title stringlengths 1 220 | author stringlengths 4 59 ⌀ | pub_year int64 398 2.01k ⌀ | summary stringlengths 11 58k |
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Against a Dark Background | Iain Banks | 1,993 | Seven of the original eight Lazy Guns were destroyed before the events of Against a Dark Background. One disappeared with its user when he tried to fire it at the local sun, one suffered a lucky strike during an air raid, two self destructed when investigators tried to take them apart and another was destroyed by an a... |
Just Like That | Lily Brett | 1,994 | Edek Zepler is a Holocaust survivor who was born Edek Zeleznikow in Łódź, Poland in 1915, where his father owned several apartment blocks. He got married in the Łódź ghetto to Rooshka but had to marry her again after the war in a DP camp in Germany. That is where their daughter, Esther, was born in 1950. In 1951 the f... |
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man | Siegfried Sassoon | 1,928 | The story is a series of episodes in the youth of George Sherston, ranging from his first attempts to learn to ride to his experiences in winning point-to-point races. The title is somewhat misleading, as the book is mainly concerned with a series of landmark events in Sherson/Sassoon's childhood and youth, and his en... |
Uncle Tom's Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe | 1,852 | The book opens with a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby facing the loss of his farm because of debts. Even though he and his wife Emily Shelby believe that they have a benevolent relationship with their slaves, Shelby decides to raise the needed funds by selling two of them—Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife a... |
The Beach | Alex Garland | 1,996 | In a cheap hostel on Khao San Road in Bangkok, Richard, a young English traveller, meets a strange Scotsman going by the pseudonym of Daffy Duck who leaves him a hand-drawn map of a supposed hidden beach located in the Gulf of Thailand that is inaccessible to tourists. After receiving the map, Richard discovers that D... |
Murder Must Advertise | Dorothy L. Sayers | 1,933 | Wimsey accepts an offer from the highly respectable management of Pym's Publicity, Ltd. (a light disguise for S. H. Bensons, where Sayers worked) to investigate a mystery and avert a scandal. Copywriter Victor Dean has died in a fall down the spiral iron office staircase, but he left a half-finished letter to the mana... |
The Man Who Would Be King | Rudyard Kipling | null | The narrator of the story is a British journalist in India–Kipling himself, in all but name. While on a tour of some Indian native states he meets two scruffy adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan. He rather likes them, but then stops them from blackmailing a minor rajah. A few months later they appear at hi... |
A Vicious Circle | Amanda Craig | 1,996 | The novel chronicles the life of Amelia, the only daughter of newspaper tycoon Max de Monde who, after having spoiled Amelia beyond hope while she was still young, abandons her when she becomes pregnant. Amelia decides to marry Mark Crawley, the father of her child, an ambitious young critic intent on shaking off his ... |
To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1,960 | The book opens with the Finch family's ancestor, Simon Finch, a Cornish Methodist fleeing religious intolerance in England, settling in Alabama, becoming wealthy and, contrary to his religious beliefs, buying several slaves. The main story takes place during three years of the Great Depression in the fictional "tired ... |
The Emperor Jones | Eugene O'Neill | 1,920 | The play is divided into eight scenes. Scenes 2 to 7 are from the point of view of Jones, and no other character speaks. The first and last scenes feature a character named Smithers, a white trader who appears to be part of illegal activities. In the first scene, Smithers is told about the rebellion by an old woman, a... |
The Go-Between | L. P. Hartley | null | The story begins with the reminiscences of Leo Colston, an elderly man looking back on his childhood with nostalgia. Leo, in his mid-sixties, is looking through his old things. He chances upon a battered old red collar box. In it he finds a diary from 1900, the year of his thirteenth birthday. He slowly pieces togethe... |
Mildred Pierce | James M. Cain | 1,941 | Set in Glendale, California, in the 1930s, the book is the story of middle-class housewife Mildred Pierce's attempts to maintain her family's social position during the Great Depression. Mildred separates from her unfaithful, unemployed husband and sets out to support herself and her children. After a difficult search... |
A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | 1,843 | Dickens divides the book into five chapters, which he labels "staves", that is, song stanzas or verses, in keeping with the title of the book. He uses a similar device in his next two Christmas books, titling the four divisions of The Chimes, "quarters", after the quarter-hour tolling of clock chimes, and naming the p... |
About a Boy | Nick Hornby | 1,998 | The novel is about Will Freeman, a 36-year-old bachelor, and Marcus, an introverted, bullied 12-year-old who lives alone with his suicidal mother, Fiona. Will, who has never had to work thanks to the royalties from his father's hit Christmas song, "Santa's Super Sleigh," has a lot of spare time, which he spends smokin... |
The Hustler | Walter Tevis | null | After losing to Fats, Eddie could spiral down to the scrapheap, but he meets Bert Gordon, a . Bert teaches him about winning, or more particularly about losing. Tautly written, it is a treatise on how someone, with all of the skills, can lose if he "wants" to lose; how a loser is beaten by himself, not by his opponent... |
Letter from an Unknown Woman | Stefan Zweig | null | A rich and well-known writer, returning from one of many holidays to Vienna, finds a long letter from an unknown woman. As a teenager she had lived with her poor widowed mother in the same building and had fallen totally in love with both the opulent cultured lifestyle of her neighbour and the handsome charming man hi... |
Miss Lulu Bett | Zona Gale | 1,920 | The story concerns a woman, Lulu, who lives with her sister's family, essentially acting as a servant. She does not complain about her position, but is not happy. When her brother-in-law's brother, Ninian, comes to visit, there is a certain attraction between them. While joking around one evening they find themselves ... |
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions | Edwin Abbott Abbott | 1,884 | The story is about a two-dimensional world referred to as Flatland which is occupied by geometric figures. Women are simple line-segments, while men are regular polygons with various numbers of sides. The narrator is a humble square, a member of the social caste of gentlemen and professionals in a society of geometric... |
Sick Puppy | Carl Hiaasen | 2,000 | Florida's corrupt governor, Dick Artemus, pursues schemes to line his pockets and those of his rich entrepreneur backers at the expense of the environment. His schemes have always foundered in the past, but he has high hopes of a plan involving Toad Island, virtually uninhabited except for innumerable tiny toads. A fo... |
The Prisoner of Zenda | Anthony Hope | 1,894 | On the eve of the coronation of King Rudolf of Ruritania, his brother, Prince Michael, has him drugged. In a desperate attempt not to give Michael the excuse to claim the throne, Colonel Sapt and Fritz von Tarlenheim, attendants of the King, persuade his identical cousin Rudolf Rassendyll, an English visitor, to imper... |
The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1,925 | The story begins with the narrator, Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who has graduated from Yale and fought in World War I, returning home to begin a career. He is restless and has decided to move to New York to learn the bond business. The novel opens early in the summer of 1922 in West Egg, Long Island, where Nick has ... |
For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway | 1,940 | This novel is told primarily through the thoughts and experiences of the protagonist, Robert Jordan. The character was inspired by Hemingway's own experiences in the Spanish Civil War as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Robert Jordan is an American in the International Brigades who travels to Spai... |
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? | null | null | This gothic story deals with two aging sisters, Jane and Blanche Hudson, who are living alone together in a decaying Hollywood mansion. Jane, a former child star of early vaudeville known as "Baby Jane", was spoiled, pampered, and doted upon by her father due to her success; her ignored older sister, Blanche, lived in... |
From Russia with Love | Ian Fleming | 1,957 | SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence agency, plans to commit a grand act of terrorism in the intelligence field. For this, it targets British secret service agent James Bond. Due in part to his role in the defeat of Le Chiffre, Mr. Big and Hugo Drax, Bond has been listed as an enemy of the Soviet state and a "death ... |
The Tombs of Atuan | Ursula K. Le Guin | 1,971 | The story centers on a Kargish child who is taken from her family and dedicated as the high priestess in the service of the "Nameless Ones" on the island of Atuan. Her true name is Tenar, but she is renamed Arha, "the eaten one", when she is formally consecrated to the gods' service at age six, as all the high prieste... |
Good Omens | Neil Gaiman | 1,990 | It is the coming of the End Times: the Apocalypse is near, and Final Judgment will soon descend upon the human race. This comes as a bit of bad news to the angel Aziraphale (who was the angel of the Garden of Eden) and the demon Crowley (who, when he was originally named Crawly, was the serpent who tempted Eve to eat ... |
Coraline | Neil Gaiman | 2,002 | This is about a "different" girl named Coraline Jones. She and her parents move into an old house that has been subdivided into flats. The other tenants include Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two elderly women retired from the stage, and Mr. Bobinski, who is training a mouse circus. The flat beside Coraline's remains e... |
The Sandman: Dream Country | Neil Gaiman | null | Like the sixth collection, Fables and Reflections, and the eighth, Worlds' End, Dream Country consists of short stories that do not have a common storyline running through them, though it has been argued that most Sandman stories are not entirely self-contained and are part of a larger story arc that encompasses the e... |
The Sandman: Season of Mists | null | null | The fourth collection belongs with the first as perhaps one of the two collections most focused on Morpheus himself. It begins with an Endless family meeting descending almost immediately into an Endless family argument. Desire angers Morpheus by taunting him about his intolerant treatment of a former lover, whose sto... |
Interview with the Vampire | Anne Rice | 1,976 | A vampire named Louis tells his 200-year-long life story to reporter Daniel Molloy (who is only referred to as "the boy" in the novel). In 1791, Louis was a young indigo plantation owner living south of New Orleans, Louisiana. Distraught with the death of his pious brother, he seeks death in any way possible. Louis is... |
Seven Against Thebes | Aeschylus | null | When Oedipus, the king of Thebes, realized he had married his own mother and had two sons and two daughters with her, he blinded himself and cursed his sons to divide their inheritance (the kingdom) by the sword. The two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, in order to avoid bloodshed, agreed to rule Thebes in alternate year... |
Tartarin de Tarascon | Alphonse Daudet | null | It tells the burlesque adventures of Tartarin, a local hero of Tarascon, a small town in southern France, whose invented adventures and reputation as a swashbuckler finally force him to travel to a very prosaic Algiers in search of lions. Instead of finding a romantic, mysterious Oriental fantasy land, he finds a sord... |
The Sandman: The Kindly Ones | null | null | The Kindly Ones belongs with the second collection, The Doll's House, and the seventh, Brief Lives, in that it finishes off a story that mostly originated in these collections. Parts from other collections are also important to its story, however, notably elements from Season of Mists and the story of Orpheus, told mo... |
SS-GB | Len Deighton | 1,978 | It is November 1941, nine months after a German invasion led to the British surrender. Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, a British homicide detective assigned to Scotland Yard, is called in to investigate a murder of a well-dressed man in an apartment in Shepherd Market. Though the body has two gunshot wounds, ... |
Finnegans Wake | James Joyce | 1,939 | Finnegans Wake comprises 17 chapters, divided into four Books. Book I contains 8 chapters, Books II and III contain 4, and Book IV consists of only one short chapter. The chapters appear without titles, and while Joyce never provided possible chapter titles as he had done for Ulysses, he did title various sections pub... |
The Virgin Suicides | Jeffrey Eugenides | 1,993 | The Lisbons are a Catholic family living in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the 1970s. The father, Ronald, is a math teacher at a private school and the mother is a homemaker. The family has five daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese. Their lives chan... |
What Makes Sammy Run? | Budd Schulberg | 1,941 | Told in first person narrative by Al Manheim, drama critic of The New York Record, this is the tale of Sammy Glick, a young uneducated boy who rises from copy boy to the top of the screenwriting profession in 1930s Hollywood by backstabbing others. Manheim recalls how he first met the 16-year-old Sammy Glick when Samm... |
The Razor's Edge | W. Somerset Maugham | 1,944 | Maugham begins by characterising his story as not really a novel but a thinly veiled true account. He includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major players. Larry Darrell’s lifestyle is contrasted throughout the book with that of his fiancée’s uncle, Elliott Templeton,... |
Born Yesterday | Garson Kanin | null | An uncouth, corrupt rich junk dealer, Harry Brock, brings his showgirl mistress Billie Dawn with him to Washington, D.C. When Billie's ignorance becomes a liability to Brock's business dealings, he hires a journalist, Paul Verrall, to educate his girlfriend. In the process of learning, Billie Dawn realizes how corrupt... |
King Solomon's Mines | H. Rider Haggard | 1,885 | Allan Quatermain, an adventurer and white hunter based in Durban, in what is now South Africa, is approached by aristocrat Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good, seeking his help finding Sir Henry's brother, who was last seen travelling north into the unexplored interior on a quest for the fabled King Solomon's... |
Babel-17 | Samuel R. Delany | 1,966 | During an interstellar war one side develops a language, Babel-17, that can be used as a weapon. Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought. The change is made more dangerous by the language's seductive enhancement of other abilities. This is discovered by the beautiful starshi... |
The Languages of Pao | Jack Vance | null | The planet Pao is a quiet backwater with a large, homogeneous, stolid population ruled by an absolute monarch: the Panarch. The current Panarch attempts to hire an offworld scientist, Lord Palafox from the Breakness Institute on the planet Breakness, as a consultant in order to reform Pao. Before the deal can be concl... |
The Count of Monte Cristo | Auguste Maquet | 1,844 | In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young and successful merchant sailor recently granted the succession of his erstwhile captain Leclère, returns to Marseille to marry his fiancée Mercédès. Leclère, a supporter of the exiled Napoléon I, found himself dying at sea and charged Dantès to deliver two objects: a package to Marshall ... |
Cat's Cradle | Kurt Vonnegut | 1,963 | At the opening of the book, the narrator, an everyman named John (a.k.a. Jonah), describes a time when he was planning to write a book about what important Americans did on the day Hiroshima was bombed. While researching this topic, John becomes involved with the children of Felix Hoenikker, a Nobel laureate physicist... |
Excellent Women | Barbara Pym | 1,952 | The book details the everyday life of Mildred Lathbury, a spinster in her thirties in 1950s England. Perpetually self-deprecating, but with the sharpest wit, Mildred keeps busy with near-romances (her own and those of others), church jumble sales, and of course the ubiquitous cup of tea. Mildred's life grows more exci... |
The Scarlet Pimpernel | Baroness Emma Orczy | 1,905 | The Scarlet Pimpernel is set in 1792, during the early stages of the French Revolution. Marguerite St. Just, a beautiful French actress, is the wife of wealthy English fop Sir Percy Blakeney, a baronet. Before their marriage, Marguerite took revenge upon the Marquis de St. Cyr, who had ordered her brother to be beaten... |
Becket | Jean Anouilh | null | The play is a re-enactment of the conflicts between King Henry II and Thomas Becket as the latter (Henry's best friend) ascends to power, becoming the King’s enemy. Becket begins as a clever, but hedonistic, companion; as a result of being created Archbishop of Canterbury, he is transformed into an ascetic who does hi... |
The Robe | Andrew Greeley | 1,942 | The book explores the aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus through the experiences of the Roman tribune Marcellus Gallio and his Greek slave Demetrius. Prince Gaius, in an effort to rid Rome of Marcellus, banishes Marcellus to the command of the Roman garrison at Minoa, a port city in southern Palestine. In Jerusalem... |
The Closing of the American Mind | Allan Bloom | 1,987 | {|class="toccolours" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 85%; background:#white; color:black; width:30em; max-width: 40%;" cellspacing="5" |style="text-align: left;"| "Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstr... |
Murder in the Cathedral | T. S. Eliot | null | The action occurs between December 2 and December 29, 1170, chronicling the days leading up to the martyrdom of Thomas Becket following his absence of seven years in France. Becket's internal struggle is the main focus of the play. The book is divided into two parts. Part one takes place in the Archbishop Thomas Becke... |
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow | Washington Irving | 1,820 | "From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of Sleepy Hollow... A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere..." The story... |
The Thirty-nine Steps | John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir | 1,915 | Richard Hannay, the protagonist and narrator, an expatriate Scot, returns from a long stay in southern Africa to his new home, a flat in London. One night he is buttonholed by a stranger, a well-travelled American, who claims to be in fear for his life. The man appears to know of an anarchist plot to destabilise Europ... |
The Winter's Tale | William Shakespeare | 1,623 | King Leontes of Sicilia begs his childhood friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, to extend his visit to Sicilia. Polixenes protests that he has been away from his kingdom for nine months, but after Leontes' pregnant wife, Hermione, pleads with him he relents and agrees to stay a little longer. Leontes, meanwhile, has bec... |
Dead Air | Iain Banks | 2,002 | The first person narrative begins on 11 September 2001, and Banks uses the protagonist's conversations - both on the radio and off - to discuss the consequences of the terrorist attacks in the United States on that day. Ken Nott is at a loft party in London at the crucial moment. The reader hears many of Nott's shock-... |
Nibelungenlied | null | null | Though the preface to the poem promises both joyous and dark tales ahead, the Nibelungenlied is by and large a very tragic work, and these four opening verses are believed to have been a late addition to the text, composed after the body of the poem had been completed. {|class="toccolours" cellpadding="7" rules="cols"... |
The Exorcist | William Peter Blatty | 1,971 | An elderly Jesuit priest named Father Lankester Merrin is leading an archaeological dig in northern Iraq and is studying ancient relics. Following the discovery of a small statue of the demon Pazuzu (an actual ancient Assyrian demigod) and a modern-day St. Joseph medal curiously juxtaposed together at the site, a seri... |
The Sweet Hereafter | Russell Banks | null | The Sweet Hereafter is a multiple first person narrative depicting life in a small town in Upstate New York in the wake of a terrible school bus accident in which numerous local children are killed. Hardly able to cope with the loss, their grieving parents are approached by a slick city lawyer who wants them to sue fo... |
A Severed Head | Iris Murdoch | 1,961 | Martin Lynch-Gibbon is a 41-year-old well-to-do wine merchant whose childless marriage to an older woman called Antonia has been one of convenience rather than love. It never occurs to him that his ongoing affair with a young academic called Georgie could be immoral. Displaying quite a number of macho attributes in hi... |
Coming Up for Air | George Orwell | 1,939 | The themes of the book are nostalgia, the folly of trying to go back and recapture past glories and the easy way the dreams and aspirations of one's youth can be smothered by the humdrum routine of work, marriage and getting old. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagoni... |
Shadow Puppets | Orson Scott Card | 2,002 | Peter, Ender's brother, is now Hegemon of Earth. Accepting a tip from inside China, where Achilles is held prisoner, Peter had planned for Bean to operate the mission, but at the last minute (because he doubted Bean would cooperate) assigns Suriyawong, a battle school student from Thailand, to rescue Achilles in trans... |
The Road to Mars | Eric Idle | 2,000 | Told from the point of view of Professor Bill Reynolds, a scholar in the fictitious discipline of 'micropaloentology', this novel is set in the 24th and 25th Centuries, when the solar system has been colonised. Reynolds is writing a thesis on fame and in his research discovers a dissertation on comedy submitted by Car... |
Regeneration | Pat Barker | 1,991 | The novel begins with Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, an army psychiatrist at Craiglockhart War Hospital (a mental institution at the time), reading poet Siegfried Sassoon’s declaration against the continuation of the war. Sassoon’s "wilful defiance of military authority" has led to Sassoon being labelled "shell-shocked", a label ... |
House of Leaves | Mark Z. Danielewski | 2,000 | House of Leaves begins with a first-person narrative by Johnny Truant, a Los Angeles tattoo parlor employee and professed unreliable narrator. Truant is searching for a new apartment when his friend Lude tells him about the apartment of the recently deceased Zampanò, a blind, elderly man who lived in Lude's building. ... |
The Whalestoe Letters | Mark Z. Danielewski | 2,000 | Pelafina writes these letters to Johnny from The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, a mental institution where she has been residing for a number of years. While a number of these letters appear in House of Leaves, The Whalestoe Letters introduces a number of new letters which serve to more fully develop Pelafina's char... |
Restoree | Anne McCaffrey | 1,967 | Restoree is the story of Sara, an introverted, beak-nosed, 24-year-old virgin librarian from New York who is abducted by the Mil, amorphous alien creatures that eat human flesh. She is kept alive, with her skin removed and in a catatonic state from the physical and mental shock, on a meat hook as a Mil meal until the ... |
Mister Roberts | Thomas Heggen | 1,946 | The title character, a Lieutenant Junior Grade naval officer, defends his crew against the petty tyranny of the ship's commanding officer during World War II. Nearly all action takes place on a backwater cargo ship, the USS Reluctant that sails, as written in the play, "from apathy to tedium with occasional side trips... |
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof | Tennessee Williams | null | Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the story of a Southern family in crisis, especially the husband and wife Brick and Margaret (usually called Maggie or "Maggie the Cat"), and their interaction with Brick's family over the course of one evening gathering at the family estate in Mississippi. The party is to celebrate the birthd... |
Elmer Gantry | Sinclair Lewis | 1,927 | The novel tells the story of a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who abandons his early ambition to become a lawyer. The legal profession does not suit the unethical Gantry, who then becomes a notorious and cynical alcoholic. Gantry is mistakenly ordained as a Baptist minister, briefly acts as a "New Tho... |
Sons and Lovers | D. H. Lawrence | 1,913 | Part I: The refined daughter of a "good old burgher family," Gertrude Coppard meets a rough-hewn miner at a Christmas dance and falls into a whirlwind romance characterized by physical passion. But soon after her marriage to Walter Morel, she realizes the difficulties of living off his meagre salary in a rented house.... |
Survivor | Chuck Palahniuk | 1,999 | Tender Branson sits in the cockpit of a Boeing 747-400, telling his life story to the black box. He is alone in the plane, having hijacked it; he has released all of the plane's passengers and crew prior to this point. He explains the events leading up to the hijacking. Tender is a member of the fanatical Creedish cul... |
The Jungle | Upton Sinclair, Jr. | 1,906 | The main character in the book is a Lithuanian man called Jurgis Rudkus, an immigrant to the United States trying to make ends meet. The book begins describing the wedding feast beginning at four o'clock after the marriage in Chicago of Jurgis to a fifteen year old Lithuanian girl named Ona Lukoszaite whom he had know... |
The Music Man | Meredith Willson | null | In the early summer of 1912, aboard a train leaving Rock Island, Illinois, Charlie Cowell and other traveling salesmen engage in a heated argument about consumer credit ("Rock Island"). They eventually turn to another topic: a con man known as "Professor" Harold Hill, whose scam is to convince parents he can teach the... |
Level 7 | Mordecai Roshwald | 1,959 | During his forced residence, X-127 is ordered to push the bomb buttons to begin World War III (which lasts a total of 2 hours and 58 minutes). From that point, all civilian life moves from the surface of the earth to a collection of underground shelter complexes on the Levels 1 - 5, while military personnel alrea... |
The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli | 1,532 | The work has a recognizable structure, for the most part indicated by the author himself, which can be summarized as follows. The Prince starts by describing the subject matter it will handle. In the first sentence Machiavelli uses the word "state" (Italian stato which could also mean "status") in order to neutrally c... |
Sounder | William Armstrong | 1,969 | A black sharecropper's family is poor and hungry. The father and his dog, Sounder, go hunting each night, but the hunting is poor. The family subsists on fried corn mush, biscuits, and milk gravy until one morning they wake up to the smell of boiling ham. They feast for three days, but finally the sheriff and two of h... |
Nemesis | Isaac Asimov | 1,989 | The novel is set in an era in which interstellar travel is in the process of being discovered and perfected. Before the novel's opening, "hyper-assistance", a technology allowing travel at a little slower than the speed of light, is used to move a reclusive space station colony called Rotor from the vicinity of Earth ... |
Island of the Sequined Love Nun | Christopher Moore | 1,997 | The main character, Tucker Case (Tuck), is a pilot for a cosmetics company, who crashes the company plane while having sex. This event causes Tuck to be blacklisted from flying in the United States, so he accepts a lucrative offer from a doctor-missionary on a remote Micronesian island to transport cargo to and from t... |
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove | Christopher Moore | 1,999 | Pine Cove suffers a major crisis when the town psychiatrist, Val Riordan — who has been haphazardly issuing prescriptions instead of dealing with the real mental problems of her patients — suffers a sudden bout of guilt and substitutes all of her patients' anti-depressants with placebos. At this same time,... |
Lost Girls | Alan Moore | null | Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (now grey-haired, and called "Lady Fairchild"), Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (now in her 20s) and Wendy from Peter Pan (now in her 30s, and married to a man in his 50s named Harold Potter) are visiting the expensive mountain resort "Hotel Himmelgarten" in Austria on the eve... |
Quartet in Autumn | Barbara Pym | 1,977 | Marcia, Letty, Norman and Edwin all work together in the same office, are all unmarried (Edwin being a widower) and have all reached retirement age. Letty, the "heroine" of the book, has plans to share a country retreat with her old friend, Marjorie, but her hopes are dashed when Marjorie suddenly announces that she i... |
Some Tame Gazelle | Barbara Pym | null | Many of the characters in the book are based on Pym's own circle, as she pictured them in twenty or thirty years' time. The two heroines, Belinda and Harriet Bede, are Barbara herself and her sister, Hilary. Archdeacon Hoccleve, a married clergyman for whom Belinda has long nurtured a passion, is believed to be based ... |
Satyricon | Petronius Arbiter | null | The work is narrated by its central figure, Encolpius, a former gladiator. The surviving sections of the novel begin with Encolpius traveling with a companion and former lover named Ascyltos, who has joined Encolpius on numerous escapades. Encolpius' slave, a boy named Giton, is apparently at Encolpius' lodging when t... |
Guns, Germs, and Steel | Jared Diamond | null | The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic super... |
On Golden Pond | Ernest Thompson | 1,979 | May Norman and Ethel arrive at the summer house, finding it in need of repairs. There are hints that Norman is having problems with his memory. June Norman makes a nominal effort to find a job in the classified ads, to Ethel's chagrin. The mailman, Charlie, stops by and reminisces about the Thayer's daughter, Chelsea,... |
A Passage to India | E. M. Forster | 1,924 | A young British schoolmistress, Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, visit the fictional city of Chandrapore, British India. Adela is to marry Mrs. Moore's son, Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate. Meanwhile, Dr. Aziz, a young Indian Muslim physician, is dining with two of his Indian friends and conversin... |
A Room with a View | E. M. Forster | 1,908 | The first part of the novel is set in Florence, Italy, and describes a young English woman's confusion at the Pensione Bertolini over her feelings for an Englishman staying at the same hotel. Lucy Honeychurch is touring Italy with her overbearing older cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, and the novel opens with... |
Alas, Babylon | Pat Frank | 1,959 | Randy (Randolph) Bragg, the protagonist, is a man who dabbles at law and lives a life with little purpose. He lives in the small Central Florida town of Fort Repose, which was founded by an ancestor during the 19th century. The scion of a once prominent Central Florida political family, Bragg is a former active duty U... |
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures | null | null | Science and Health encapsulates the teachings of Christian Science and Christian Scientists often call it their "textbook." At Sunday services, passages from the book are read along with passages from the Bible. Eddy called the two books Christian Science's "dual and impersonal pastor." |
Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser | 1,900 | Dissatisfied with life in her rural Wisconsin home, 18-year-old Caroline "Sister Carrie" Meeber takes the train to Chicago, where her older sister Minnie, and her husband Sven Hanson, have agreed to take her in. On the train, Carrie meets Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman, who is attracted to her because of her sim... |
The Accidental Tourist | Anne Tyler | 1,985 | Set in Baltimore, Maryland, the plot revolves around Macon Leary, a writer of travel guides whose son has been killed in a shooting at a fast-food restaurant. He and his wife Sarah, separately lost in grief, find their marriage disintegrating until she eventually moves out. When he becomes incapacitated due to a fall,... |
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal | Christopher Moore | 2,002 | Biff has been resurrected in the present day to complete missing parts of the Bible, supposedly under the watchful eye of the angel Raziel, who turns out to be more interested in soap operas and Spiderman on the television in their hotel. Biff is made to write down his account of the decades missing from Jesus' life. ... |
The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | 1,989 | The Remains of the Day tells, in first person, the story of Stevens, an English butler who has dedicated his life to the loyal service of Lord Darlington (mentioned in increasing detail in flashbacks). The novel begins with Stevens receiving a letter from a former colleague, Miss Kenton, describing her married life, w... |
Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 1,866 | Raskolnikov, a conflicted former student, lives in a tiny, rented room in Saint Petersburg. He refuses all help, even from his friend Razumikhin, and devises a plan to murder and to rob an unpleasant elderly pawn-broker and money-lender, Alyona Ivanovna. His motivation comes from the overwhelming sense that he is pred... |
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul | Douglas Adams | 1,988 | * The central premise of the book is that gods are created by humans' necessity and desire for them, and, once worshipped by man, don't disappear but remain on earth forever. Because nobody worships them, many become destitute, like the tramps whom Dirk witnesses entering Valhalla. * Odin makes Thor accidentally trans... |
Njáls saga | Traditional | null | The first episode covers the period from the betrothal of Hrútr Herjólfsson and Unnr to the ugly legacy of their divorce. We are shown Hrútr's exploits in Norway, where he gains honour at court and in battle, but he ruins his subsequent marriage by becoming the lover of the aging queen mother Gunnhildr. When he denies... |
Damage | Josephine Hart | 1,991 | The first person narrator of the novel is an unnamed medical doctor turned politician (called Dr Stephen Fleming in the Louis Malle film) whose promotion from MP to cabinet member is imminent. Just then the MP is casually introduced to his grown-up son's enigmatic girlfriend Anna and helplessly falls for her. For as l... |
The Railway Children | E. Nesbit | 1,906 | The story concerns a family who move to "Three Chimneys", a house near the railway, after the father, who works at the Foreign office, is imprisoned as a result of being falsely accused of selling state secrets to the Russians. The three children, Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis (Phil), find amusement in watching ... |
Imperial Earth | Arthur C. Clarke | 1,975 | Duncan Makenzie is the latest generation of the 'first family' of Titan, a colonised moon of Saturn. Originally settled by his grandfather Malcolm Makenzie in the early 23rd century, Titan's economy has flourished based on the harvest and sale of hydrogen mined from the atmosphere, which is used to fuel the fusion eng... |
The Masque of the Red Death | Edgar Allan Poe | 1,842 | The story takes place at the castellated abbey of the "happy and dauntless and sagacious" Prince Prospero. Prospero and one thousand other nobles have taken refuge in this walled abbey to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague with gruesome symptoms that has swept over the land. Victims feel overcome by convulsive ag... |
Chocolat | Joanne Harris | 1,999 | The story begins as two strangers, Vianne Rocher, and her small daughter Anouk, move into the small French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. They are brought by 'the wind' during the last days of carnival, and they settle and open a chocolaterie, La Céleste Praline. The village priest, Francis Reynaud, is initially m... |
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