It is the Middle Ages, and the Hundred Years War rages on in England and France. Alleyne Edricson, the son of an English landowner, is training as a novice at an abbey. As his training draws to a close, he’s called upon to spend a year in the outside world to decide if he really wants to devote his life to prayer and contemplation.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Historical · 38 ch
Nell and her grandfather eke out a life of near-poverty in a small curiosity shop in London. Despite their narrow circumstances, their lives are happy ones, in which each takes care of the other. But Nell’s grandfather is hiding a secret, one which threatens their very survival.
Charles Dickens · Drama · 75 ch
Four years after writing his immensely popular The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum returned to the Land of Oz in this second book of fourteen he wrote about the magical country. Like its predecessor, The Marvelous Land of Oz has delighted children through the years, and has been adapted into stage plays, films, and comics.
L. Frank Baum · Fantasy · 25 ch
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope is an adventure novel first published in 1894 that takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Ruritania. It tells the story of Rudolph Rassendyll, who is, because of past indiscretions in the family and unbeknownst to him, the near twin of King Rudolph V of Ruritania. Labeled a ne’er-do-well by his sister-in-law, young Rudolph determines to escape his family and secretly travel to Ruritania for the coronation of his distant relative.
Anthony Hope · Adventure · 22 ch
Two idlers in London are sauntering in the streets when they pick up a coin dropped by a fleeing man. They keep meeting three persons, each time in a different disguise, who recount lurid tales. They seem to be looking for a spectacled man who regrets working with them, and has run away with a valuable coin … This novel is a Gothic horror classic, and takes the form of an episodic novel, with each chapter containing a story recounted by one of the three impostors.
Arthur Machen · Horror · 11 ch
At the Earth’s Core, published in 1914, is the first of a series of science fiction novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs set inside a hollow earth with a central “sun,” a land called Pellucidar. However unlikely this scenario, it allowed Burroughs free play to create heroic adventures in yet another alien environment in addition to his fantastic version of Mars in his Martian series. The story’s hero, David Innes, is recruited by an old man, Perry, to help fund his invention, a “mechanical subterranean prospector,” and then to test it out.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 16 ch
William Guest wakes up to find himself transported to a future utopian society. This bucolic society functions despite the absence of private property, marriage, prisons, courts, schools, and central government. The people are happy, healthy, and hard working.
William Morris · Sci Fi · 32 ch
The Night Land is science fiction ahead of its time. Published in 1912, the book introduces a 17th-century gentleman who loses his wife. He soon discovers himself somehow reanimated in Earth’s far future, millions of years from now, when the sun has died and the Earth has become a hellish waste.
William Hope Hodgson · Sci Fi · 30 ch
The gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin returns in this set of ten short stories to confess—or perhaps boast about—his crimes to the unnamed narrator. Mostly set around Lupin’s attempts to frustrate Chief-Inspector Ganimard and pocket some cash in the process, they also show off his knack for escaping from seemingly impossible situations, and even playing the role of the master detective. In the chronology of Arsène Lupin, these tales were published after, but set before, the darker stories of The Hollow Needle and 813.
Maurice Leblanc · Mystery · 10 ch
The Land That Time Forgot opens with the discovery near Greenland of a floating thermos flask containing a manuscript by castaway Tyler Bowen, Jr. The document recounts a series of adventures that starts with a sea battle against a German U-boat and ends on a mysterious island populated by hostile prehistoric animals and people. The second part of the book, “The People That Time Forgot,” continues the story with the tale of Tom Billings, who has been sent on a mission to rescue Bowen after his manuscript was discovered.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 23 ch
When Arsène Lupin disappeared at the end of The Hollow Needle the public and police assumed he was dead; but it turns out he was just biding his time and waiting for the right opponent to face off against. Luckily, a secret involving a stash of hidden papers and Europe’s aristocratic families is more than enough to pique the interests of Lupin and his unknown competitor. This novel is told more from Lupin’s point of view than the previous stories, and that reduces some of the omnipotence bestowed upon him by Leblanc while highlighting his more emotional qualities.
Maurice Leblanc · Drama · 18 ch
An Antarctic Mystery follows Mr. Jeorling, a wealthy American naturalist whose research has led him to the remote Kerguelen Islands, located in the southern Indian Ocean. Jeorling begins his adventure on the Halbrane after being admitted aboard by the reluctant captain Len Guy, who believes the events in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to be true. In that novel, Pym persuades Len Guy’s brother, William Guy, to lead a voyage to the Antarctic.
Jules Verne · Adventure · 26 ch
The Way We Live Now is Anthony Trollope’s longest novel, published in two volumes in 1875 after first appearing in serial form. After an extended visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1872, Trollope was outraged on his return to England by a number of financial scandals, and was determined to expose the dishonesty, corruption, and greed they embodied. The Way We Live Now centers around a foreign businessman, Augustus Melmotte, who has come to prominence in London despite rumors about his past dealings on the Continent.
Anthony Trollope · Drama · 100 ch
Three years after the publication of The Marvelous Land of Oz and encouraged by young fans’ letters, L. Frank Baum once more returned to write about lands full of magic and wonder. On a ship on her way to Australia for a holiday with Uncle Henry, Dorothy Gale gets tossed overboard during a storm.
L. Frank Baum · Fantasy · 22 ch
Peter Blood, with experience as a soldier and sailor, is practicing medicine in Bridgewater, England, when he inadvertently gets caught up in a rebellion being waged by the Duke of Monmouth. After being convicted of treason, Blood and some of the rebels are sentenced to slavery in the Caribbean. The year is 1688.
Rafael Sabatini · Adventure · 31 ch
Edward Waverley is a young English gentleman, the heir to his uncle, Sir Everard Waverley. After receiving a commission in the English army and being stationed in Scotland, he comes into contact with Jacobites, supporters of the pretender Charles Stuart, who seeks to reclaim the throne of England. After becoming enamored with the Jacobite cause and subsequently being suspected of treason, Waverley decides to openly join the uprising on the side of the rebels, during which his honorable conduct wins him favor on both sides of the conflict.
Walter Scott · Adventure · 77 ch
Captain Belval, learning of a threat to his beloved nurse Little Mother Coralie, rescues her from her would-be assailants and is promptly dragged into a plot involving her husband and millions of francs worth of gold. As layer upon layer of conspiracy emerges with no obvious thread to follow, there’s only one man who can be counted on to uncover the truth. The Golden Triangle (also known as The Return of Arsène Lupin ) was published in 1917 in both the original French and this English translation.
Maurice Leblanc · Mystery · 19 ch
Barnaby Rudge opens in the English village of Chigwell in 1775, where an unsolved double murder casts a long shadow over the local community, and in particular Barnaby Rudge, the son of one of the victims. Five years later, London is consumed by the Gordon Riots of 1780, when Lord George Gordon led the Protestant Association in a protest against increased rights for Catholics that descended into days of mob violence. Into this maelstrom wanders Barnaby, a guileless young man with an intellectual disability, recognized across the countryside by his eccentric dress and by Grip, the raven riding on his shoulder.
Charles Dickens · Historical · 83 ch
Recently engaged Harry Feversham, son of a soldier and descendant of a long line of soldiers, receives word that his regiment is going overseas. For complex reasons he suddenly resigns rather than be deployed. This action brands him a coward among his fellow officers and his fiancée, who present him with white feathers, a symbol of cowardice.
A. E. W. Mason · Adventure · 35 ch
The fictional Dombey and Son is a prominent mercantile “house” in England, and as Dombey and Son the novel opens, the third generation “and Son” has just been born. For Paul Dombey, the proud second “and Son” to graduate to “Dombey,” this moment has been the focus of his life to this point. So much so that he barely knows his six-year-old daughter Florence exists.
Charles Dickens · Drama · 64 ch