind’s inability to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance, and we were never meant to voyage far into the black seas of infinity.
The Red House Mystery
A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne
The mystery lies not in the victim, but in the performance; a house party turns into a stage where one man’s vanity provides the perfect cover for another’s cold-blooded design.
The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe
The narrator—a man named Montresor—harbors a deep, singular obsession: he has endured a "thousand injuries" from his acquaintance, Fortunato, and finally resolves that the time has come for a final, irreversible retribution. He frames his plot with a cold, terrifying precision, ensuring that his vengeance is not…
The Great God Pan
Arthur Machen
A doctor performs a forbidden experiment to reveal the hidden soul of the world, only to unleash an ancient, nameless horror that bleeds into the lives of everyone it touches.
Children of the Whirlwind
Leroy Scott
A life built on deceit and street-level crime is often just a brittle shell, waiting for the right force to crack it open and reveal what lies beneath.
Tales of Terror and Mystery
Arthur Conan Doyle
The sky holds secrets that can swallow a man whole, and the earth hides horrors that have waited centuries for a witness.
The Roll of Honour, Volume 1
Ruvigny et Raineval, Melville Henry Massue, marquis de
Thousands of names, frozen in time, stand as silent witnesses to a global rupture. This collection serves as a somber monument, gathering the scattered lives of those who vanished into the machinery of the Great War.
Love-at-arms
Rafael Sabatini
A lady trapped by a loveless political arrangement finds her only salvation in the arms of a mysterious, battle-hardened knight who is not the man he claims to be.
The Zeppelin's Passenger
E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
The war is a crucible, and for the residents of Dreymarsh, the most dangerous enemy is the one who keeps his secrets behind a charming smile and a gentleman’s handshake.
The Secret of the Night
Gaston Leroux
The shadows of a revolution stretch long across the datcha of General Trebassof, where a young man’s arrival marks the only barrier between a decorated war hero and an unseen, relentless assassin.
The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories
Rudyard Kipling
A spectral carriage haunts the fog of a mountain station, while forgotten kings and ancient galley slaves reach across the veil of time to reclaim the lives they left behind.
The Grand Babylon Hôtel
Arnold Bennett
The Grand Babylon Hôtel is not merely a place to stay; it is a fortress of secrets where a single order for dinner can topple empires and reveal the darkest threads of a continental conspiracy.
Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
The girl who walks out on her restrictive home to find a life of her own learns that freedom is rarely a clean break, but a messy, exhilarating, and dangerous collision with reality.
Mr. Standfast
John Buchan
A man of action finds himself drawn into a shadowy web of subversion, where his only guide through the crucible of war is the timeless path of a pilgrim.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
The moor is a vast, desolate expanse where the line between natural danger and supernatural terror blurs, leaving a man to wonder if the shadows contain a beast or merely his own darkest fears.
Love's Labour's Lost
William Shakespeare
Wit is a dangerous weapon, and those who wield it most skillfully often find themselves wounded by their own sharp edges.
The City of God, Volume I
Augustine, of Hippo, Saint
A city is not merely stone and mortar, but a gathering of loves; here, two competing cities rise from the bedrock of human history, one seeking the eternal, the other chasing the shadows of the earth.
Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Mary White Rowlandson
A sudden attack at sunrise leaves a frontier town in ashes, forcing a mother into a harrowing journey through the wilderness as a prisoner of war.
The Yellow Crayon
E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
A man of dangerous secrets stands at the center of a web of international intrigue, forced to choose between his grand political ambitions and the woman he loves.
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu
Sax Rohmer
The shadows of London hide a mastermind whose reach spans the globe and whose methods defy the limits of modern science.
Poirot Investigates
Agatha Christie
A diminutive man with a mustache of military precision and a mind that operates like a Swiss watch solves the most baffling crimes in London, one systematic deduction at a time.
Under the Red Dragon: A Novel
James Grant
A young soldier finds his heart divided between a true-hearted girl and an unattainable noblewoman, only to be swept from the quiet hills of Wales into the brutal, chaotic reality of the Crimean War.
The case-book of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
A final glimpse of a legendary mind, these stories trace the fading embers of a Victorian icon as he confronts the fractured, often darker landscape of a changing world.
The Man in the Brown Suit
Agatha Christie
A girl from a quiet English village suddenly finds herself at the center of a global conspiracy, chasing a shadowy figure across the high seas to the rugged, sun-drenched landscape of Rhodesia.
At the mountains of madness
H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft
The earth holds secrets better left in the ice, where the architecture of an elder age defies the limits of human reason and the sanity of those who dare to look.
Washington Confidential
Jack Lait
The halls of power are shadowed by a hidden, grimy metropolis where the law is a suggestion, the police are often compromised, and the real business of the capital is conducted in the dark.
The Seven Dials mystery
Agatha Christie
A group of idle young aristocrats turns a late-night prank into a lethal, high-stakes game of international espionage. Can a bored socialite and a clever detective outwit a secret society before the body count rises again?
The Plymouth Express Affair
Agatha Christie
The Plymouth Express is not a typical passenger carriage, but a stage for a meticulously crafted deception where the truth is buried beneath a layer of performance.
The Hunter's Lodge Case
Agatha Christie
The famous “little gray cells” of the great detective Poirot function admirably in solving what at first seems a particularly puzzling murder mystery.
The Knights of the Cross, or, Krzyzacy: Historical Romance
Henryk Sienkiewicz
A young knight’s vow of devotion ignites a desperate, multi-generational struggle for justice against a powerful military order, testing the loyalties of a nation on the brink of total war.
Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 4, June, 1923: The unique magazine
Various
The boundaries between the rational world and the encroaching dark dissolve in these pages, where science, crime, and the supernatural collide. This collection offers a glimpse into an era of pulp storytelling that hungered for the strange, the macabre, and the unexplained.
The Missing Will
Agatha Christie
A determined woman risks her entire inheritance to prove her independence, turning to a master detective to solve a final, mocking puzzle left behind by her eccentric, wealthy uncle.
The Torrents of Spring
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
The sudden, unbidden surge of a past life proves that what we once thought was finished may simply be waiting for the right moment to hollow us out.
The Big Four
Agatha Christie
The shadows of a global conspiracy loom over a quiet life, drawing a retired detective into a high-stakes hunt for four enigmatic architects of chaos. The world’s safety rests on unmasking the faces hidden in plain sight.
The mystery of the Blue Train
Agatha Christie
The Blue Train hurtles toward the French Riviera, carrying a fortune in rubies and a secret that will turn a luxurious journey into a desperate race against a clever, hidden killer.
The Sex Life of the Gods
M. E. (Michael E.) Knerr
The line between the mundane and the impossible blurs when a man wakes up in a strange cabin, married to a woman he doesn’t recognize, while the world above searches for a downed vessel from the stars.