The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 538
32,123 public-domain books, summarised. Page 538 of 670.
The Daughter of the Storage: And Other Things in Prose and Verse
William Dean Howells
A young woman stands inside a Manhattan storage facility, trying to recall a long-forgotten childhood encounter while her mother obsessively sorts through old household trunks.
The Dominant Strain
Anna Chapin Ray
High society and artistic ambition collide when a refined woman marries a charming man to save him, only to face the limits of her influence.
The Escorial: A Historical and Descriptive Account of the Spanish Royal Palace, Monastery and Mausoleum
Albert Frederick Calvert
An austere gridiron of granite rises against the Castilian mountains, built to align a king's religious devotion with the absolute power of his empire.
The evolution of religion
Lewis Richard Farnell
A comparative examination of ancient rites reveals how primitive taboos and magical spells slowly evolved into refined moral codes and spiritual communion.
The flame-gatherers
Margaret Horton Potter
A soul cursed by passion and betrayal seeks redemption across the span of centuries and reincarnations in medieval India.
The Golden Judge
Nathaniel Gordon
A flippant suggestion made during a sweltering UN armistice meeting unexpected transforms global diplomacy by proving that nations respect the outcome of a fair bet far more than formal treaties.
The Great Fortress
William Wood
A lone stone citadel on the fog-shrouded shores of Cape Breton holds the key to an empire, serving as the sole Atlantic gateway between France and its vast American wilderness.
The Happy Adventurers
Lydia Miller Middleton
A housebound young girl steps through the glass of a family photograph album into nineteenth-century Australia, discovering a world of sunlit gardens, lost diamonds, and timeless bonds.
The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, Part 39
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
An aging knight wanders Spain chasing courtly phantoms, accompanied by a peasant whose stubborn common sense repeatedly collides with his master's delusions.
The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, Part 41
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Deluded by romance, a defeated knight errant and his shrewd squire ride home toward reality, bargaining over magical lashes and confronting fake histories.
The House of the Wolf: A Romance
Stanley John Weyman
A high-spirited teenage nobleman leads his brothers into the madness of 1572 Paris, risking everything to rescue their cousin's Protestant lover from the deadly clutches of an implacable rival.
The Indian Drum
William MacHarg
Across the stormy, ice-bound waters of Lake Michigan, an unseen drum marks every life lost to the waves, keeping count of a dark tally that one ambitious man will do anything to hide.
The Iron Woman
Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
Youth, passion, and stubborn pride collide in a industrial river town where four childhood friends discover how easily a single hasty decision can shatter multiple lives.
The Italian, Volume 1 (of 3)
Ann Ward Radcliffe
A sinister monk stalks a noble Neapolitan youth to thwart his passion for an orphaned noblewoman.
The King of Arcadia
Francis Lynde
A remote Colorado valley becomes a deadly battleground when an ambitious irrigation project collides with an unyielding cattle baron's private wilderness kingdom.
The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 6, December 1837
Various
This 1837 issue captures the burgeoning literary spirit of nineteenth-century America through a rich mixture of travelogues, historical speculation, moral fiction, and social criticism.
The Kopje Farm
William Johnston
A Highland teenager defends his family's South African farm during the Boer War, uncovering an immense fortune in diamonds amid the clash of arms.
The Last Miracle
M. P. (Matthew Phipps) Shiel
Forged miracles, stolen clerics, and a grand, ruthless conspiracy collide in a twilight Europe where a dying faith is systematically dismantled by a single terrifying will.
The Lucky Seventh
Ralph Henry Barbour
A makeshift ball club, a stubborn town patriarch, and a crippling injury conspire against a high school baseball team fighting to keep its home field.
The Making of Species
Douglas Dewar
A rigorous critique of post-Darwinian evolutionary theories that challenges rigid dogmas while offering a fresh, empirical vision of species formation.
The Man from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion
William Simpson
A recluse observing nature through a telescope meets a Martian visitor who reveals how an advanced society solved Earth's worst systemic failures.
The Marx He Knew
John Spargo
A reverent old cigarmaker passes down the unwritten history of socialism's foundational theorist through the intimate memories of a lifelong friendship.
The Mind Master
Arthur J. Burks
Trapped inside a giant ape's body, a man fights to stop a mad scientist from replacing New York's leaders with mind-controlled beasts.
The missing chums
Franklin W. Dixon
When a summer boat trip turns into a abduction, two teenage brothers race to rescue their lost friends from a ruthless gang hiding on a desolate island.
The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. I., No. 2, April, 1889
Various
A grand survey of physical landmasses, oceanic depth, and global atmosphere unfolds alongside the formal administrative birth of a newly organized scientific institution.
The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. II., No. 5, April, 1891
Various
A young scientific institution charts its administrative growth while venturing beyond the lecture hall into bold Alaskan field exploration.
The Nursery, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1875: A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers
Various
Gentle morality tales, playful nature lessons, and domestic vignettes capture the quiet rhythms and earnest values of late nineteenth-century childhood.
The Pension Beaurepas
Henry James
An observant American student takes lodging in Geneva, where two expatriate families quietly unravel over money, culture, and the freedom to go home.
The Potato Child & Others
Lucia Prudence Hall Woodbury
A young orphan girl, enduring a harsh apprenticeship under a cold dressmaker, finds a spark of hope and human connection in a curiously shaped vegetable.
The Reflections of Ambrosine: A Novel
Elinor Glyn
A high-born young woman trades her freedom for her family’s survival, only to discover that the aristocratic world she sacrificed herself to enter is governed by its own ruthless code.
The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America: From its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in Chicago
George N. McLean
A city gripped by economic strife becomes a powder keg when radical labor rhetoric meets the unyielding authority of the law.
The Scott Country
John Geddie
A journey through the Scottish Borders reveals how physical terrain, regional history, and poetic imagination interweave to create a landscape permanently shaped by Sir Walter Scott.
The Shagganappi
E. Pauline Johnson
Across these stories of the Canadian frontier, young hands hold canoes against furious rapids, skin frostbitten ankles on the trail, and balance the weight of ancestral honor against a rapidly encroaching white world.
The Two Dianas, Volume 3 (of 3)
Paul Meurice
A man of noble character finds his life’s purpose consumed by a vendetta against the monarchy that destroyed his world. This final installment traces his path from private justice to the bloody theater of civil war.
The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen
Roger T. (Roger Thompson) Finlay
Surviving on a remote island takes more than raw courage; it requires practical science, heavy-duty ingenuity, and an absolute mastery of the wilderness.
Thirty Years in Australia
Ada Cambridge
A quiet domestic intimacy illuminates this thirty-year journey across a rapidly changing young nation.
Thomas D'Arcy McGee
Alexander Brady
A fugitive revolutionist transformed into a founding father finds that the ultimate test of statecraft lies not in pulling a kingdom down, but in forging a nation out of diverse, divided provinces.
Three Boys in the Wild North Land
Egerton Ryerson Young
A guest in a northern wilderness home finds himself drawn into an endless sequence of wild chases, bitter cold, and the sudden, fierce beauty of the subarctic edge.
Three little maids
Ethel Turner
Three sisters leave their native England for Australia, turning early family struggles into imaginative play and eventual literary ambitions.
Through the Iron Bars: Two Years of German Occupation in Belgium
Emile Cammaerts
A nation stripped of its territory, its flags, and its native industry refuses to surrender its spirit to a military occupier.
Turkey and the Armenian atrocities
Edwin Munsell Bliss
A geography of landscape and belief yields to a meticulous record of terror, political inertia, and targeted human destruction.
U.S. Marines In Vietnam, Volume 1 (of 9)
Robert H. Whitlow
Before heavy combat units arrived, a small contingent of American advisors and helicopter crews quietly built the foundation of the Marine presence in Southeast Asia.
Uncle Wiggily's Fortune
Howard Roger Garis
A gentle old rabbit with a cornstalk crutch roams the woods and beaches searching for a elusive fortune, meeting helpful friends and hungry predators along the way.
Under the Shadow of Etna: Sicilian Stories from the Italian of Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Verga
On the scorched, malarial plains of nineteenth-century Sicily, passions cut as deep as the poverty that feeds them, bound only by brute force, pride, and the unrelenting struggle to survive.
Under Three Flags: A Story of Mystery
Bert Leston Taylor
A small-town murder launches a globe-trotting chase, pulling a restless reporter and an ambitious detective into the dangerous currents of the Cuban War of Independence.
Ungava
R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne
To plant a trading post on the frozen shores of Hudson's Bay, men must fight snowstorms, starvation, and endless inter-tribal warfare. This is an earnest nineteenth-century arctic adventure where human warmth holds back the barren wilderness.
Up in Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told in Verse
Holman Day
Bare-knuckled humor, rustic ironies, and timber-town tragedies converge in a spirited poetic portrait of turn-of-the-century rural New England.
War paint
Robert Winchester
She came to the Texas border in a high-powered roadster with her lipstick drawn for war, never expecting two laconic Rangers to turn her city-bred world upside down.