Free summaries
Novels — page 10
2,236 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 10 of 47.
The Poor Plutocrats
Mór Jókai
A dark, gripping tale of love, greed, and deception in old Transylvania, where a forced marriage entangles a innocent heiress with a ruthless, masked criminal mastermind.
A Soldier's Son
Maude Mary Butler
When a young boy returns from a long illness transformed by a gentle, radical faith, his quiet certainty begins to reshape every life he touches.
The Enemies of Women (Los enemigos de la mujer)
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
A decadent Russian prince retreats to the Riviera with his wealthy inner circle, swearing off women forever—only to be completely shattered when war and desire break down their fragile fortress of cynicism.
The Five Hells of Orion
Frederik Pohl
A starship navigator vanishes from his locked bridge, dragged across light-years into a dark cell where non-human minds need a favor.
The Happy Man
Gerald W. Page
Freedom in the wilderness is only a dream designed to keep the dangerous men satisfied.
The Mermaid: A Love Tale
L. (Lily) Dougall
A lonely scholar falls in love with a phantom of the waves, only to discover that the woman behind the myth is bound by a terrible secret and a tragic marriage.
The Shepherd of the North
Richard Aumerle Maher
A formidable churchman confronts a ruthless timber monopoly to protect a mountain community, shielding a young suspect accused of a deadly crime.
The Valley of Gold: A Tale of the Saskatchewan
David Howarth
Across the wind-swept prairies of Saskatchewan, a single strain of high-yield seed wheat becomes the prize in a high-stakes duel between an idealistic young farmer and his bitter rivals.
Eline Vere
Louis Couperus
A delicate woman unravels amid the stifling conventions and luxurious quiet of upper-class Hague society, destroyed by her own hyper-sensitive temperament and an agonizing quest for peace.
Maurice Guest
Henry Handel Richardson
A young English student travels to Leipzig to study music, only to lose his art, his pride, and ultimately his life to an unreciprocated passion.
Operation: Outer Space
Murray Leinster
A rat-race advertising man, drafted to publicize a faster-than-light space drive, accidentally turns a troubled millionaire's vanity project into humanity’s first commercial interstellar empire.
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 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 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 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.
Garrison's finish
W. B. M. (William Blair Morton) Ferguson
A disgraced jockey loses his name, his memory, and his standing, then travels a long, uncertain road to redeem his reputation and reclaim his true identity on and off the racetrack.
Leslie's loyalty
Charles Garvice
Two lovers navigate class barriers, hidden titles, and malicious deceptions before finding their way back to one another.
The Book of Clever Beasts: Studies in Unnatural History
Myrtle Reed
A lighthearted spoof of turn-of-the-century nature writers, this parody follows a bumbling observer's encounters with woodland creatures whose humanlike intelligence reaches absurd, impossible heights.
The Heart of Cherry McBain: A Novel
Douglas Durkin
Amid the rugged, unforgiving wilderness of early Canada, a woman of indomitable will and a quiet, steadfast laborer find their fates entangled with a violent, ambitious foreman.
The Isle of Unrest
Henry Seton Merriman
High on the wind-swept cliffs of Corsica, an ancient blood feud reignites just as France slides headlong into disaster on the battlefields of 1870.
The Onslaught from Rigel
Fletcher Pratt
An alien invasion alters human biology, forcing transformed survivors into a desperate campaign of high-tech guerilla warfare.
Valley of Dreams
Stanley G. (Stanley Grauman) Weinbaum
Beneath Mars’s thin skies, ancient ruins yield quiet secrets, but the red sand hides a trap built entirely of human desire.
Berenice
E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
A high-minded London scholar falls under the spell of a captivating actress, only to find their mutual passion tested by rigid morality, public scandal, and a devastating secret from her past.
Mr. Wu: Based on the Play "Mr. Wu" by H. M. Vernon and Harold Owen
Louise Jordan Miln
A powerful Chinese mandarin exacts a haunting, lifelong vengeance against an English youth who seduced and abandoned his daughter, leaving a permanent shadow over the young man’s future happiness.
A Man's Hearth
Eleanor M. (Eleanor Marie) Ingram
A man walks away from the hollow splendor of his wealthy New York life to find a simpler existence, only to discover that the past is never truly left behind.
Olive in Italy
Moray Dalton
An orphaned Englishwoman seeks a new life in Italy, only to find that the romantic landscape masks a dark, volatile world where passion and peril are inextricably linked.
The Happy Isles
Basil King
The story of a stolen childhood, this narrative follows a boy navigating the sharp divide between his mysterious, vulnerable beginnings and the structured world of the American elite.
The rejected wife
Ann S. (Ann Sophia) Stephens
A young woman’s secret marriage to a charismatic but duplicitous man threatens to destroy her family and her own life. This tale of hidden loyalties and public betrayal explores the heavy cost of misplaced devotion.
Mark Hurdlestone
Susanna Moodie
A miser’s legacy of greed and cruelty poisons the lives of his two nephews, setting them on divergent paths of virtue and vice. This Victorian moral drama explores how the corrosive power of wealth distorts the human spirit.
Rosa Alchemica
W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
An aging aesthete, obsessed with the cold beauty of art, is lured away from his solitary, curated life by an old acquaintance promising a transcendental initiation into a secret order. This encounter shatters the narrator’s carefully constructed world, forcing a violent collision between the refined, lonely…
The Grip of Desire: The Story of a Parish-Priest
Hector France
This narrative follows the internal and external disintegration of a village priest, exploring the friction between his religious vows and his human nature. It is a work of grim realism that prioritizes the visceral truth of the body over the ideals of the pulpit.
The Three Fates
F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford
A young writer navigates the treacherous waters of professional obscurity, social ambition, and the unpredictable nature of the heart in late nineteenth-century New York.
A Rich Man's Relatives (Vol. 1 of 3)
Robert Cleland
A wealthy man’s inheritance casts a long shadow over his surviving kin, revealing the vanities and hidden struggles of those who covet his fortune. This story of social ambition and domestic maneuvering captures the peculiar tensions of a stratified society.
A Slave is a Slave
H. Beam Piper
The transition of a slave-run society into an imperial province reveals that liberation is often a matter of semantics. A rigid social hierarchy built on centuries of oppression cannot be undone by a simple decree.
Dead Ringer
Lester Del Rey
A man convinced that humanity is being secretly replaced by invincible aliens discovers that his greatest enemy is not a monster, but the very person he trusted to "cure" his obsession.
Possession
Louis Bromfield
The children of the American frontier find themselves adrift, standing with their backs to a rough-hewn past and their faces set toward an uncertain, glittering future.
Princess Napraxine, Volume 1 (of 3)
Ouida
HOOK A bored, beautiful Russian aristocrat drifts through the artificial glamour of the French Riviera, only to find her own icy detachment challenged by a man who refuses to remain a mere spectator to her life.
The Right Knock: A Story
Helen Van-Anderson
The threshold of a new life waits for those who dare to seek beyond the material world. A quiet transformation begins with a single knock at the door of consciousness.
Unhuman tour
Soseki Natsume
Seeking to escape the suffocating pressures of modern life, an artist wanders into the mountains, where he finds that art and nature are the only true refuges from the human condition.
Small Souls
Louis Couperus
HOOK A woman returns to her native city after twenty years of exile, only to find that the past is a living, breathing weight she can never truly escape.
The Goose Girl
Harold MacGrath
A wanderer with a penchant for intrigue finds himself at the center of a royal identity crisis, where a simple goose girl and a princess may have traded places at birth.
By Right of Conquest: A Novel
Arthur Hornblow
A disillusioned, cynical heiress and a bitter, downtrodden stoker find their lives irrevocably altered when a shipwreck leaves them as the sole survivors on a deserted island. This tale explores the friction between social castes when stripped of the protective layers of civilization.
Divers Women
Pansy
Divers Women is a collection of interconnected tales that trace the profound influence of personal faith on the domestic and spiritual lives of nineteenth-century women. It is a work of moral earnestness, capturing the quiet struggles of those who seek to reconcile worldly expectations with their private devotion.
John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an Experiment
Dan B. (Dan Brearley) Brummitt
A methodical pastor attempts a decade-long spiritual experiment to shape a young man’s life, ultimately revealing that intentional mentorship can transform a secular career into a global mission of service.
Captain Jinks, Hero
Ernest Crosby
The life of a celebrated war hero is less a matter of personal merit than a puppet show choreographed by the press, the state, and the drumbeat of public fervor.
Shamar's War
Kris Neville
This tale of political subversion follows an Earth agent tasked with destabilizing an alien world, only to find that the power to topple a regime is a fire that consumes everything it touches. It is a cynical, sharp-edged examination of the volatile intersection between individual agency and bureaucratic control.
Miss Primrose: A Novel
Roy Rolfe Gilson
A woman of quiet, enduring grace finds her own fulfillment through the lives of the people she nurtures, turning a life of solitude into a legacy of love.
Mothwise
Knut Hamsun
This tale of life in a remote coastal Norwegian village centers on a restless telegraph operator whose impulsive, often foolish behavior masks a keen mind and an irrepressible spirit. It is a story of shifting romantic allegiances, local rivalries, and the unpredictable nature of human connection.