Free summaries
Novels — page 2
89 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 2 of 2.
The Panchronicon
Harold Steele MacKaye
Flying over the North Pole at extreme speeds, an aerial vessel made of glass and copper winds backwards through time, carrying three modern New Englanders straight into the vibrant, chaotic world of Elizabethan England.
The Sand-Hills of Jutland
H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen
A child cast away on the wind-scourged dunes of Denmark carries an unseen royal heritage through poverty, wrongful imprisonment, and tragedy, searching for a home that eludes him until his final, luminous breath inside an abandoned church.
Dead Souls
Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol
A smooth-talking middleman travels the dusty roads of provincial Russia, buying up dead serfs who still exist on paper to execute a grand financial scam against the state.
The Defiant Agents
Andre Norton
Hook Conditioned by rival powers to act as colonial pawns on an alien world, a band of displaced warriors must reclaim their autonomy from the machines that bind them.
The Rider of Waroona
G. Firth Scott
The quiet of an Australian backwater is shattered when a series of daring, inexplicable robberies leads a determined investigator into a web of vengeance, hidden identities, and long-buried family grudges.
Which? Or, Between Two Women
Ernest Daudet
This historical romance weaves together the turbulent political upheaval of the French Revolution with the quiet, agonizing dilemmas of a domestic love triangle. It explores how personal virtue and private loyalty endure when the foundations of society collapse.
The marriage
Ann Bannon
HOOK A young couple discovers their marriage is a legal and moral impossibility, triggering a desperate journey of survival and an agonizing search for identity.
![Cover of Eugene Oneguine [Onegin]: A Romance of Russian Life in Verse](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/eugene-oneguine-onegin-a-romance-of-russian-life-in-verse-aleksandr.webp)
Eugene Oneguine [Onegin]: A Romance of Russian Life in Verse
Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
This story of a jaded aristocrat and a provincial girl unfolds as a series of intimate snapshots, tracing the distance between youthful idealism and the cold wisdom of maturity.
Laura Middleton
Anonymous
This narrative follows a young man’s arrival at a country estate, where he discovers a hidden world of libertine indulgence shared among the inhabitants and their young guests. It is a candid, focused account of sexual initiation and the complex social maneuvers required to maintain such secret lives.
Eight Keys to Eden
Mark Clifton
When a colony on a lush, unreachable world falls silent, a brilliant investigator must navigate the thin, terrifying threshold between human logic and the unknown.
The tortoiseshell cat
Naomi Royde-Smith
A young woman finds herself adrift in the complex social currents of 1920s London, navigating the demands of professional life and the intense, often confusing attractions of those around her.
The Status Civilization
Robert Sheckley
A man wakes up on a prison planet with no memory of his past crime, only to discover that on this world, murder is a path to social advancement. He must navigate a brutal, lawless society to uncover the truth about his own identity and the secret history of two worlds.
Starman's Quest
Robert Silverberg
HOOK A young man leaves the confined, lifelong isolation of a deep-space starship to search for his runaway brother on an Earth he has never known.
The scorpion
Anna Elisabet Weirauch
This is a portrait of a young woman’s search for identity and belonging in a world that denies her nature. It remains a poignant exploration of the ache of being an outsider.
St. Cuthbert's
Robert E. (Robert Edward) Knowles
A dedicated minister faces the unraveling of his quiet Canadian parish when the hidden, shameful pasts of his flock collide with the rigid expectations of his congregation.
The Dead Command: From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
The weight of history is a suffocating inheritance, yet liberation remains possible for those who dare to defy the ghosts of their ancestry. This narrative explores the tension between tradition and the urgent, living present.
The Huntress
Hulbert Footner
The wilderness is a mirror, and for those who wander into its depths, the reflection is often a brutal and beautiful revelation of the self.
Possessed
Cleveland Moffett
The story of a woman haunted by a divided self, this narrative explores the thin, often blurred line between psychological distress and the intrusion of unseen, malevolent forces.
In the land of the gods
Alice Mabel Bacon
Ancient folklore and modern domestic life converge in these tales, where the boundaries between the living, the dead, and the divine remain perpetually porous.
Half a Hero: A Novel
Anthony Hope
The political arena is a place of shifting alliances and hidden debts, where a man’s public triumphs are often shadowed by the weight of a secret, unvarnished past. This narrative explores the steep cost of ambition when the ideals of a leader collide with the rigid expectations of the ruling class.
The Gambler
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The spinning wheel offers a dangerous promise of transformation, but for those who stake their lives on the turn of a card, the only certainty is the erosion of the soul.
Star Surgeon
Alan Edward Nourse
The path to becoming a healer requires more than technical expertise; it demands the courage to discard one's crutches and stand entirely alone. This narrative follows a young alien physician navigating the biases of a human-dominated medical establishment to prove his worth among the stars.
The Dust Flower
Basil King
A rash impulse transforms a spurned lover’s vengeful prank into an extraordinary test of devotion, dignity, and redemption.
Stavrogin's Confession and The Plan of The Life of a Great Sinner: With Introductory and Explanatory Notes
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
This volume offers a rare, intimate look at the engine of a literary master, presenting the raw, haunting fragments of a vision that never reached full completion. It is a profound meditation on the dark corners of the human conscience.
A Woman's Will
Anne Warner
HOOK A headstrong American widow travels solo through Europe, only to find her fiercely guarded independence challenged by an intense, enigmatic musician who believes he can tame her spirit.
The lavender dragon
Eden Phillpotts
A naive knight sets out to slay a legendary beast, only to find that the creature is a philosopher-king who has built a utopian society in the wilderness.
The Dictator
Justin McCarthy
The life of a deposed South American leader in London is turned upside down by a lethal conspiracy. This political drama balances drawing-room wit with the tension of an international manhunt.
Hung Lou Meng, or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel, Book I
Xueqin Cao
A gilded household in Qing-dynasty China unravels from within as its spoiled heir retreats into a world of poetry, dreams, and doomed youthful attachments.
Poor Folk
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A impoverished, middle-aged clerk and a fragile, orphaned young woman attempt to preserve their human dignity through a tender correspondence across a bleak St. Petersburg courtyard.
Doña Perfecta
Benito Pérez Galdós
A young engineer arrives in a provincial Spanish town expecting family, warmth, and reasonable progress, only to collide with a wall of ancient prejudice, religious bigotry, and quietly malicious hypocrisy.
Space Prison
Tom Godwin
Abandoned on a hyper-gravitational hell-world by an enemy empire, a helpless remnant of human colonists transforms over two centuries of harsh natural selection into a lethal force bent on total galactic retribution.
The tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
In the shimmering, status-obsessed world of the Heian court, a shining prince pursues perfection in art and love, only to discover that beauty cannot outrun impermanence or human vulnerability.
In the Border Country
Josephine Daskam Bacon
An artist collapses under the strain of living for herself, her husband, and her children, and slips into a shadowy, dreamlike realm where three encounters with extraordinary women rewrite her understanding of womanhood and duty.
Islands of Space
Campbell, John W., Jr. (John Wood)
Four Earth scientists build a faster-than-light spaceship, venture into intergalactic space, and find themselves drawn into an alien war across distant galaxies.
Major Frank
A. L. G. (Anna Louisa Geertruida) Bosboom-Toussaint
A unexpected inheritance, a ruined estate, and an outspoken woman dubbed a Cossack by local gossips form the center of this Dutch nineteenth-century romance.
The Devil: A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience
Joseph O'Brien
A single day in Vienna exposes the fragile boundary between civilized restraint and suppressed desire when a mysterious stranger manipulates an artist and a married woman.
The place called Dagon
Herbert Sherman Gorman
A shadowy, isolated valley in Massachusetts hides a surviving centuries-old cult, pulling a skeptical young country doctor into a terrifying web of hypnosis, diabolical rituals, and forgotten Puritan witch-trials.
The house of the dead
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A noble-born political prisoner endures ten years of hard labor in a penal colony, finding humanity and resilience within Russia's dark, forgotten depths.
Tangled trails
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
A stagecoach driver arrives in town claiming he was held up, but the bank's ten thousand dollars is untouched, making him the laughingstock of Sun Dog County. When the money turns out to be forged, a quiet local sheriff realizes a simple robbery is actually a sprawling conspiracy of murder and counterfeit currency.
'Our Guy'
Boyd, E. E., Mrs.
Two devoted sisters struggle to keep their household afloat and preserve their faith, while sacrificing their own desires to nurture their proud, ambitious brother toward true Christian living.
Beebo Brinker
Ann Bannon
An eighteen-year-old farm girl flees her restrictive hometown for Greenwich Village, navigating the hidden mid-century lesbian underground while searching for her own identity.