Free summaries
Novels — page 20
2,572 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 20 of 54.
The Man Who Found Himself (Uncle Simon)
H. De Vere (Henry De Vere) Stacpoole
An older man’s late-life folly disrupts his career, his family, and his quiet routines, sparking a cascade of comedy, romance, and unintended self-discovery.
Tangle Hold
F. L. (Floyd L.) Wallace
On the corrupt, sprawling frontier of Venicity, a down-on-his-luck engineer discovers that the ultimate trap is not the police force hunting him down, but the very flesh on his own bones.
The Monctons: A Novel. Volume 2 (of 2)
Susanna Moodie
A young man is cast out by his treacherous uncle, only to stumble into a tangled web of family secrets, illicit romances, and the inevitable, crushing weight of retributive justice.
Cattle
Onoto Watanna
The rugged Alberta foothills serve as a crucible where the harshness of the frontier collides with human longing and the predatory greed of a powerful, ruthless cattle baron.
Chetwynd Calverley: New Edition, 1877
William Harrison Ainsworth
A young man returns home to find his father dying and his stepmother’s virtue in question, sparking a dark series of betrayals, poisonings, and desperate schemes among the landed gentry of Cheshire.
The Colonists
Raymond F. Jones
The search for the perfect colonist leads not to the desperate or the criminal, but to those with the courage to build anew without the need to flee the old.
The Cruise of the Make-Believes
Tom Gallon
The wealthy Gilbert Byfield creates an elaborate, artificial fairy tale to rescue a young woman from poverty, only to find that the boundary between performance and reality is dangerous to cross.
The Gnomes of the Saline Mountains: A Fantastic Narrative
Anna Goldmark Gross
A collection of melancholic, atmospheric tales explores the intersection of love, class, and the crushing weight of social ambition in the early twentieth century.
The Woman & the Priest
Grazia Deledda
A young priest struggles against a forbidden love and the crushing weight of his mother’s devotion. In the remote Sardinian hills, a private moral crisis unfolds into a devastating, inevitable tragedy.
All-Hallow Eve
Robert Curtis
The path to true love in a remote Irish parish is paved with dangerous rivalries, ancestral secrets, and the shadow of a local abduction plot.
Flora Adair
A. M. Donelan
The quiet, introspective journey of a young woman navigating the complexities of faith, love, and social expectations, set against the evocative, sun-drenched backdrop of mid-19th-century Italy.
Giants on the Earth
S. P. (Sterner St. Paul) Meek
HOOK A race of giants from Jupiter holds Earth in a brutal, iron-fisted grip until a defiant hero rises to break their tyranny.
Mollie's Substitute Husband
Max McConn
John Merriam, a quiet high school principal, finds his life upended when he agrees to impersonate a powerful, dissipated Senator to save the man’s career—and eventually, to secure his own future with the woman he loves.
The Untempered Wind
Joanna E. (Joanna Ellen) Wood
The wind blows cold across the Ontario countryside, but the heaviest chill emanates from the hearts of neighbors who turn their backs on a woman struggling to survive. This is an unflinching look at the social and personal cost of hypocrisy.
The Weird Adventures of Professor Delapine of the Sorbonne
G. Lindsay (George Lindsay) Johnson
This tale chronicles the extraordinary life of a Parisian academic who discovers that the human mind possesses latent, reality-bending powers. It balances scientific inquiry with supernatural mystery to explore the boundaries of the known world.
Transient
Ward Moore
HOOK A politician encounters a surreal, shifting hotel that mirrors his own internal decay. This haunting narrative explores the thin line between ambition and loss.
Jenny: A Novel
Sigrid Undset
The story of a gifted young painter who ventures to Rome to find her own life, only to be caught in the tangled, destructive expectations of the men who love her.
Sweet Violet
Miller, Alex. McVeigh, Mrs.
A young woman’s inheritance and romantic future are held hostage by the machinations of a jealous cousin and a cold-hearted guardian, setting the stage for a desperate struggle for autonomy and truth.
What Dreams May Come
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
An obsessive, phantasmagoric exploration of reincarnation and the persistence of love, this narrative follows a man whose life becomes haunted by an inexplicable connection to a woman from a past life.
Cross Purposes and The Shadows
George MacDonald
A master of Victorian fantasy explores the thin, permeable veil between the mundane world and the shifting, dream-like realms of the imagination.
Fair Haven and Foul Strand
August Strindberg
This collection of stories explores the volatile intersections of love, pride, and domestic duty, portraying marriage as a relentless, often agonizing, struggle for individual survival.
For the Defence
Fergus Hume
A retired major finds his quiet life in the English countryside shattered when a bizarre African relic becomes the focus of a deadly, occult-tinged murder investigation.
Greylorn
Keith Laumer
HOOK A desperate mission into deep space becomes a battle for survival against mutinous crewmen and a grotesque alien intelligence. It is a taut study of command under extreme isolation.
Lantern Marsh
Beaumont Sandfield Cornell
The vast, encroaching bog of a rural childhood gives way to the rigid, intellectual climate of university life in this searching portrait of a young man’s coming of age. The narrative traces the uneasy friction between individual idealism and the unyielding expectations of society.
Rescue Mission
Robert Silverberg
A desperate distress call leads an intelligence agent into a trap on a hostile world, where he must rely on his telepathic bond to outmaneuver an alien telepath and survive.
The Prodigal Returns
Lilian Staveley
The return to the Divine is not a journey to a distant land, but an awakening of the soul to a presence already standing at the door. Through the surrender of self-will, the seeker discovers that the everyday trials of life are the very instruments of spiritual transformation.
The Transgression of Andrew Vane: A Novel
Guy Wetmore Carryl
A young American in Paris finds himself caught between the wholesome ideals of his past and the seductive, destructive allure of a city that never seems to wake from its own afternoon.
Victory
Lester Del Rey
The galaxy is a treacherous place where war is a constant, exhausting grind, yet the true test of any victor is not the destruction of an enemy, but the ability to face the next, larger challenge.
Purple Springs
Nellie L. McClung
HOOK A young woman faces a defining spring of transformation, navigating the restrictive politics of her province while discovering that personal independence and romantic fulfillment are not mutually exclusive.
Ruben and Ivy Sên
Louise Jordan Miln
A young man caught between his English upbringing and his Chinese heritage struggles to reconcile his mother’s past, his sister’s sorrow, and his own desire for a love that spans two worlds.
The Emily Emmins Papers
Carolyn Wells
A whimsical, observant traveler turns her back on the frantic pace of typical tourism, choosing instead to lose herself in the quiet, atmospheric corners of London.
The Men in the Walls
William Tenn
In the dark, narrow confines of a forgotten world, a young man’s rite of passage reveals that the monsters he fears are merely human, and the walls he calls home are a vast, unnoticed prison.
Beware, the Usurpers!
Robert W. Krepps
The world is a stage of puppet-bodies, and only a select few know that monsters pull the strings from a fourth dimension. Can a ragtag band of outcasts reclaim Earth from these invisible, encroaching usurpers?
Martyr
Alan Edward Nourse
HOOK This story explores the harrowing cost of absolute power and the hidden decay of a society that has exchanged ambition for eternal, stagnant youth.
Suffered in vain
Bertha M. Clay
The shadow of a secret inheritance forces a reluctant soldier to guard a young heiress, only to find himself trapped in a web of obsession, murder, and high-society intrigue.
The Finger of Fate: A Romance
Mayne Reid
The Finger of Fate follows the divergent paths of two half-brothers, Nigel and Henry Harding, as they navigate the betrayals of their inheritance, the machinations of a social-climbing family, and the brutal realities of the Italian criminal underworld.
The Witch Hypnotizer
Zena A. Maher
A quiet, solitary woman discovers she possesses a mysterious, magnetic power to influence the minds of others toward righteousness. She spends her final years transforming a fractured city one soul at a time.
Behind the Throne
William Le Queux
Behind the Throne is an intricate, atmospheric tale of political intrigue and personal sacrifice set within the highest levels of the Italian government. It captures the dark, treacherous intersection of state secrets, bureaucratic corruption, and the private lives of those pulling the levers of power.
Mr. Oseba's Last Discovery
George W. (George William) Bell
An American observer discovers a hidden, hollow-earth civilization that looks to New Zealand as the pinnacle of human progress and social justice.
Peggy Plays Off-Broadway
Virginia Hughes
HOOK Ambition meets reality in the high-stakes world of New York theater, where a young actress discovers that the most challenging performance happens off-stage.
The courts of Jamshyd
Robert F. Young
In a scorched, post-apocalyptic wasteland, a starving tribe sustains its fragile existence through ritualized hatred of the ancestors who destroyed the world.
Yesterday House
Fritz Leiber
A young biology student discovers a girl living in a strange, time-locked isolation on a remote Maine island, unknowingly trapped in a scientist’s obsessive effort to resurrect his lost love.
Cry Chaos!
Dwight V. Swain
The fate of the solar system hangs on a desperate, high-stakes game of shadows and survival played out in the farthest reaches of the void. A legendary wanderer must navigate a web of intergalactic slavery and political betrayal to reclaim his honor and secure the future of his people.
Felix Lanzberg's Expiation
Ossip Schubin
The shadow of a tarnished reputation haunts a man seeking redemption in a society that never truly forgets. This is a story of how a single, irrevocable past can define a life, no matter how much one struggles to outrun it.
San Salvador
Mary Agnes Tincker
Seeking a hidden sanctuary, a young woman discovers a remote, utopian society where the rigors of the world fall away, revealing both the beauty of communal living and the haunting, inescapable nature of human longing.
The Ethic of the Assassin
Hayden Howard
A physician on a colonized planet fights a cold, ritualized death sentence hanging over his pregnant wife, only to find that his only hope lies in operating on the legendary, sightless assassin who holds the contract.
The Flight of the Eagle
Alfred Coppel
A space-faring crew risks everything to transport a sentient, weather-altering plant from Venus to a starving Earth. Their desperate mission hinges on a navigator with a unique, mutated gift.
Assignment in the Dawn
Bryce Walton
He awakens into a world he cannot remember, fueled only by an immediate, overwhelming devotion to a woman whose voice gives him purpose.