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All free summaries — page 276
34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 276 of 714.
Prince and Heretic
Marjorie Bowen
Two brothers, a fragile marriage, and the shadow of an empire converge as a young prince stakes everything to challenge the world's most terrifying tyranny.
Prose Fancies (Second Series)
Richard Le Gallienne
To find wonder in a world choked with routine, one must look past the grey roofs of the everyday and learn to see with the luminous, defiant eyes of an artist.
St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student
Edward Berdoe
Behind the grand facade of Victorian charity lies a chilling reality: public hospitals where impoverished patients are treated as mere disposable material for medical experimentation.
St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century
William Godwin
A French nobleman sacrifices his family and peace of mind when he accepts the double-edged gift of the philosopher’s stone and eternal youth from a dying stranger.
Strange Stories of the Great River: The Adventures of a Boy Explorer
Abbie Johnston Grosvenor
A spirited French boy traverses the unmapped wilderness of the Mississippi River, serving explorers, surviving capture, and witnessing the birth of a continental empire.
The Adventures of Bob White
Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess
When a clear, persistent whistle echoes across the Green Meadows, it signals both a cheery worker helping in the fields and a wary prey target dodging lurking predators.
The Art of Bookbinding: A practical treatise, with plates and diagrams
Joseph William Zaehnsdorf
Mastering the craft of binding printed pages into enduring, beautiful volumes demands meticulous attention to structural integrity, material selection, and decorative precision.
The Athelings
Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
Three siblings in a modest 19th-century London suburb navigate unexpected fame, mysterious aristocrats, and a life-changing inheritance case that tests their loyalties, romantic devotion, and family bonds.
The Babylonian Story of the Deluge as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh: The Discovery of the Tablets at Nineveh by Layard, Rassam and Smith
Budge, E. A. Wallis (Ernest Alfred Wallis), Sir
Unburied clay tablets from ancient Assyria reveal humanity’s oldest preserved myth of a world-ending flood and a hero’s desperate search for eternal life.
The Barbarism of Berlin
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
When a nation tears up its own solemn pledges, it abandons not just its honour, but the foundational principles that allow civilized society to exist.
The battles of the British Army
Robert Melvin Blackwood
Men march across continents to expand and hold an empire, facing horrific fusillades, hand-to-hand combat, and crushing losses in a centuries-long succession of bloody campaigns that shaped Great Britain's global domain.
The Black Box
E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
A trail of mysterious thefts, missing bones, and sudden violence draws an urban criminologist into a shadowy web where no suspect is quite what they seem.
The Captain's Story
Unknown
A wandering son flees his father's godly authority, suffers terrible maritime disasters, and spends decades believing he is cursed before finding divine grace and unexpected reconciliation.
The Culprit Fay, and Other Poems
Joseph Rodman Drake
A disgraced fairy battles river imps and storm demons across the Hudson Valley to restore his glowing wings and reclaim his place among the stars.
The First Quarter-Century of Steam Locomotives in North America: Remaining Relics and Operable Replicas with a Catalog of Locomotive Models in the U. S. National Museum. United States National Museum Bulletin 210
Smith Hempstone Oliver
An essential reference work for transit history enthusiasts, this catalog meticulously surveys the earliest surviving steam engines and operable replicas that forged North America's pioneer rail network.
The Girls of Chequertrees
Marion St. John Webb
Four young women are given fifty pounds, a country house, and six months without supervision, subject to a single rule: leave the locked room untouched.
The Heavenly Twins
Sarah Grand
Her rebellious mind was shaped by books her parents never thought to supervise, but her heart was broken by the quiet, accepted corruptions of the men her world insisted she must honor.
The Point Of Honor: A Military Tale
Joseph Conrad
Driven by an absurd, unyielding grudge, two French officers pursue a private duel across two decades of the Napoleonic Wars. They fight between grand battles, through ice and dust, transforming a trivial insult into a lifelong obsession.
The Quadroon: Adventures in the Far West
Mayne Reid
A sweeping tale of love, legal treachery, and flight across the Antebellum South, Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel pits romantic devotion against the cruel machinery of human chattel slavery.
The Quest of the Sacred Slipper
Sax Rohmer
A stolen Islamic relic unleashes a blood-drenched trail of unseen assassins across London, drawing an ordinary pressman into a deadly clash of faith and greed.
The Story of Ireland
Emily Lawless
A murky path beset with hidden pitfalls and fierce controversies invites only those willing to navigate its turns without total certainty. To guide others down it requires accepting that some histories retain their darkness despite every effort to illuminate them.
The Surgeon's Daughter
Walter Scott
A young Scottish surgeon travels from the quiet streets of his village to the dangerous, gilded courts of India in search of the woman he loves, battling treachery and betrayal to save her from a horrifying fate.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
William Shakespeare
Two lifelong friends venture out into the world only to find their devotion fractured by the sudden spell of love, betrayal, and disguise.
Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship
Victor Appleton
A brilliant young inventor faces foreign espionage when his latest creation—a massive, heavily armed flying fortress built for national defense—becomes the target of saboteurs.
Woman in Modern Society
Earl Barnes
Evolution drives human development toward specialized, complementary halves, making the search for biological and personal unity the core shaping force of civilization.
Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century
Alice Clark
Centuries of English economic transformation trace a profound shift: as home-centered industries yielded to modern capitalism, women were systematically excluded from productive enterprise and financial independence.
A Book of Dartmoor: Second Edition
S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
A vast granite tableland in the West of England, swept by harsh winds and heavy rains, preserves the traces of ancient human occupation alongside the lives of its modern inhabitants.
Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 2, September, 1905
Various
A tapestry of urban excess, high-stakes finance, and tragic romance captures the glittering surface and dark undercurrents of turn-of-the-century American life.
An Outback Marriage: A Story of Australian Life
A. B. (Andrew Barton) Paterson
A high-spirited young heiress arrives in the Australian bush to claim her estate, only to ignite a fierce range-war over land, legacy, and true identity.
Ancient Rome: The Lives of Great Men
Mary Agnes Hamilton
Ancient Rome survived external enemies through raw endurance, but its internal democracy dissolved under the weight of personal ambition, military genius, and class division.
Animals of the Past
Frederic A. (Frederic Augustus) Lucas
Earth’s ancient past holds a staggering record of forgotten life, preserved only through stony prints, petrified bones, and delicate impressions left behind in soft mud millions of years ago.
Anthropology
A. L. (Alfred Louis) Kroeber
Human culture grows not through sudden, miraculous bounds, but through the slow, interconnected drift of shared inventions, shifting habits, and inherited traits.
Aunt Caroline's Dixieland recipes
Emma McKinney
This collection of traditional Southern recipes codifies the intuitive kitchen wisdom of the old plantation south into precise, accessible instructions for the twentieth-century household.
Beaumont and Fletcher's Works, Vol. 06 of 10
John Fletcher
A vibrant collection of Jacobean dramatic works ranges from high-stakes royal tragedies and heroic ancient wars to meta-theatrical comedies and tale of far-flung romantic intrigue.
Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions
Henry Festing Jones
Sun-drenched, episodic, and richly observant, this warm travelogue captures early twentieth-century Sicily not through monumental ruins, but through the vibrant, theatrical lives of its local inhabitants.
Castillo de San Marcos: A Guide to Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, Florida
United States. National Park Service
Built on the coquina shores of Saint Augustine, a solitary stone fortress endured pirate raids, imperial sieges, and changing flags over three centuries of struggle for control of North America.
Children of the lens
E. E. (Edward Elmer) Smith
A intergalactic war spanning millions of years culminates in a clash between ultimate mental powers across multiple dimensions and hidden worlds.
Domestic service
Lucy Maynard Salmon
Reforming household labor requires dismantling rigid social hierarchies and placing domestic work on the same scientific and economic footing as any other modern industry.
Fiends, Ghosts, and Sprites: Including an Account of the Origin and Nature of Belief in the Supernatural
John Netten Radcliffe
An investigation into human credulity traces how ancient mythologies, optical illusions, and neurological ticks conspire to convert ordinary natural phenomena into ghosts, devils, and mischievous sprites.
From Makin to Bougainville: Marine Raiders in the Pacific War
Jon T. Hoffman
Born from political pressure and elite combat ideals, special amphibious units fight through the Pacific, proving their mettle before institutional expansion renders them obsolete.
History of the Prophet Joseph, by His Mother
Lucy Smith
A mother records the extraordinary spiritual rise, relentless persecutions, and violent murder of her sons in early nineteenth-century America.
Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Washington Irving
Washington Irving
A comprehensive roadmap to an expansive literary legacy, organizing decades of American wilderness adventure, European lore, and historical chronicles.
Mr. Punch's Railway Book
Unknown
A chaotic iron track stretches across Victorian Britain, binding highborn snobs, nervous commuters, and pugilistic strangers in shared, noisy, and perpetually delayed compartments.
Niece Catherine
Mary Hampden
When an orphan's integrity collides with her wealthy family's long-standing feud, love and plain dealing prove far more persuasive than gold.
On Sunset Highways: A Book of Motor Rambles in California
Thos. D. (Thomas Dowler) Murphy
An open road through early twentieth-century California reveals a landscape of towering Sierras, sun-baked desert valleys, and fragile historic missions, all experienced through the front seat of a pioneer motor car.
Popular British Ballads, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 (of 4)
Unknown
These traditional verses pull readers straight into a visceral landscape of fierce loyalties, bloody betrayals, tragic romances, and supernatural horrors.
Queens of the Renaissance
M. Beresford Ryley
Six portraits of remarkable women trace the emergence, triumph, and spiritual fracturing of the European Renaissance through the intimate realities of private character and public trial.
Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots in July, 1877: Read in the Senate and House of Representatives May 23, 1878
Pennsylvania. General Assembly. Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots in July, 1877
A nation’s rapid industrial expansion collides with its working class, turning miles of rail into a battleground and leaving a major city’s freight yards in ashes.