Free summaries
Novels — page 10
1,000 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 10 of 21.
The noise of the world
Adriana Spadoni
This is a story of two people navigating the friction between their intimate hopes and the relentless demands of an industrializing, chaotic society. It is an honest, unsentimental portrait of a marriage finding its footing in a changing world.
Their Son
Eduardo Zamacois
To understand the ruin of a soul, one must often look at the small, sharp desires that first lead it astray. This collection offers a piercing, unflinching examination of how ordinary lives fracture under the weight of obsession and social expectation.
Growing up on Big Muddy
Charles V. De Vet
A stranded explorer undergoes a slow, silent transformation on a rain-drenched alien world as his own body begins to adapt to his surroundings.
The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance
Marie Corelli
The human spirit possesses the power to transcend physical decay, provided it masters the secret of eternal, selfless love. This transformative journey defies the boundaries of time, memory, and the illusions of death.
The Measure of a Man
Amelia E. Barr
An unwavering portrait of duty and domestic devotion, this story follows a Yorkshire mill owner navigating the tensions between ancestral tradition, industrial labor, and the volatile currents of his own family life. It remains a testament to the Victorian-era belief that individual character is the true bedrock of…
The Powers and Maxine
C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson
This story follows the high-stakes intersection of international intrigue and personal devotion in the early twentieth century.
Victor's Triumph: Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
A villainous woman orchestrates a fraud to frame an innocent man for bigamy, only to see her network of deception collapse under the weight of truth.
Blind Man's Lantern
Allen Kim Lang
Two Amish homesteaders are planted on a foreign world by spacefarers who hope low-energy agriculture will spark a planetary renaissance, only for the couple to discover that surviving requires adapting to foreign sacred traditions.
Quest of the Golden Ape
Paul W. Fairman
A lost heir to an alien throne awakens with no memory inside a hidden Earth mansion, pulled across space to right a centuries-old betrayal.
Sand Doom
Murray Leinster
Surrounded by miles of searing yellow sand, a stranded survey officer must outthink a lethal world before his air and options run out.
The Republic of the Future
Anna Bowman Dodd
Beneath a polished veneer of automated comfort lies a world so perfectly equalized that humanity has forgotten how to feel, strive, or create.
With the one coin for fee
Helen R. (Helen Rose) Hull
A bitter rivalry between two aging New England women reaches its terrifying, exhilarating climax when a devastating hurricane strikes their coastal town.
Carnac's Folly, Complete
Gilbert Parker
Life will bend a man away from his natural course, but it rarely breaks the hidden ties of blood and purpose that pull him back.
Mary Gray
Katharine Tynan
A fragile girl from the slums of London rises through quiet resilience to enter high society, while those who touch her life navigate the unspoken boundaries of duty, rank, and love.
The Land of the Blue Flower
Frances Hodgson Burnett
A young king raised in solitude on a mountain summit learns the quiet secrets of the earth, then descends to redeem a darkened realm through the shared cultivating of a single, radiant blossom.
Goslings
J. D. (John Davys) Beresford
A sudden plague sweeps across the globe, killing almost every man while leaving women almost entirely spared, forcing a shattered society to rebuild itself from the ground up.
Natalie
Emma V. Hallett
An infant washed ashore in a wooden trough becomes the shining center of a Christian household, guiding lost souls from Nantucket to Italy toward spiritual peace.
The Return of Peter Grimm: Novelised From the Play
David Belasco
A dead nurseryman returns as a ghost to mend the lives he inadvertently ruined by forcing his earthly will upon those he loved.
Wang the Ninth: The Story of a Chinese Boy
B. L. (Bertram Lenox) Putnam Weale
A street-wise boy navigates the brutal collapse of nineteenth-century China, surviving famine, wall-climbing smugglers, and siege warfare with unyielding grit.
Beside Still Waters
Robert Sheckley
An aging prospector seeks ultimate solitude on a half-mile slab of rock floating in space, taking along only an adaptable, standard-issue robot for company.
David Poindexter's Disappearance, and Other Tales
Julian Hawthorne
A clergyman unmoors his soul for a sudden fortune, while phantom lovers and secret passages entangle ordinary lives in uncanny webwork.
The Bail Jumper
Robert J. C. Stead
A young clerk is accused of a prairie bank-safe robbery, loses his liberty to bail, and flees into the wide Canadian West to rebuild his honor.
The Mentor: The Ring of the Nibelung, Vol. 3, Num. 24, Serial No. 100, February 1, 1916
Henry T. Finck
A four-part epic of gods, dwarfs, and mortal heroes battles for a ring of absolute power that carries an inescapable deadly curse.
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.
Narakan Rifles, About Face!
George H. (George Henry) Smith
A lone Terran officer refuses to abandon his native frog-like recruits on a sweltering alien planet, leading them on a desperate march into combat against feline invaders.
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.