title stringlengths 1 220 | author stringlengths 4 59 ⌀ | pub_year int64 398 2.01k ⌀ | summary stringlengths 11 58k |
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The Man Who Awoke | null | null | * 5000 AD. Humanity staggers to save itself amid the world's littered, stagnant wreckage after what has become known as the great Age of Waste. * 10,000 AD. The world is dominated by the Brain - the immovable in purpose super computer that knows all, sees all, and feels nothing. Thanks to its cradle-to-grave supervisi... |
The Genesis Quest | null | null | The Genesis Quest gets around the problems involved with intergalactic travel, namely the distance, by avoiding the traditional staple of science fiction, faster than light travel. Instead Moffitt opts for a different tactic, that of having an alien race (The Nar) assemble humans from a stream of genetic information t... |
Summer and Smoke | Tennessee Williams | null | Summer and Smoke is set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, from the "turn of the century through 1916," and centers on a high-strung, unmarried minister's daughter, Alma Winemiller, and the spiritual/sexual romance that nearly blossoms between her and the wild, undisciplined young doctor who grew up next door, John Buchan... |
Critique of Dialectical Reason | Jean-Paul Sartre | 1,960 | Critique of Dialectical Reason is the product of a later stage in Sartre's thinking, during which he no longer identified Marxism with the Soviet Union or French Communism but came closer to identifying as a Marxist. It puts forward a revision of Existentialism, and an interpretation of Marxism as a contemporary philo... |
The Necessity of Atheism | null | null | The tract starts with the following rationale of the author's goals: Shelley made a number of claims in Necessity, including that one's beliefs are involuntary, and, therefore, that atheists do not choose to be so and should not be persecuted. Towards the end of the pamphlet he writes: "the mind cannot believe in the ... |
The Velveteen Rabbit | Margery Williams | null | A boy receives a Velveteen Rabbit for Christmas. The Velveteen Rabbit is snubbed by other more expensive or mechanical toys, the latter of which fancy themselves real. One day while talking with the Skin Horse, the Rabbit learns that a toy becomes real if its owner really and truly loves it. The Skin Horse makes the V... |
Executive Orders | Tom Clancy | null | Following the conclusion of Debt of Honor, Jack Ryan is sworn in as president of the United States minutes after becoming Vice President. With virtually nearly every executive, legislative, and judicial figure deceased, Ryan is left to represent the United States by himself. Ryan deals with various hardships and crise... |
My Night with Reg | Kevin Elyot | null | All three scenes are set in the sitting room of Guy's London apartment: during Guy's flatwarming party (Scene 1); after Reg's funeral, some years later (Scene 2); and after Guy's funeral (Scene 3). The group, most of them in their thirties, meet at irregular intervals, often at Guy's place. Guy himself is a lonely man... |
Tell England | Ernest Raymond | null | The novel opens with a prologue by Padre Monty, a character from the second half of the novel. Padre Monty speaks affectionately and retrospectively of the three boys Rupert Ray, Edgar Doe and Archibald Pennybet as they were in childhood. The inference is made that Padre Monty acquired this information from the boys' ... |
The Woman Who Did | Grant Allen | null | Herminia Barton, the Cambridge-educated daughter of a clergyman, frees herself from her parents' influence, moves to London and starts living alone. As she is not a woman of independent means, she starts working as a teacher. When she meets and falls in love with Alan Merrick, a lawyer, she suggests they live together... |
Chicago | Fred Ebb | null | ; Act 1 In the mid 1920s in Chicago, Illinois, Velma Kelly is a vaudevillian who murdered both her husband and her sister when she found them in bed together. She welcomes the audience to tonight's show ("All That Jazz"). Meanwhile, we hear of chorus girl Roxie Hart's murder of her lover, nightclub regular Fred Casely... |
Au Bonheur des Dames | Émile Zola | 1,883 | The events of Au Bonheur des Dames cover approximately 1864-1869. The novel tells the story of Denise Baudu, a 20-year-old woman from Valognes who comes to Paris with her brothers and begins working at the department store Au Bonheur des Dames as a saleswoman. Zola describes the inner workings of the store from the em... |
Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner | 1,936 | Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who comes to Mississippi with the complementary aims of becoming rich and a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard U... |
Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh | 1,945 | 1923: Protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder, a student at Hertford College, Oxford, is befriended by Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the aristocratic Lord Marchmain and an undergraduate at Christ Church. Sebastian introduces Charles to his eccentric and aesthetic friends, including the haughty and homosexual... |
The Collector | John Fowles | 1,963 | The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall, and collects butterflies in his spare time. The first part of the novel tells the story from his point of view. Clegg is obsessed with Miranda Grey, a middle-class art student at the Slade School of Fine Art. He admires her fr... |
King Solomon's Carpet | Ruth Rendell | 1,991 | Jarvis Stringer is a student of the London Tube and its history and of underground trains worldwide. In order to finance his hobby and be able to travel to distant lands to inspect the underground systems in other parts of the world, he lets rooms in an old disused school building he has inherited which is close to th... |
Uncle and his Detective | null | null | The story begins with the arrival not of a detective, but of disaster: Badfort is for sale, but when Uncle decides to buy it, demolish it, and build a pleasantly appointed park on the site, he is forestalled. Beaver Hateman has sold it cheaply to someone on the condition that he, Hateman, is allowed to stay on as a pa... |
Uncle Cleans Up | null | null | In this story, Goodman the Cat joins Uncle's supporters. He is rescued from down-trodden and hungry service at Wizard Blenkinsop's and throws himself wholeheartedly into battle against Uncle's enemies, though never quite ridding himself of a propensity to steal fish and postage stamps. His fish-stealing gets him into ... |
Planet of the Apes | Pierre Boulle | 1,963 | The main events of the book are placed in a frame story, in which Jinn and Phyllis, a couple out on a pleasure cruise in a spaceship, find a message in a bottle floating in space. The message inside the bottle is the testimony of a man, Ulysse Mérou. Ulysse explains that he was a friend of Professor Antelle, a genius ... |
The Small House at Allington | Anthony Trollope | 1,864 | The Small House at Allington concerns the Dale family, who live in the "Small House", a dower house intended for the widowed mother (Dowager) of the owner of the estate. The landowner, in this instance, is the bachelor Squire of Allington, Christopher Dale. Dale's mother having died, he has allocated the Small House, ... |
Framley Parsonage | Anthony Trollope | 1,861 | The hero of Framley Parsonage, Mark Robarts, is a young vicar, newly arrived in the village of Framley in Barsetshire. The living has come into his hands through Lady Lufton, the mother of his childhood friend Ludovic, Lord Lufton. Mark has ambitions to further his career and begins to seek connections in the county's... |
Go Ask Alice | Beatrice Sparks | 1,971 | An unnamed 15-year-old begins keeping a diary. With a sensitive, observant style, she records her thoughts and concerns about issues such as crushes, weight loss, sexuality, social acceptance, and difficulty relating to her parents. Her father, a college professor, accepts a teaching position at a new college. The dia... |
The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas | 1,844 | The poor d'Artagnan travels to Paris to join the Musketeers. On the way, he encounters and alienates de Roquefort, one of the Cardinal Richelieu's spies. He also encounters Milady de Winter for the first time, who becomes relevant later. After entering Paris and speaking with Monsieur de Treville, he suffers misadvent... |
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson | 1,886 | In London, Gabriel John Utterson, a prosecutor, is on his weekly walk with his relative Richard Enfield, who proceeds to tell him of an encounter he had seen some months ago while coming home late at night from Cavendish Place. The tale describes a sinister figure named Mr. Hyde who tramples a young girl, disappears i... |
Shooting an Elephant | George Orwell | 1,936 | In Moulmein, the narrator—Orwell, writing in the first person—is a police officer during a period of intense anti-European sentiment. Although his intellectual sympathies lie with the Burmese, his official role makes him a symbol of the oppressive imperial power. As such, he is subjected to constant baiting and jeerin... |
Eminent Victorians | Lytton Strachey | null | Each of the lives is very different from the others, although there are common threads - for example the recurrent appearance of William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Hugh Clough. Each story is set against a specific background. In Cardinal Manning's story, the background is the creation of the Oxford Movement and the de... |
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark | 1,961 | In 1930s Edinburgh, six ten-year-old girls, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, Monica, and Eunice are assigned Miss Jean Brodie, who describes herself as being 'in her prime', as their teacher. Miss Brodie, determined that they shall receive an education in the original sense of the Latin verb educere, "to lead out", gives her... |
Death in the Clouds | Agatha Christie | null | Frustrated with the evident artificiality of the blowpipe, an item that could hardly have been used without being seen by another passenger, Poirot suggests that the means of delivering the dart may have been something else. Is it the flute of one passenger, or perhaps one of the ancient tubes carried by one of the tw... |
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | Agatha Christie | null | The novel is set in England during World War I at Styles Court, an Essex country manor (also the setting of Curtain, Poirot's last case). Upon her husband's death, the wealthy widow, Emily Cavendish, inherited a life estate in Styles as well as the outright inheritance of the larger part of the late Mr. Cavendish's in... |
Sweep | Cate Tiernan | 2,001 | Morgan Rowlands is a high school student living in the picturesque town of Widow's Vale. Overall, Morgan is an ordinary girl who lives an ordinary lifestyle. However, her life becomes unsettled upon meeting Cal Blaire. With his angelic face, gold-colored eyes, perfect body, and olive skin, Cal quickly becomes the cent... |
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili | Francesco Colonna | 1,499 | The book begins with Poliphilo, who has spent a restless night because his beloved, Polia (literally "Many Things"), shunned him. Poliphilo is transported into a wild forest, where he gets lost, encounters dragons, wolves and maidens and a large variety of architecture, escapes, and falls asleep once more. He then awa... |
The Invincible | Stanisław Lem | 1,964 | A very powerful and armed interstellar space ship called Invincible lands on the planet Regis III which seems uninhabited and bleak, to investigate the loss of its sister ship, Condor. During the investigation, the crew finds evidence of a form of quasi-life, born through evolution of autonomous, self-replicating mach... |
Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | 1,925 | Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh and s... |
Principles of Economics | null | 1,871 | Menger advanced his theory that the marginal utility of goods, rather than the labor inputs that went into making them, is the source of their value. This marginalist theory solved the diamond-water paradox that had been puzzling classical economists: the fact that mankind finds diamonds to be far more valuable than w... |
The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 | Władysław Szpilman | 1,999 | Władysław Szpilman studied the piano in the early 1930s in Warsaw and Berlin. In Berlin, he was instructed by Leonid Kreutzer and, at the Berlin Academy of Arts, by Artur Schnabel. During his time at the academy he also studied composition with Franz Schreker. In 1933 he returned to Warsaw after Adolf Hitler and his N... |
Sleeping Murder | Agatha Christie | null | "Let sleeping murder lie": this is the proverb (a variation on "Let sleeping dogs lie") which is not obeyed by twenty-one year old New Zealander Gwenda Reed (née Halliday), who has recently married and now comes to England to settle down there. She believes that her father took her directly from India to New Zealand w... |
Battle Royale | Koushun Takami | 1,999 | Battle Royale takes place in 1997 in an alternate timeline—Japan is a member region of a totalitarian state known as the . Under the guise of a "study trip", a group of students from in the fictional town of Shiroiwa, in Kagawa Prefecture, are gassed on a bus. They awaken in the Okishima Island School on Okishima, an ... |
Crooked House | Agatha Christie | null | Three generations of the Leonides family live together under wealthy patriarch Aristide. His first wife died; her sister Edith has cared for the household since then. Second wife indolent Brenda, decades his junior, exchanges love letters with grandchildren's tutor. After Aristide is poisoned by his own eye medicine (... |
Joseph Andrews | Henry Fielding | 1,742 | The novel begins with the affable, intrusive narrator outlining the nature of our hero. Joseph Andrews is the brother of Richardson’s Pamela and is of the same rustic parentage and patchy ancestry. At the age of ten years he found himself tending to animals as an apprentice to Sir Thomas Booby. It was in proving his w... |
Cunt | null | null | Kelso, who has already published a number of books (for example novels entitled Desiring Machines in the Australian Bush and Fuck Your Mother Up the Arse, but also non-fiction), is in his thirties, several times divorced, a heavy drinker and, according to his own description, a "sex beast". As a writer, he says he has... |
A Study in Scarlet | Arthur Conan Doyle | null | The story begins in 1881, where Dr. John Watson runs into an old friend, Stamford. Due to a shoulder injury sustained in the Anglo-Afghan War, Watson was forced to retire and is now looking for a place to live. Stamford mentions that an acquaintance of his, one Sherlock Holmes, is looking for someone to split the rent... |
Phineas Finn | Anthony Trollope | null | Finn is the only son of a successful Irish doctor, Dr Malachi Finn of Killaloe, County Clare, who sends him to London to become a lawyer. He proves to be a lackadaisical student, but being pleasant company and strikingly handsome to boot, he makes many influential friends. One of them, a fellow Irishman and a politici... |
Cranford | Elizabeth Gaskell | null | The fictional town of Cranford is closely modelled on Knutsford in Cheshire, which Mrs Gaskell knew well. The book has little in the way of plot and is more a series of episodes in the lives of Mary Smith and her friends, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two spinster sisters. The "major" event in the story is the return t... |
Wives and Daughters | Pam Morris | null | The novel opens with young Molly Gibson, who has been raised by her widowed father, Mr. Gibson (Bill Paterson). While visiting the local 'great house', Molly feels tired so she is sent to rest in the former governess's room. The woman, Clare (Francesca Annis), makes noise about her kindness to Molly, but is actually c... |
Travels with My Aunt | Graham Greene | 1,969 | The novel begins when Henry Pulling, a conventional and uncharming bank manager who has taken early retirement, meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over fifty years at his mother's funeral. Despite having little in common, they form a bond. Henry finds himself drawn into Aunt Augusta's world of... |
Ann Veronica | H. G. Wells | 1,909 | Mr. Stanley forbids his adult daughter, a biology student at Tredgold Women's College and the youngest of his five children, to attend a fancy dress ball in London, causing a crisis. Ann Veronica is planning to attend the dance with friends of a down-at-the-heels artistic family living nearby and has been chafing at o... |
Little Lord Fauntleroy | Frances Hodgson Burnett | null | In a "shabby" "New York side street" in the mid-1880s, young American Cedric Errol lives with his mother (never named, known only as Mrs. Errol or "Dearest") in genteel poverty after his father, Captain Errol (whose first name was also Cedric), dies. They receive a visit from Havisham, an English lawyer with a message... |
The Song of Roland | null | null | Charlemagne's army is fighting the Muslims in Spain. The last city standing is Saragossa, held by the Muslim king Marsilla. Terrified of the might of Charlemagne's army of Franks, Marsilla sends out messengers to Charlemagne, promising treasure and Marsilla's conversion to Christianity if the Franks will go back to Fr... |
Humphry Clinker | Tobias Smollett | 1,771 | The titular character, Humphry Clinker, is an ostler, a stableman at an inn, who does not make his first appearance until about a quarter of the way through the story. He is taken on by Matthew Bramble and his family while they are travelling through England. Various adventures befall them, especially after their meet... |
The Lover | Marguerite Duras | null | Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man. In 1929, a 15 year old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, return... |
Lorna Doone | R. D. Blackmore | null | The book is set in the 17th century in the Badgworthy Water region of Exmoor in Devon and Somerset, England. John (in West Country dialect, pronounced "Jan") Ridd is the son of a respectable farmer who was murdered in cold blood by one of the notorious Doone clan, a once noble family, now outlaws, in the isolated Doon... |
The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1,929 | The four parts of the novel relate many of the same episodes, each from a different point of view and therefore with emphasis on different themes and events. This interweaving and nonlinear structure makes any true synopsis of the novel difficult, especially since the narrators are all unreliable in their own way, mak... |
Phineas Redux | Anthony Trollope | null | His beloved wife having died in childbirth, Phineas Finn finds Irish society and his job as a Poorhouse Inspector dull and unsatisfying after the excitement of his former career as a Member of Parliament. Back in England, the Whigs are determined to overturn the Tory majority in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. A... |
The Duke's Children | Anthony Trollope | null | The plot concerns the children of the Duke of Omnium, Plantagenet Palliser, and his late wife, Lady Glencora. When Lady Glencora dies unexpectedly, the Duke is left to deal with his grownup children, with whom he has a somewhat distant relationship. As the government in which he is Prime Minister has also fallen, the ... |
Daniel Deronda | George Eliot | 1,876 | Daniel Deronda contains two main strains of plot, united by the title character. The novel begins in mid-story in late August 1865 with the meeting of Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth in the fictional town of Leubronn, Germany. Daniel finds himself attracted to, but wary of, the beautiful, stubborn, and selfish Gw... |
Nine Princes in Amber | Roger Zelazny | 1,970 | Carl Corey awakes in a medical clinic, with little to no knowledge of who he is or how he got there. He suspects he is being over-medicated, so he overpowers the nurse and security guard and escapes his room. He finds the manager of the clinic, and learns that he was recovering from a car accident in a private clinic,... |
The Guns of Avalon | Roger Zelazny | 1,972 | Corwin sets out through the endless worlds of shadow in search of Avalon, his one-time home. As Corwin nears Avalon, he passes through a land called Lorraine. As it is near to Avalon in Shadow, some aspects of it are similar — it is a medieval kingdom, ruled once by a shadow version of Corwin, more recently by a... |
Sign of the Unicorn | Roger Zelazny | 1,975 | Corwin returns to Castle Amber bearing the body of one of the spined, bloodshot-eyed humanoid creatures that had pursued Random to Flora's house on Earth—one that had moments earlier killed his brother, Caine. Fearing that he has been framed for Caine's murder, Corwin summons Random, who tells him the story how he cam... |
The Hand of Oberon | Roger Zelazny | 1,976 | Corwin, Random and Ganelon go down to the Primal Pattern and see that it is damaged, with a dark stain obscuring the pattern from the center to one edge, in the shape of the corrupted Vale of Garnath. They also see a pair of objects at the pattern's centre. While Corwin and Random discuss whether it would be safe to w... |
The Courts of Chaos | Roger Zelazny | 1,978 | Corwin sulks in Castle Amber's library while Oberon gives the family orders for a massive battle with the forces of Chaos. Random persuades Corwin to leave, but they are held back by an invisible force. They watch as Corwin's sword appears and chops off Benedict's new arm, just as Corwin did in Tir-na Nog'th. The swor... |
The Garden of Cyrus | Thomas Browne | null | With its near vertiginous procession of visual imagery and objects, its constant reinforcement of how God geometrizes (via the symbols of the number five and Quincunx pattern), developed from hastily jotted notes in a fractured, breathless, style, The Garden of Cyrus is one of the most idiosyncratic of all literary wo... |
Roadmarks | Roger Zelazny | 1,979 | The central theme of the novel is time travel using a highway that links all times and all possible histories. Exits from the highway lead to different times and places. Changing events in the past cause some exits further up the road, in the future, to become overgrown and inaccessible and new exits to appear, leadin... |
Lord of Light | Roger Zelazny | 1,967 | Lord of Light is set on a planet colonized by some of the remnants of "vanished Urath," or Earth. The crew and colonists from the spaceship Star of India found themselves on a strange planet surrounded by hostile indigenous races and had to carve a place for themselves or perish. To increase their chances of survival,... |
The BFG | Roald Dahl | 1,982 | The story is about a little girl named Sophie, after the author's granddaughter Sophie Dahl. One night, when Sophie cannot fall asleep during the "witching hour", she sees a giant blowing something into the bedroom windows down the street. The giant notices her, reaches through the window, and carries her to his home ... |
The Tommyknockers | Stephen King | 1,987 | While walking in the woods near the small town of Haven, Maine; Roberta (Bobbi) Anderson, a writer of Wild West-themed fiction, stumbles upon a metal object which turns out to be a protrusion of a long-buried alien spacecraft. Once exposed, the spacecraft begins releasing an invisible, odorless gas into the atmosphere... |
Journey to the West | Wu Cheng'en | null | The novel has 100 chapters. These can be divided into four very unequal parts. The first, which includes chapters 1–7, is really a self-contained introduction to the main story. It deals entirely with the earlier exploits of Sun Wukong, a monkey born from a stone nourished by the Five Elements, who learns the art of t... |
253 | Geoff Ryman | 1,998 | It is about the 253 people on a London Underground train travelling between Embankment station and Elephant & Castle on January 11, 1995. The basic structure of the novel is explained in this quote from the foreword: There are seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train, each with 36 seats. A train in which every passeng... |
Trainspotting | Irvine Welsh | 1,993 | The Skag Boys, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Mother Superior - Narrated by Renton. Mark and Simon (aka Sick Boy) are watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie when they decide to go buy heroin from Johnny Swan (aka Mother Superior) since they are both feeling symptoms of withdrawal. They cook up with Raymie (who kisses Sick ... |
The Eustace Diamonds | Anthony Trollope | 1,871 | In this novel, the characters of Plantagenet Palliser, his wife Lady Glencora and their uncle the ailing Duke of Omnium are in the background. The plot centres on Lizzie Greystock, a fortune-hunter who ensnares the sickly, dissipated Sir Florian Eustace and is soon left a very wealthy widow and mother. While clever an... |
Anna of the Five Towns | Arnold Bennett | null | The plot centres on Anna Tellwright, daughter of a wealthy but miserly and dictatorial father, living in the Potteries area of Staffordshire, England. Her activities are strictly controlled by the Methodist church. The novel tells of Anna's struggle for freedom and independence against her father's restraints, and her... |
Laughing Gas | P. G. Wodehouse | 1,936 | Drone Reginald Swithin, the third Earl of Havershot ("Reggie") is 28, unmarried, and has a face like a gorilla. As the new head of his family, he is assigned a delicate task by his Aunt Clara and by Plimsoll, the family lawyer: He is to go to Hollywood and look for Aunt Clara's son, his cousin Eggy, who seems to have ... |
Anthem | Ayn Rand | 1,938 | Equality 7-2521, writing in a tunnel under the earth, later revealed to be an ancient subway tunnel, explains his background, the society around him, and his emigration. His exclusive use of plural pronouns ("we", "our", "they") to refer to himself and others tells a tale of complete socialization and governmental con... |
We | Yevgeny Zamyatin | null | One thousand years after the One State's conquest of the entire world, the spaceship Integral is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets. Meanwhile, the project's chief engineer, D-503, begins a journal which he intends to be carried upon the completed Integral. Like all other citizens of t... |
Migraine | Oliver Sacks | null | As with Sacks' other writings, the book is a comprehensive review of the subject aimed at the lay population and uses numerous case histories. Sacks describes the nature of and treatments for migraine in general and several various subtypes, particularly examining the visual aura feature that is common to many suffere... |
Without Remorse | Tom Clancy | 1,993 | The book starts off with John Kelly and two other UDT men performing a maritime demolition of an oil-rig irreparably damaged by Hurricane Camille. While driving to pick him up after the job, Kelly's pregnant wife Patricia (Tish) is killed in a car accident caused by damaged brakes in a large truck. Next to be introduc... |
The Black Tulip | Alexandre Dumas | null | The story begins with a historical event — the 1672 lynching of the Dutch Grand Pensionary (roughly equivalent to a modern Prime Minister) Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis, by a wild mob of their own countrymen — considered by many as one of the most painful episodes in Dutch history, described by Dumas with a d... |
Cujo | Stephen King | 1,981 | We first meet the middle-class Trentons, who are recent arrivals in town: Vic, an advertisement designer, his wife, Donna, and their four-year-old son Tad. Vic has discovered that his wife had been involved in an affair. In the midst of this household tension, Vic's fledgling advertising agency is failing, and he is f... |
Human Action | Ludwig von Mises | null | Mises sees economic calculation as the most fundamental problem in economics. The economic problem to Mises is that of action. Man acts to dispel feelings of uneasiness, but can only succeed in acting if he comprehends causal connections between the ends that he wants to satisfy, and available means. The fact that man... |
More Joy in Heaven | Morley Callaghan | null | The story of Kip Caley, an ex-criminal, intent on becoming a useful and honourable human being. His struggle with himself and with a society which will not let him regain his human dignity. |
Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry | 1,985 | It is 1876. Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae and Captain Woodrow F. Call, two famous ex–Texas Rangers, run a livery called the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium in the small dusty Texas border town of Lonesome Dove. Smooth, charming and easy going, Gus loves women and women return the sentiments, but he's twic... |
Warring States | Mags L Halliday | 2,005 | Cousin Octavia of Faction Paradox has come to Peking during the Boxer Rebellion in search of an artifact she believes can bestow immortality. For Liu Hui Ying, the artifact is a symbol that will rally the Han. But in this dangerous time, more than each other stands in the way of either obtaining the jade casket. |
The Practice Effect | David Brin | 1,984 | A scientist by the name of Dennis Nuel is working at, and attending, an institute of scientific research and pioneering work into the fictional scientific field of "Zievatronics", the manipulation of Time and Space. After the death of his mentor, however, he is taken off the project and another professor takes over. A... |
The British Museum Is Falling Down | David Lodge | 1,965 | Set in Swinging London, the novel describes one day in the life of Adam Appleby, who lives in constant fear that his wife might be pregnant again with a fourth child. As Catholics, they are denied any form of contraception and have to play "Vatican roulette" instead. Adam and Barbara have three children: Clare, Domini... |
The History Man | Malcolm Bradbury | 1,975 | What we learn about the Kirks' past does not set them apart from most young working-class intellectuals who grew up in the 1950s when there was growing hope of improved economic and educational opportunity. When Howard and Barbara meet in their third year at the University of Leeds, Howard is still a virgin. They are ... |
The Turn of the Screw | Henry James | 1,898 | An unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript written by a former governess whom the friend claims to have known and who is now dead. The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has become responsible for his young nephew and niece after the death of their parent... |
The French Lieutenant's Woman | John Fowles | 1,969 | The novel's protagonist is Sarah Woodruff, the Woman of the title, also known unkindly as “Tragedy” and by the unfortunate nickname “The French Lieutenant’s Whore”. She lives in the coastal town of Lyme Regis, as a disgraced woman, supposedly abandoned by a French naval officer named Varguennes — married, unknown to h... |
Shadow of the Hegemon | Orson Scott Card | 2,001 | In Shadow of the Hegemon, all of the Battle School graduates, except Ender, return to Earth in approximately 2170 A.D. Ender's brother Peter, using his online pseudonym Locke, arranges for Ender to be returned to earth so he can control Ender, however Valentine under the pseudonym Demosthenes uses Peter's violent dera... |
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them | J. K. Rowling | null | Fantastic Beasts purports to be a reproduction of a textbook owned by Harry Potter and written by magizoologist Newt Scamander, a fictional character in the Harry Potter series. In the series, Magizoology is the study of magical creatures. Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, provides the Foreword and explains th... |
My Family and Other Animals | Gerald Durrell | null | The book is an autobiographical account of five years in the childhood of naturalist Gerald Durrell, age 10 at the start of the saga, of his family, pets and life during a sojourn on the island of Corfu. The book is divided into three sections, marking the three villas where the family lived on the island. Apart from ... |
Prince Caspian | C. S. Lewis | 1,951 | While standing on a British railway station, awaiting their train to school after the summer holidays, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie are magically whisked away to a beach near an old and ruined castle. They come to realize the ruin is Cair Paravel, where they once ruled as the Kings and Queens of Narnia, and... |
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | C. S. Lewis | 1,950 | The story begins in 1940 during World War II, when four siblings—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie—are evacuated from London to escape the Blitz. They are sent to live with Professor Digory Kirke, who lives in a country house in the English countryside. While the four children are exploring the house, Lucy looks... |
Primary Colors | Joe Klein | 1,996 | The book begins as an idealistic former congressional worker, Henry Burton, joins the presidential campaign of Southern governor Jack Stanton, a thinly disguised stand-in for Bill Clinton. The plot then follows the primary election calendar beginning in New Hampshire where Stanton's affair with Cashmere, his wife's ha... |
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | Agatha Christie | null | The book is set in the fictional village of King's Abbott in England. It is narrated by Dr. James Sheppard, who becomes Poirot's assistant (a role filled by Captain Hastings in several other Poirot novels). The story begins with the death of Mrs. Ferrars, a wealthy widow who is rumoured to have murdered her husband. H... |
The A.B.C. Murders | Agatha Christie | null | When a serial killer nicknamed ABC taunts Poirot in veiled letters and kills people in alphabetical order, Poirot employs an unconventional method to track down ABC. In a seemingly unconnected story, a travelling salesman named Alexander Bonaparte Cust has travelled to all of the murder locations on the day the crimes... |
Crossing the Chasm | Geoffrey Moore | 1,991 | In Crossing the Chasm, Moore begins with the diffusion of innovations theory from Everett Rogers, and argues there is a chasm between the early adopters of the product (the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the early majority (the pragmatists). Moore believes visionaries and pragmatists have very different e... |
The Futurological Congress | Stanisław Lem | null | Ijon Tichy is sent to the Eighth World Futurological Congress in Costa Rica by professor Tarantoga. The conference is set to focus on the world's overpopulation crisis and ways of dealing with it. It is held at the Costa Rica Hilton in Nounas, which is 164 stories tall. Lem is fiercely satirical from the start, and ab... |
Angela's Ashes | Frank McCourt | 1,996 | Born in Brooklyn, New York, on 19 August 1930, Frank (Francis) McCourt was the eldest son of Malachy and Angela McCourt. Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died eight weeks after b... |
Oscar and Lucinda | Peter Carey | 1,988 | It tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the boat over to Australia, and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive the other compulsive. Lucin... |
From the Earth to the Moon | Jules Verne | 1,865 | It's been some time since the end of the American Civil War. The Gun Club, a society based in Baltimore and dedicated to the design of weapons of all kinds (especially cannons), meets when Impey Barbicane, its president, calls them to support his idea: according to his calculations, a cannon can shoot a projectile so ... |
Underworld | Don DeLillo | 1,997 | The novel opens on October 3, 1951, when a boy named Cotter Martin sneaks in to watch the New York Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Giants' home field Polo Grounds. (The prologue, Pafko at the Wall, was written on its own before the novel.) In the ninth inning, Ralph Branca pitches to Bobby Thomson, who hits th... |
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