Free summaries
Novels — page 7
2,236 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 7 of 47.
The Wonderful Story of Ravalette
Paschal Beverly Randolph
This 1863 narrative blends occult mystery with the intense, often erratic, personal philosophy of a singular American figure. It serves as a strange, atmospheric bridge between the burgeoning Spiritualist movement and the more structured, ancient traditions of the Rosicrucians.
Back to Billabong
Mary Grant Bruce
Seeking a fresh start after the Great War, two orphaned siblings trade the stifling atmosphere of a London home for the vast, sun-drenched landscapes of the Australian bush. This classic tale of resilience follows their journey from displacement to belonging, finding lasting appeal in its portrait of courage and…
Where I Wasn't Going
Walt Richmond
HOOK When a massive space-station project goes rogue, its crew finds themselves trapped in a political nightmare that threatens to bring the world beneath them to its knees.
A Vendetta of the Desert
W. C. (William Charles) Scully
Driven by a blood feud that spans generations and continents, this story explores the corrosive power of hatred within the harsh landscape of the South African frontier. It is a stark, character-driven examination of how vengeance destroys both the hunter and the hunted.
Corleone: A Tale of Sicily
F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford
A love that defies the violent shadows of a Sicilian blood feud takes root in the hearts of a Roman nobleman and a girl born into a family of outlaws.
Geoffrey Hampstead: A Novel
Stinson Jarvis
A portrait of moral decay and social ambition in late 19th-century Toronto, this psychological drama explores the internal fractures of a man who masks a ruthless, manipulative nature behind a facade of refined gentility.
The Headsman
James Fenimore Cooper
A young woman’s love for a man of "inferior" birth and a prince’s search for a lost son converge in the dangerous, craggy heights of the Swiss Alps.
Brigands of the Moon
Ray Cummings
HOOK A high-stakes interplanetary heist unfolds aboard a luxury space-liner, where a navigator and his comrades must outwit ruthless lunar pirates to protect a priceless cargo of rare ore.
Miriam Monfort: A Novel
Catherine A. (Catherine Ann) Warfield
A young heiress finds herself trapped by the cold machinations of a predatory guardian, leading to a desperate flight across land and sea. This gothic-tinged novel explores the struggle for autonomy against those who would trade a woman’s freedom for her inheritance.
Princess Zara
Ross Beeckman
The fate of two strangers, bound by a grand, unseen design, converges in the shadow of the Russian autocracy. This is a tale of political intrigue, forbidden love, and the lethal cost of conviction.
Uller Uprising
H. Beam Piper
A colonial governor finds himself caught in a sudden, planet-wide insurrection when a local population, long dismissed as backward, turns sophisticated weapons against their corporate overseers.
Underground Man
Gabriel de Tarde
The solar fire fades, and humanity must choose between extinction on the surface or a new, claustrophobic existence deep within the earth’s crust. This imaginative work explores the radical transformation of our species when forced into total, subterranean confinement.
Mayflower (Flor de mayo): A Tale of the Valencian Seashore
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
HOOK This rugged tale of the Valencian coast pits the relentless, life-giving ocean against the fragile, often treacherous nature of human desire.
The Torrent (Entre Naranjos)
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
The son of a powerful political dynasty finds his carefully scripted life upended by an encounter with a woman who embodies the freedom and passion he only dares to read about in novels.
Master of Life and Death
Robert Silverberg
The weight of seven billion souls presses down on a single desk. To save a suffocating world, one man must become the architect of its most hated necessity.
Mr. World and Miss Church-Member: A Twentieth Century Allegory
W. S. (William Shuler) Harris
A perilous journey along the Broad Highway explores the spiritual dangers of compromise and the seductive deceptions of worldly influence on a professing believer.
Second stage Lensmen
E. E. (Edward Elmer) Smith
A galaxy-spanning struggle pits the Galactic Patrol against an inscrutable, malevolent enemy. In a war of planetary scales, one man’s telepathic Lens and indomitable will define the future of Civilization.
You Never Know Your Luck
Gilbert Parker
A man’s past in Ireland collides with his present on the Canadian prairie when an unopened letter—and a meddling, spirited woman—force a reckoning with the wife he abandoned years before.
The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon
Josephine Daskam Bacon
A physician observes the fragile, often invisible boundaries between sanity and secret lives, witnessing how the human heart unravels when society’s expectations become an unbearable cage.
A Gamble with Life
Silas K. (Silas Kitto) Hocking
A desperate inventor stakes his future on a risky legal bet, only to find that winning his life's work means nothing if he loses his soul—and the woman he loves.
Voodoo Planet
Andre Norton
A Terran space trader steps into a high-stakes duel of minds on a lush safari world where psychological witchcraft threatens to unravel planetary order.
Such Is Life
Joseph Furphy
A wandering officer on the Australian frontier weaves a web of yarns, misread clues, and bad luck into a grand, comic tapestry of the bush.
The Confession: A Novel
Maksim Gorky
Driven by an unquenchable spiritual hunger, an orphaned peasant wanders through the dark heart of Imperial Russia in search of a true, living God—only to discover that divinity resides not in heaven, but within the collective human soul.
The Devil
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
A respectably married estate owner finds himself helplessly consumed by a secret physical obsession with a local peasant woman.
The Golden Woman: A Story of the Montana Hills
Ridgwell Cullum
A cursed orphan flees to the Montana hills, only to find that the tragedy following her might be built on human greed rather than fate.
Captivity
Leonora Eyles
A young Scottish woman marries a weak-willed medical student, enduring his alcoholism across two continents before discovering that self-sacrifice alone cannot save another soul.
Dawn
Adams, H. A., Mrs.
Bound by standard social conventions, restless souls search for spiritual harmony, authentic love, and personal purpose across a landscape of broken marriages and traditional expectations.
Pursuit
Lester Del Rey
A man wakes in terror to find months erased from his memory, pursued by invisible forces through a city that has suddenly become a lethal maze.
All Men are Ghosts
L. P. (Lawrence Pearsall) Jacks
A strange journey through human perception, where the lines between the living, the dead, and the imagined dissolve entirely.
St. Peter's Umbrella: A Novel
Kálmán Mikszáth
A single, forgotten piece of red silk transforms a dusty Hungarian village into a place of miracles while a young lawyer hunts down a lost fortune, only to find something far more valuable.
North of Fifty-Three
Bertrand W. Sinclair
When a woman is forced out of her quiet life by social hypocrisy and the cold calculations of a city, she finds herself stranded far beyond the reaches of civilization—where survival demands a brutal choice between pride and freedom.
The Summons
A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
A tragedy of duty and devotion, this First World War novel maps how personal ambition and national service collide across continents and hearts.
Egholm and his God
Johannes Buchholtz
In a damp, provincial Denmark, an erratic inventor wrestles with debt, religious sects, and his own grandiose ambitions, dragging his long-suffering family through a life of perpetual upheaval.
The lovable liar
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
A mysterious letter and a five-thousand-dollar reward draw two wandering cowboys into a lawless valley where cattle disappear from locked pens and nobody tells the truth.
Life in a Thousand Worlds
W. S. (William Shuler) Harris
A mortal traveler is swept across the cosmos in a flash, discovering wildly varied civilizations—from giant trust-plagued worlds to winged utopias—before beholding the ultimate structural and spiritual glory of Heaven itself.
The Peacemaker
Alfred Coppel
In an era of interplanetary division, a ruthless space pirate unites humanity against a common enemy: himself.
Burned Bridges
Bertrand W. Sinclair
The wilderness tests a man’s character when the life he was prepared for suddenly falls away. Here, the challenge of the North strips a sheltered soul to his core, revealing the strength hidden beneath his habits.
In God's Way: A Novel
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
This novel explores the friction between rigid religious dogma and the messy, vital reality of human connection. It is a portrait of a changing society where inherited traditions clash with the emerging language of science and individual autonomy.
The Moccasin Maker
E. Pauline Johnson
In these vivid Canadian stories, indigenous strength and European tradition meet, collide, and reshape one another along the wild frontier.
The Fallen Star, or, the History of a False Religion by E.L. Bulwer
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
The humble and the ambitious are easily led astray, for history proves that humanity’s inherent craving for mystery and miracles consistently outweighs its commitment to demonstrated truth.
From the Five Rivers
Flora Annie Webster Steel
HOOK These stories capture the vibrant, dust-swept rhythms of Punjab village life, where ancient traditions and modern pressures collide with startling, human intimacy.
Marzio's Crucifix, and Zoroaster
F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford
A volatile Roman artisan descends into the madness of his own jealousies, while in a distant, ancient empire, a philosopher-priest discovers that love and faith are far more fragile than his own rigid intellect.
The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen
Elizabeth Von Arnim
Walking the perimeter of Rügen is an exercise in freedom for a woman who finds her spirit deified by the rhythms of the road. She seeks the quiet beauty of the Baltic, but finds the human landscape far more complicated than the scenery.
The monk and the hangman's daughter
Ambrose Bierce
This tale of devotion and ruin explores the thin, dangerous line between spiritual ecstasy and human obsession. It serves as a haunting meditation on how the most fervent piety can mask, or even catalyze, a tragic, earthly destruction.
The Consolidator
Daniel Defoe
A traveler journeys to the Moon and discovers a society whose political maneuvers, religious infighting, and absurdities mirror our own, held together by a mysterious machine known as the Consolidator.
The Blood of the Arena
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
The life of a celebrity bullfighter is a dance with death, played out before a bloodthirsty crowd that craves his grace as much as his destruction.
On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands
August Strindberg
This is a stark, philosophical portrait of a man seeking intellectual refuge on the remote Baltic islands, only to find his isolation—and his sanity—tested by the friction of human connection.
The Bright Messenger
Algernon Blackwood
The mystery of existence finds a startling, non-human manifestation in this exploration of consciousness that defies the boundaries of traditional reality. It challenges the reader to look beyond the mundane and recognize the vast, unseen forces that pulse beneath the surface of the world.