Free summaries
Novels — page 8
1,109 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 8 of 24.
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.
The Spy: The Story of a Superfluous Man
Maksim Gorky
Yevsey Klimkov is a man of profound insignificance, a small, timid orphan who drifts into the machinery of state oppression. He is a "superfluous man" in the truest sense, a person so devoid of agency that he becomes the perfect, hollow vessel for a regime built on suspicion and fear.
Fantasy: A Novel
Matilde Serao
A masterful study of obsession and the performative nature of suffering, this portrait of a toxic friendship dissects the psychological wreckage left by a woman who weaponizes her own melancholy.
The Wailing Asteroid
Murray Leinster
Strange, rhythmic signals begin emanating from deep space, drawing humanity’s attention to a mysterious, abandoned fortress on a distant asteroid. A small group of resourceful individuals journeys to this site, discovering that the silent base holds the key to Earth’s survival against a looming, cosmic threat.
Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath
Ben Hecht
A descent into a fevered, solipsistic consciousness, this narrative follows an artist who attempts to replace the external world with a singular, self-constructed reality. It is a work of intense, claustrophobic interiority that traces the fragile boundary between creative genius and total psychic collapse.
The Jameson Satellite
Neil R. Jones
HOOK Seeking immortality, a scientist launches his body into orbit. Forty million years later, he is revived not as a man, but as a mechanical mind trapped in an eternal, metallic existence.
Null-ABC
H. Beam Piper
The collapse of civilization leaves humanity in a dark age where reading is a guarded privilege, sparking a desperate shadow war to reclaim the power of the written word.
The Poison Tree: A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal
Bankimacandra Cattopadhyaya
A man’s infidelity seeds a quiet, domestic tragedy that slowly dismantles his household, testing the limits of devotion and the heavy price of personal desire.
The pretty sister of José: 1889
Frances Hodgson Burnett
A young woman’s pride and cold indifference are shattered by an obsessive, all-consuming passion that she struggles to suppress, eventually driving her toward a desperate surrender.
Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland
Olive Schreiner
A soldier’s solitary night in the African wilderness becomes a moral crucible when a mysterious stranger confronts him with the reality of his colonial brutality. This haunting narrative explores the high cost of choosing conscience over convenience.
The Right of Way
Gilbert Parker
A brilliant, cold-hearted lawyer is left for dead and begins a new life as a humble, anonymous tailor in a remote French-Canadian village, forced to confront the soul he once denied.
The Visions of Dom Francisco de Quevedo Villegas
Francisco de Quevedo
The world is a stage where the actors wear masks of virtue to conceal rot. Through a series of phantasmagorical journeys, the hypocrisy of human society is laid bare, leaving no profession or pretense unpunished.
The Dragon Painter
Sidney McCall
The wild genius of the mountains meets the refined tradition of the city, sparking a love that defies the boundaries between the living, the dead, and the divine.
The Street Called Straight
Basil King
An elegant, troubled young woman faces a sudden collapse of her family's fortune, forcing her to confront the raw truth of her social standing and the depth of her own hidden heart.
![Cover of Home Life in Russia, Volumes 1 and 2: [Dead Souls]](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/home-life-in-russia-volumes-1-and-2-dead-souls-nikolai-vasilevich-gogol.webp)
Home Life in Russia, Volumes 1 and 2: [Dead Souls]
Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol
A quietly devastating portrait of provincial greed masquerading as respectable ambition, where dead souls are bought for cold profit.
Invaders from the Infinite
Campbell, John W., Jr. (John Wood)
A trio of Earth scientists crisscrosses the cosmos to acquire unimaginable super-weapons and save the galaxy from an unstoppable alien battle fleet.
Jacob's Ladder
E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
Bankrupt on a bright July morning, a soft-hearted former clerk overnight inherits a fortune from an oil speculation, launching him into a swift succession of financial swindles, social schemes, and unrequited courtships across Europe and America.
Star of India
Alice Perrin
A young woman’s impulsive marriage to a distant, older colonial official leads to a suffocating life in India, where she must choose between duty, social scandal, and a forbidden love.
The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
A man saved from the brink of despair journeys beyond the veil of death, where he witnesses a final, cosmic reckoning between a hunter and his prey. This strange vision challenges the hierarchy of the living and the dead, questioning whether humanity’s dominion over nature carries a moral weight that extends into…
A Columbus of Space
Garrett Putman Serviss
Bound together by an extraordinary secret, four men board an experimental craft and embark on a daring expedition beyond the edge of Earth's atmosphere.
In the Permanent Way
Flora Annie Webster Steel
A white watchman stands vigil at an Indian church; a driver sleeps aboard a runaway train; a sightless musician touches a dead keyboard.
Marie Tarnowska
Annie Vivanti
A woman’s confession from a prison cell reveals the descent of a high-born Russian countess into a web of manipulation, obsession, and murder. This psychological chronicle explores the fine line between tragic impulse and cold-blooded crime.
Rustlers' roost
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
A crooked-nosed convict undergoes facial reconstruction after a brutal escape attempt, returning under an assumed identity to protect the woman he loves and untangle a web of frontier corruption.
The Gallery
Rog Phillips
A young scholar returns to his small hometown to help his aunt, only to discover that every corner of the village is being quietly observed, recorded, and preserved inside animated portraits.
The World That Couldn't Be
Clifford D. Simak
A single rogue predator can ruin a alien harvest, but hunting it across an untamed world reveals a secret that upends everything a human planter knows about life.
Harum Scarum's Fortune
Esmè Stuart
A young heiress's generous spirit disrupts high society when she decides her fortune belongs to everyone but herself.
Stand by for Mars!
Carey Rockwell
Three disparate teenagers enter Space Academy, face ruthless exams, survive a harrowing rescue mission, and endure a grueling march across the Martian desert to become a unified rocket crew.
Anything You Can Do
Randall Garrett
A heavily modified human agent descends into the dark, ruined subways of Manhattan to face a formidable alien predator on equal physical terms.
Earth Alert!
Kris Neville
An unassuming heiress and a telepathically brainwashed mutant clash in a covert battle for the fate of humanity when an alien space station threatens to conquer Earth.
I.N.R.I.: A prisoner's Story of the Cross
Peter Rosegger
In a dark prison cell, a condemned man writes his way toward light, re-imagining the life of Christ not through dogma, but through the tender, wounded eyes of a soul seeking ultimate redemption.
Leon Roch: A Romance, vol. 1 (of 2)
Benito Pérez Galdós
A high-minded husband and a fanatically pious wife locked in a bitter marriage find their ideals disintegrating under the pressures of Madrid society.
The Dreamer of Dreams
Marie, Queen, consort of Ferdinand I, King of Romania
Driven by an obsessive quest to capture a vision of perfect beauty, a talented young court painter abandons fame, comfort, and royal favor to wander through a mythic world of trials, tragic enchantment, and ultimate spiritual grace.