Free summaries
Novels — page 4
1,233 public-domain novels books, summarised. Page 4 of 26.
The World's Greatest Books
Unknown
A room of old books has its own atmosphere, but a room of book summaries feels like a crowded salon where every shelf speaks at once.
Carmen Ariza
Charles Francis Stocking
A young girl's unwavering spiritual clarity transforms lives and shatters corporate and clerical corruption across two continents.
The Nürnberg Stove
Ouida
A poor Tyrolese boy clings so fiercely to his family’s antique majolica stove that he hides within its hollow body when it is sold, riding it blindly across frozen Germany into the presence of the king.
Shadows of Flames: A Novel
Amélie Rives
A woman's youth is burned away by two bad marriages before she learns that love without freedom is only a trap.
Another ace for Ananias
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
The truth is the most dangerous weapon in a liar’s arsenal, especially when the target is a group of imaginative, fast-talking cowboys. This rollicking Western farce chronicles a tangled web of tall tales that spirals into an uncontrollable, hilarious catastrophe.
My Brilliant Career
Miles Franklin
A fiercely independent young woman rebels against the crushing limitations of her rural life, only to discover that her aspirations for intellectual and artistic freedom are constantly thwarted by the harsh realities of poverty.
Assisting Ananias
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
This is a rollicking Western tall tale that follows three desperate drifters as they attempt a preposterous confidence scheme. It captures the frantic, dust-choked energy of a frontier yarn where the truth is merely a flexible starting point for a better story.
First Lensman
E. E. (Edward Elmer) Smith
HOOK The Galactic Patrol fights for the survival of civilization against an unseen, malevolent enemy, armed only with the mysterious, psychic power of the Lens.
Max Havelaar
Multatuli
HOOK A blistering indictment of colonial exploitation masquerading as a novel, this work dismantles the self-satisfied morality of the Dutch empire through the lens of a disgraced official’s desperate, doomed crusade for justice in Java.
We of the Never-Never
Jeannie Gunn
HOOK This is a vivid, autobiographical account of a city-bred woman’s year living in the heart of the Australian Northern Territory, where harsh wilderness and human warmth collide.
The Prose Tales of Alexander Pushkin
Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
This collection of prose fiction captures the soul of nineteenth-century Russia, blending romantic idealism with a sharp, often fatalistic eye for social reality. These stories move between the rigid hierarchies of the imperial court and the lawless chaos of the frontier, painting a portrait of a nation in flux.
Youth
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
A young nobleman steps across the threshold of early manhood, where his high-minded resolutions instantly collide with the petty vanity, social anxiety, and awkward missteps of daily life.
![Cover of Yama [The Pit], a Novel in Three Parts](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/yama-the-pit-a-novel-in-three-parts-a-i-aleksandr-ivanovich-kuprin.webp)
Yama [The Pit], a Novel in Three Parts
A. I. (Aleksandr Ivanovich) Kuprin
Behind the glowing facades of a provincial red-light district lies a world of routine transaction, institutionalized cruelty, and the fragile humanity of women trapped within it.
Deathworld
Harry Harrison
A high-stakes gambler travels to a deadly alien world where every plant, animal, and weather pattern is locked in an escalating war against human settlers.
Space Viking
H. Beam Piper
A aristocratic wedding on the cloud-veiled world of Gram ends in blood, launching a lifelong pursuit across two hundred billion cubic light-years of collapsing galactic civilization.
The Cryptogram: A Novel
James De Mille
A deathbed promise binds an aristocratic youth and an heiress into a sudden marriage, setting off a sprawling, continent-spanning drama of stolen identities, coded papers, and dark family secrets. <Image alt="Ruins of an ancient castle along a river bank surrounded by lush greenery" caption="An ancient English…
The Created Legend
Fyodor Sologub
HOOK This dreamlike narrative explores how a sensitive soul navigates the wreckage of a failed revolution by constructing a private, legendary reality against the encroaching chaos of a crumbling imperial order.
The Time Traders
Andre Norton
The shadow of an encroaching, hostile power drives a young man into a clandestine experiment to defend the course of human history. Through the veil of time, he finds himself caught in a desperate, secret struggle.
Mother
Maksim Gorky
The factory whistle bellows, the smoke-begrimed streets teem with exhausted laborers, and a quiet woman finds herself drawn into a dangerous, clandestine world of awakening. This is a story of a mother who moves from fear to a fierce, transcendent courage as her son embraces the revolutionary cause.
A Dog of Flanders
Ouida
A boy of rare artistic promise and his loyal dog face a world that offers them only cold indifference. Their bond becomes their sole refuge as they endure poverty, social ostracism, and the crushing weight of unfulfilled dreams.
A Witch Shall Be Born
Robert E. (Robert Ervin) Howard
A warrior betrayed and left to die upon a cross returns to exact a brutal, calculated vengeance against the usurper who stole a queen’s throne.
Promoting Polecat Perkins
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
A band of hard-luck cowboys attempts a hilariously ill-conceived scheme to pass off a skunk-trapper as a missing millionaire. It is a raucous, dust-covered romp through the culture clash of the Wild West and the urban East.
The Man Who Was Afraid
Maksim Gorky
Money, pride, and an aching conscience tear a young merchant apart along the banks of the Volga River.
Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of Home
Bayard Taylor
A society reveals its true heart when its accepted rules are pushed to their logical, absurd, or heartbreaking limits.
Giants' bread
Agatha Christie
A young composer's rise and fall, a family's unraveling, and the enduring power of music.
The Awakening: (The Resurrection)
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
A careless court sentence sends an innocent woman to Siberia, compelling the wealthy nobleman whose past betrayal ruined her to follow her into exile and rebuild his soul.
The Devourers
Annie Vivanti
A genius-child is a devouring creature, feeding upon the blood, youth, and ambitions of the mother who yields her life to sustain it.
Slow Burn
Henry Still
A sabotaged space station hurtles toward a fiery atmospheric death after a vindictive politician triggers a disaster. With no rescue rocket and limited options, ninety men must find a way to defy physics and survive.**
The Lady of the Shroud
Bram Stoker
A wealthy traveler inherits a remote mountain kingdom, only to find himself ensnared in a haunting, ancient mystery involving a beautiful woman who appears in a burial shroud.
Star Born
Andre Norton
A young colonist on a distant planet and a stranded interstellar pilot must unite to thwart a technologically superior, long-hidden enemy. This classic space adventure explores the collision between ancient alien legacies and human survival.
The Fighting Chance
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
In the gilded, restless world of New York’s high society, an heir to a crumbling fortune and a woman burdened by a cynical family legacy must decide if they possess the strength to save one another from self-destruction.
The Defenders
Philip K. Dick
Humanity has retreated beneath the surface to survive a planetary war, leaving robotic "leadys" to wage the conflict above. But when a scout team ventures to the surface, they discover a shocking, peaceful reality.
The Triumph of Death
Gabriele D'Annunzio
The desire to possess another person entirely, to the exclusion of all else, leads inevitably toward a hollow, self-destructive end. This is a story of how a consuming obsession with physical intimacy can mirror the decay of the soul.
O. T., A Danish Romance
H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen
The life of a young man is defined by the secret of his birth, a burden he carries like a physical mark beneath his clothes. This story explores how the shadow of an unhappy origin shapes a man’s identity, his friendships, and his capacity for love.
Rudin: A Novel
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
An eloquent, restless intellectual arrives in a provincial Russian society, igniting hearts and minds before his inability to ground his ideals in action leads to a quiet, inevitable tragedy.
The World's Greatest Books
Unknown
This collection serves as a sweeping survey of the nineteenth-century literary imagination, acting as a curated gateway to the foundational novels of the Western canon. It provides a vital glimpse into the storytelling traditions that shaped the modern reader’s understanding of fiction.
The Tenants of Malory, Volume 1
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
A secluded estate holds a desperate secret, drawing a young man into a web of political scandal, forbidden romance, and the encroaching shadows of a ruined family’s past.
The Lani People
Jesse F. (Jesse Franklin) Bone
A young veterinarian takes a job on a distant, isolated planet, only to discover that the "livestock" he has been hired to manage are actually a subjugated, forgotten branch of humanity.
Married
August Strindberg
Marriage is a fragile, often brutal experiment, where the initial intoxication of romance frequently yields to the grinding friction of social expectation, economic strain, and the slow erosion of individual identity.
Where Love is There God is Also
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
The shoemaker who spends his days watching the world through a street-level window finds that the divine is not found in grand gestures, but in the humble acts of service he performs for his neighbors.
The Red Room
August Strindberg
An idealistic young man arrives in the capital, only to find that in a world of charlatans and institutions, truth is a commodity to be bought and sold by the highest bidder.
I Walked in Arden
Jack Randall Crawford
An earnest, reflective chronicle of an Anglo-American marriage, this narrative traces the intersections of youthful ambition, the harsh realities of industrial enterprise, and the endurance of love against the backdrop of changing times.
The Witch of Prague: A Fantastic Tale
F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford
A woman of immense, occult power in old Prague trades her soul for the man she loves, only to find that manipulating reality cannot command the human heart.
Planet of the Damned
Harry Harrison
A desperate, high-stakes countdown forces a trained empathetic to confront a hostile alien culture, ultimately questioning the nature of humanity and the responsibilities we owe one another.
Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record
Percy Greg
Driven across space by a novel anti-gravitational force, a Victorian traveler reaches Mars, only to find a hyper-rational, cold paradise where secret spiritualists wage a quiet war for the human soul.
The meddler
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
A newcomer with an eye for trouble rides into a cattle town to untangle a web of robbery and murder.
Storm Over Warlock
Andre Norton
An isolated survivor of an alien massacre must navigate a strange, telepathic world alongside genetically modified wolverines to turn the tide against a ruthless enemy force.
The Water of the Wondrous Isles
William Morris
A stolen child escapes her witch captor in a magical boat, navigating strange islands and noble quests to discover her own identity, true love, and freedom.