Free summaries
Adventure — page 20
3,494 public-domain adventure books, summarised. Page 20 of 73.
The Moon Maid
Edgar Rice Burroughs
A multigenerational struggle between freedom and tyranny begins in space and spans centuries across a subterranean lunar world and a desolate, conqueror-ravaged Earth.
The Giant Raft
Jules Verne
A family floats down the Amazon on a colossal wooden raft, completely unaware that an extortionist on board carries the secret that could save—or condemn—their patriarch.
The House of Arden: A Story for Children
E. (Edith) Nesbit
An ancient English estate, two penniless siblings, and a magic mole with a gift for turning back time drive this inventive time-travel adventure toward a choice between worldly rank and family love.
The Lone Ranche
Mayne Reid
Surrounded by desert sand and hunted across a hostile frontier, a fallen trader and a deposed officer band together to survive the high plains of New Mexico.
The Wood Beyond the World
William Morris
When an unhappily married young merchant flees his coastal city, he strays beyond the known earth into a perilous fairy-realm of sorcery, enthrallment, and true love.
Tom Swift and His Undersea Search
Victor Appleton
Deep beneath the Atlantic, a young inventor risks everything to solve two mysteries at once: locating a long-lost fortune and unmasking a ruthless fraud.
Travels in the Interior of Africa
Mungo Park
A Scottish explorer trudges across West Africa, trading cowries for passage, surviving tropical fevers, and recording the interior with observant, quiet resolve.
Children of the Frost
Jack London
A relentless Northland isolates Native dwellers and white interlopers, pitting human endurance against an unyielding wilderness and inevitable change.
The Black Buccaneer
Stephen W. (Stephen Warren) Meader
A young boy is torn from his lonely Maine island by notorious buccaneers, launching a perilous journey through capes, sea battles, and hidden gold.
The marines have landed
Giles Bishop
A young boy searches for his place in the military, trading the comforts of home for the harsh discipline and global battlefields of an elite fighting force.
Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive
Victor Appleton
A young inventor races against corporate saboteurs to build a two-mile-a-minute electric engine and save a struggling Western railroad.
The Ghost Kings
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
White and beautiful, a missionary's daughter is acclaimed by the Zulu people as the living embodiment of their heavenly goddess—only to be traded to a secretive race of tree-worshiping dwarfs.
Buccaneers and pirates of our coasts
Frank R. Stockton
Driven by raw greed and twisted codes of honor, the legendary rogues of the high seas transformed the American coastline into a blood-soaked theater of high-stakes plunder.
Jack Hardy: A Story of English Smugglers in the Days of Napoleon
Herbert Strang
Trapped between French spies, shore-bound smugglers, and the strict discipline of the Royal Navy, a young midshipman discovers that defending the English coast requires as much cunning on land as it does courage at sea.
My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands, Dictated in My Seventy-Fourth Year
George Francis Train
A restless American promoter looks back from a quiet park bench, recounting decades of global dealmaking, political radicalism, and grand infrastructural schemes that altered the nineteenth-century industrial landscape.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Part 3
Mark Twain
In a small Mississippi River town, childhood fantasy collides with brutal adult reality when a boy's midnight prank in a graveyard leaves him sole witness to a horrific murder.
The Seventh Man
Max Brand
Bound by devotion and driven by revenge, a mountain recluse takes on a relentless posse across a rugged wilderness, only to face a tragic final reckoning with the family he left behind.
Two Knapsacks: A Novel of Canadian Summer Life
John Campbell
Two young men hoist their packs for a modest Canadian walking tour, only to find their breezy summer excursion swept into a tangled web of rural intrigue, stolen dogs, regional dialects, and local romance.
The Mystery
Stewart Edward White
A ghost ship in the Pacific hides a terrifying secret, drawing a naval cruiser into an impossible mystery of lost crews, elemental power, and total annihilation.
A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe on Rivers and Lakes of Europe
John MacGregor
Alone in a custom-built oak and cedar canoe, a Victorian traveler glides along the rivers, lakes, and canals of Western Europe. Every turn of the water brings quiet solitary reflection, swirling rapids, or sudden crowds of astonished onlookers.
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main
Howard Pyle
A grim, authentic portrait of the Golden Age of Piracy, where real-world greed and sudden violence strip the romance from the high seas.
Maid Marian
Thomas Love Peacock
A fugitive wedding, a besieged castle, and a forest democracy bound by wine and archers turn the Robin Hood legend into a witty celebration of freedom.
Si Klegg, Book 3: Si and Shorty Meet Mr. Rosenbaum, the Spy, Who Relates His Adventures
John McElroy
When two Indiana infantrymen encounter a shadowy spy network in Civil War Tennessee, ordinary picket duty turns into a chaotic gauntlet of backwoods rogues, high-stakes gambling, and unexpected courtships.
Submarine U93
Charles Gilson
A orphaned British teenager in New York longs to fight for his homeland, only to fall into the crosshairs of a ruthless espionage network operating on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Story of Baden-Powell: 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps'
Harold Begbie
A buoyant Victorian youth grows into a fearless officer whose boundless humor, keen observation, and resourceful leadership transform him into an iconic military hero during the siege of Mafeking. <Image alt="Portrait of Robert Baden-Powell" caption="Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell"…
A Tour Through South America
A. S. (Archibald Stevenson) Forrest
An expansive, vivid trek across a continent on the cusp of modern industrial transformation, capturing wild landscapes, ruined empires, and bustling frontier societies.
Big Game Shooting, volume 2 (of 2)
Clive Phillipps-Wolley
Tracking a phantom beast through dense pine ravines demands absolute stillness, deep patience, and an appetite for cold terrain.
Gulliver of Mars
Edwin Lester Arnold
A disillusioned American navy officer travels across space to an ancient, decaying Mars, where he fights savage conquerors and falls in love with a fleeting alien princess.
History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. 1.: To the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Performed During the Years 1804-5-6
Meriwether Lewis
In the spring of 1804, a small contingent of soldiers and boatmen rowed up the Missouri River into an unmapped continent. This volume records their daily struggle against swift currents, harsh weather, and the sheer immensity of the American West.
Jerry Todd and the Oak Island Treasure
Leo Edwards
A midnight escape on a stolen clay scow, a disguised piano leg, and a band of small-town boys facing down a ruthless criminal bring this classic midwestern adventure to life.
Maurice Tiernay, Soldier of Fortune
Charles Lever
An orphaned street boy navigates the blood-soaked chaos of Revolutionary France, forging a perilous career as an opportunistic soldier across the battlefields and battlements of Napoleonic Europe.
Shackleton's Last Voyage: The Story of the Quest
Frank Wild
A leader’s sudden passing in icy waters leaves an expedition without its guiding star, forcing a resilient crew to press onward through the Antarctic pack.
Tom Cringle's Log
Michael Scott
An eager thirteen-year-old midshipman sets sail into the high-stakes, powder-charred waters of the West Indies during the Napoleonic Wars, coming of age amidst roaring sea battles, tropical fevers, privateers, and the vibrant, unpredictable life of the Caribbean.
Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-69
Edward Whymper
Scaling jagged, untamed peaks demands relentless physical grit, a keen eye for terrain, and an unflinching acceptance of deadly risk.
The Captain of the Wight: A Romance of Carisbrooke Castle in 1488
Frank Cowper
A high-spirited teenager leaves his ancestral home to serve a famous lord, plunging into a world of knightly tournaments, dark family secrets, and a doomed military expedition across the English Channel.
The mystery of Easter island: the story of an expedition
Katherine Routledge
Setting sail in a private yacht on the eve of the First World War, an intrepid couple embarks on a voyage to Easter Island to solve the enduring mystery of its giant stone sentinels.
The Tiger of Mysore: A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
To a young Englishman in the late eighteenth century, India is an expanse of rumor and peril, where a father can vanish into thin air and a hostile tyrant rules from the fortress of Seringapatam.
Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos (Vol. 2 of 2): During the Years 1858, 1859, and 1860
Henri Mouhot
A mid-nineteenth-century European explorer braves dense jungles, lethal fevers, and unpredictable mountain passes to chart the ancient temples, hidden waterways, and interior kingdoms of Southeast Asia.
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
These tales, salvaged from the margins of history, offer a window into a world where the boundaries between the marvelous and the mundane are as fluid as the shifting desert sands.
The Adventures of Dick Trevanion: A Story of Eighteen Hundred and Four
Herbert Strang
Threatened by war, debt, and localized corruption, a Cornish youth steps forward to rescue his home.
When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
Three English gentlemen on a South Pacific voyage stumble upon a buried subterranean kingdom, awakening a tyrant who holds the power to end human civilization.
Stories from the Faerie Queen, Told to the Children
Edmund Spenser
Adventure and enchantment collide in this retelling of classic tales, where noble knights, steadfast princesses, and mythical creatures navigate a world governed by the struggle between shadow and light.
The Way of a Man
Emerson Hough
A man caught between the traditions of the antebellum South and the raw, untamed reality of the expanding West finds his life irrevocably altered by a single, fateful encounter.
The Young Marooners on the Florida Coast
F. R. (Francis Robert) Goulding
A group of young people, separated from their families during a coastal excursion, must rely on their wits and the natural resources of a wild island to survive and eventually secure their own rescue.
Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer
W. C. (William Charles) Scully
The young man who left Ireland for the South African frontier in the late 1860s did not know that he was walking into a transformation that would turn a quiet, bucolic landscape into an engine of global empire.
The Gringos: A Story Of The Old California Days In 1849
B. M. Bower
The lawless fervor of the 1849 Gold Rush transforms men into savages, forcing two friends to navigate the brutal justice of the California frontier and the complex loyalties of a changing land.
Trading Jeff and His Dog
Jim Kjelgaard
A resourceful young peddler finds himself entangled in a mountain feud, testing his wits and his loyalty to a massive, haunted dog. This is a story of independence, unlikely friendship, and the collision between rural traditions and the modern world.
The Golden Bough
George Gibbs
The world of international espionage meets the atmosphere of a dark, ancient fairy tale in this tension-filled story of a man caught in a web of shifting loyalties.