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My Brilliant Career

My Brilliant Career is a classic Australian work published in 1901 by Stella Miles Franklin, with an introduction by Henry Lawson. A thinly veiled autobiographical novel, it paints a vivid and sometimes grim picture of rural Australian life in the late 19th Century. Sybylla Melvyn is the daughter of a man who falls into grinding poverty through inadvised speculation before becoming a hopeless drunk unable to make a living from a small dairy farm.

Miles Franklin · Drama · 40 ch

Almayer’s Folly

Kaspar Almayer is a Dutch trader whose career has stalled. He finds himself in a riverside village in the jungles of East Borneo with his estranged Malay wife, their beautiful daughter Nina, and a lavish but unfinished house the village has dubbed “Almayer’s Folly.” Kaspar dreams of becoming rich enough to free himself from the backwater village and take Nina to Europe. Rumors of gold deposits in the depths of the jungle delude him into thinking he’s close to achieving that dream, and with the arrival of a rajah’s son who’s willing to join Kaspar in his get-rich-quick scheme, the plot is kicked into motion.

Joseph Conrad · Drama · 13 ch

Nordenholt’s Million

As a new bacteria strain emerges and causes the collapse of the world’s food supply, wealthy and powerful Stanley Nordenholt steps forward with a plan to try to save a small, select portion of the British population. Sequestered in Scotland, he leads the group in a race between their dwindling food supply and their effort to reverse the damage caused by the bacteria as the outside world descends into chaos and starvation. Blending ecological disaster and science fiction with psychological and sociological exploration, Nordenholt’s Million asks the reader how far might they be willing to go—and at what cost—to save humanity from total disaster.

J. J. Connington · Sci Fi · 20 ch

Tom Brown’s School Days

Tom Brown’s School Days is a seminal novel of Victorian literature that immerses readers in the turbulent world of 19th-century English boarding schools. The novel follows Tom Brown, a spirited and good-hearted boy from the countryside, as he navigates life at Rugby School, an institution renowned for its strict traditions and emphasis on character-building. Through Tom’s eyes, the story explores the challenges of adolescence—bullying, loyalty, and moral growth—against the backdrop of a school culture defined by the reforming influence of its real-life headmaster, Dr. Thomas Arnold.

Thomas Hughes · Drama · 18 ch

The Amateur Cracksman

A. J. Raffles and his friend “Bunny” Manders are the quintessential rich young socialites; but behind the high-living façade, they’ve exhausted their funds.

E. W. Hornung · Drama · 8 ch

The Wonderful Visit

The Wonderful Visit is an early work by H. G. Wells, published in the same year as The Time Machine.

H. G. Wells · Fantasy · 53 ch

Scaramouche

Scaramouche tells the tale of André-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer in Brittany. When his friend is killed by an unremorseful landowner, Moreau swears revenge and begins a life of adventure on the run. His travels lead him to joining a traveling theater troupe, becoming a master swordsman, and even to revolution.

Rafael Sabatini · Drama · 38 ch

Armageddon 2419 A.D.

Armageddon 2419 A.D. features the introduction of Buck Rogers, the famous sci-fi adventure hero of early comics and radio shows. Originally published in Amazing Stories in 1928, this novella was later combined with Nowlan’s sequel, The Airlords of Han, and re-published under this same title in the 1960s.

Philip Francis Nowlan · Sci Fi · 13 ch

The Shadow Line

The unnamed narrator, a young seaman, is the first mate on a ship in Southeast Asia. Despite being satisfied with his position, he decides, on a whim, to end his career and head back to Europe. As he awaits for passage in the port of Singapore, he’s offered his first command: the captaincy of a ship left stranded in a nearby port without its commanding officer.

Joseph Conrad · Drama · 6 ch

The Chessmen of Mars

The Chessmen of Mars, the fifth installment in the Martian series, was originally serialized in six parts in Argosy All-Story Weekly before being published as a novel in 1922. It introduces Tara, Princess of Helium, the headstrong daughter of John Carter, the Warlord of Mars. Just like the rest of the novels in the series, this one is packed with imaginative characters and locations.

Edgar Rice Burroughs · Fantasy · 24 ch

The Leavenworth Case

Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy and widowed philanthropist, raises his two beautiful orphaned nieces, Mary and Eleanore. One of the cousins, Mary, is his designated heir. When Mr. Leavenworth is murdered in mysterious circumstances, a young lawyer is called upon to support the distraught cousins.

Anna Katharine Green · Mystery · 40 ch

The Coming Race

An engineer encounters a strange sight while exploring a mine, and reluctantly reports it to the narrator. The two descend into the mine together, but an accident causes the narrator to fall through a crevice and into a secret subterranean world. The inhabitants seem to be an offshoot of an ancient human race who have been living and evolving underground.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton · Sci Fi · 29 ch

The Absolute at Large

The Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote his novel Továrna na absolutno in 1922. It was translated into English and published by Macmillan in 1927 as The Absolute at Large. The novel is a satirical piece of science fiction, and starts with the invention of an “atomic engine” in the future year 1943 which can convert matter directly into energy.

Karel Čapek · Sci Fi · 29 ch

The Phoenix and the Carpet

Like other E. Nesbit stories, The Phoenix and the Carpet was initially published in The Strand Magazine. While The Railway Children or Five Children and It proved more popular, Phoenix has still been adapted into three BBC TV series and a film.

E. Nesbit · Fantasy · 13 ch

Some Do Not …

Some Do Not … opens at the cusp of World War I. Christopher Tietjens, a government statistician, and his friend Vincent Macmaster, an aspiring literary critic, are visiting the English countryside. Tietjens, preoccupied with his disastrous marriage, meets Valentine Wannop, a suffragette, during a round of golf.

Ford Madox Ford · Drama · 16 ch

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, published in 1886, was the first novel by Fergus Hume. It begins with a sensational murder, as the body of a dead man is discovered in a hansom cab by the driver. Set in Melbourne, Australia, it presents an engaging story of crime and detection, with several unexpected twists and turns.

Fergus Hume · Mystery · 36 ch

The Enchanted Castle

The Enchanted Castle is a novel for young readers by Edith Nesbit, who was writing in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era in Britain. As in her other children’s books, it begins in the everyday world but quickly brings in the fantastical and magical. A large part of the delight of Nesbit’s books is that her children behave in quite ordinary ways, getting into scrapes, getting dirty and their clothes torn, making decisions which seem right to them at the time but which are generally wrong-headed.

E. Nesbit · Fantasy · 14 ch

The Moon Pool

The Moon Pool, in novel form, is a combination and fix-up of two previously published short stories: “The Moon Pool,” and “Conquest of the Moon Pool.” Initially serialized in All-Story Weekly, Merritt made the interesting choice of framing the novel as a sort of scientific retelling, going so far as to include footnotes from fictional scientists, to give this completely fantastic work an air of authenticity. In it we find the adventuresome botanist William T. Goodwin embarking on a quest to help his friend Throckmortin, whose wife and friends have fallen victim to a mysterious temple ruin on a remote South Pacific island.

A. Merritt · Sci Fi · 36 ch

The Voyage Out

Miss Rachel Vinrace, aged twenty-four and previously interested only in music, is on a voyage both literal and metaphorical. An ocean cruise with her father leaves her for the summer at her Aunt’s villa in an unnamed South American country, where she meets the English inhabitants of the local town’s hotel. As the season progresses she starts to become entangled in their own lives and passions, and through those burgeoning acquaintances and friendships the discovery of her own nature grows.

Virginia Woolf · Drama · 27 ch

Nightmare Abbey

Published in 1818, Peacock’s novella Nightmare Abbey is a gentle satire of the then-popular gothic movement in literature. He pokes fun at the genre’s obsessions and most of the book’s characters are caricatures of well-known personages of the time. Young Scythrop is the only son of Mr. Glowry, living in the semi-ruined Nightmare Abbey on his estate in Lincolnshire.

Thomas Love Peacock · Drama · 154 ch