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1,474 public-domain books, summarised. Page 7 of 31.
Moods
Louisa May Alcott
The heart has its own seasons, and sometimes the winter of a mistake lasts long enough to shape the spring that follows. To live is to drift through many-colored lenses of feeling, until the truth of one’s own nature finally comes into focus.
Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman
William Godwin
The life of an icon is often obscured by the mythology of her own making. Here, her partner strips away the pedestal to reveal a woman of raw intuition, exhausting vulnerability, and unyielding intellectual fire.
Plutarch's Morals
Plutarch
The pursuit of a good life is not a destination but a deliberate, daily practice of mind. Here, ancient wisdom meets the common challenges of human character with refreshing, unsentimental clarity.
The Undersea Tube
L. Taylor (Lucile Taylor) Hansen
The marvel of a trans-oceanic railway turns to a nightmare of ancient ruins and tectonic fury, leaving one man to carry the weight of a secret that history refuses to believe.
The Railway Children
E. (Edith) Nesbit
The lives of three children change overnight when their father is mysteriously taken away, forcing them to find a new, rugged home beside a railway line where they must learn to survive and wait for the truth.
Wizard
Laurence M. Janifer
The line between a miracle and a heresy is often drawn by a single, desperate mind. In an age of shadows, one man gambles that the deadliest enemy of his people might become their greatest secret asset.
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
The urge to wander, often at the expense of one’s own safety, is a persistent human affliction that can lead to either ruin or a strange, solitary form of wisdom.
The Iliad
Homer
The anger of a single man, once unleashed, unspools the fates of nations and brings gods to the field of battle. This is the weight of a thousand ships, measured in the rhythm of human suffering.
The Gay Adventure: A Romance
Richard Bird
This is a story of a young man who finds that life’s best opportunities are hidden behind a stage door. If you enjoy elegant, witty puzzles where the mystery is as much about the heart as the plot, you belong here.
Anabasis
Xenophon
A mercenary army is stranded deep in enemy territory, surrounded by hostile empires and brutal mountains. They have no king, no supplies, and only one way home: through thousands of miles of wilderness.
The Belle of Bowling Green
Amelia E. Barr
In the shadow of the War of 1812, two beautiful cousins navigate the shifting tides of love and loyalty in a New York City poised on the edge of its future.
Helen Vardon's confession
R. Austin (Richard Austin) Freeman
The woman who stands in the shadow of a secret marriage finds that the law, like a closing trap, is never as merciful as the heart.
The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery
Hildegard G. Frey
A quiet, historic house holds secrets of the past, but the real mystery is whether a fractured family can mend itself in time for a Christmas celebration.
Barry Locke, half-back
Ralph Henry Barbour
The courage to hold your ground is rarely found on the field alone; sometimes it is hidden in the quiet loyalties we build when the stadium lights are dark.
Cynthia's Chauffeur
Louis Tracy
The open road beckons as an American heiress and her mysterious driver embark on a thousand-mile tour through the lush, sun-drenched landscapes of Edwardian England.
Dainty's Cruel Rivals
Miller, Alex. McVeigh, Mrs.
The heart of an innocent woman is a battleground where greed, jealousy, and dark, ancestral secrets collide. Only the purest devotion can weather the storm of such ruthless, cold-blooded intrigue.
The Silent Barrier
Louis Tracy
Between the jagged peaks of the Swiss Alps and the crushing weight of hidden pasts, two strangers find their fates irrevocably tangled.
The Prince and the Pauper
Mark Twain
In the gray, crowded slums of 16th-century London, a beggar boy and a prince trade places, revealing how easily the world mistakes the garment for the man.
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition: Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes
Edgar Allan Poe
Shadows stretch long across these pages, where the boundary between the living and the dead dissolves into a whisper of dread.
Don Juan
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron
The world is a grand, chaotic masquerade where the only constant is change, and the only certainty is that everything—love, war, and fame—will eventually unravel. To survive the dance, one must learn to laugh at the music while the floor collapses beneath.
A princess of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The red planet hangs in the night sky, a distant, beckoning mystery. A man who has touched its soil once finds himself stranded on Earth, forever listening for the call of a world he cannot reach.
White Fang
Jack London
The frozen, silent Northland is a place where life is a desperate struggle against the crushing, inevitable cold. In this unforgiving landscape, a creature born of wild instinct must navigate the brutal laws of nature to survive.
Harriet Martineau
Florence Fenwick Miller
A life of relentless intellectual labor and fierce independence, lived in the shadow of chronic illness and the scrutiny of a changing world. Witness the extraordinary transformation of a timid, misunderstood girl into a public figure who reshaped how her generation understood politics, morality, and the place of…
The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1: Books 1, 2 and 3
Kisari Mohan Ganguli
The ancient world breathes through these pages, a vast and stormy epic where gods and men collide in a struggle that shapes the very architecture of existence.
The Mysterious Island
Jules Verne
The impossible, desperate escape of five men from a storm-tossed balloon ends in a mystery: how will they conquer a wild, uninhabited island with nothing but their wits and a dog?
The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 1 (of 2): Written by Himself Containing a True and Full Account of the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and New Spain
Bernal Díaz del Castillo
A foot soldier’s unvarnished account of an empire’s collapse, this chronicle captures the visceral reality of a collision between two worlds that forever altered the map of human history.
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
A prince loses his father, finds his mother in the arms of an uncle, and encounters a ghost who demands a bloody accounting. In a kingdom rotting from within, silence is the only safe harbor—until it becomes a tomb.
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 01 (of 10): Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi
Giorgio Vasari
Great art is not a spontaneous miracle, but the slow, stubborn recovery of human vision from the long shadows of the Middle Ages.
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana: Translated From the Sanscrit in Seven Parts With Preface, Introduction and Concluding Remarks
Vatsyayana
Discover a meticulous blueprint for the art of living, where the pursuit of pleasure is balanced by the steady demands of duty and the careful stewardship of a household.
Chaucer's Works, Volume 2
Geoffrey Chaucer
The wheels of fate turn with a terrible, indifferent precision, yet even in the wreckage of a broken life, one can find the architecture of a higher, serene understanding.
Cruel as the grave
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
The shadows of a mountain estate hold a lethal secret, and for one woman, the price of love is a descent into a nightmare of false accusations and flight.
Quintus Claudius: A Romance of Imperial Rome. Volume 1
Ernst Eckstein
In the shadow of the Colosseum, a young nobleman risks his life to defy the cruel whims of a decaying empire. Amidst the marble opulence of Rome, a secret brotherhood of faith begins to challenge the blood-soaked foundations of Caesar’s power.
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
In the vast, untamed woods of the American frontier, a scout and his Mohican companions race against time to rescue two sisters from a ruthless enemy during a brutal colonial war.
Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic
Herbert Quick
The frantic heartbeat of an American boomtown pulse-thrums through this account of a city willed into existence by audacity, debt, and the sheer, intoxicating belief that tomorrow will always be worth more than today.
Mademoiselle de Maupin, Volume 1 (of 2)
Théophile Gautier
A young man wanders through a life of exquisite privilege and profound loneliness, searching for an ideal of beauty so absolute that it renders the real world and its inhabitants pale by comparison.
The Place of Honeymoons
Harold MacGrath
The heart’s map is often drawn in invisible ink, requiring a journey through uncertainty and misapprehension before the true destination reveals itself.
The Girl Philippa
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
HOOK As the shadows of the Great War lengthen over the French countryside, an American expatriate and a mysterious, nameless girl find themselves entangled in a web of espionage that will change their lives forever.
The Lost World
Arthur Conan Doyle
Deep in the Amazonian basin, a forgotten plateau holds the living echoes of an ancient, prehistoric past. Here, the laws of evolution have stood still, shielding creatures long thought extinct from the march of time.
A Woman at Bay
Nicholas (House name) Carter
The game of cat and mouse begins in the deep, untamed woods, where a master of disguise infiltrates a criminal empire to confront a woman who commands an army of outlaws.
Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius
The most powerful empire in history rests on the shoulders of one man who only wants to be left alone to do what is right. These are the private notes of a ruler trying to stay human while holding the world in his hands.
Aesop's Fables
Aesop
Common sense often wears a mask of fur or feather, revealing hard truths about the world through the quiet lives of animals. These brief, pointed narratives offer a mirror to human nature, stripping away vanity to show what remains.
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
An isolated girl and an invalid boy find their lives transformed when they discover a walled-in, forgotten garden that blooms alongside their own hidden healing.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving
A lanky, superstitious schoolmaster finds his dreams of wealth and marriage derailed by a nocturnal encounter with a specter in the quiet, shadow-drenched valley of Sleepy Hollow.
The Chessmen of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs
When the sky itself turns against you, the only way to survive is to stop playing by the rules of men and start playing by the rules of the game.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Mark Twain
A bump on the head sends a nineteenth-century man to the sixth century, where he discovers that being a modern genius among superstitious knights is both a dangerous game and a lonely burden.
Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I
Edmund Spenser
The path to holiness is never a straight line, but a winding journey through shadows, enchantments, and the treacherous desires of the human heart.
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
To find the truth of one’s own life, a man must navigate the wreckage of his youth, the illusions of his heart, and the slow, steady wisdom of those who truly see him.
The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio
The world is falling apart, but the stories are just beginning. Ten young people flee a plague-stricken city to reclaim their humanity through the simple, radical act of speaking their minds.