A young Scotsman with no fortune ships out as a surgeon's mate and endures press-gangs, quacks, and rogues across sea and land. A rough, funny adventure about making one's way in an unforgiving world.
Tobias Smollett · Adventure · 71 ch
Adam Jeffson, the narrator of The Purple Cloud, is recruited to join a polar expedition after the suspicious death of another crewmate. Jeffson and the rest of crew of the Boreal are hoping to claim a multimillion dollar prize for the first expedition to reach the North Pole. During the long voyage, Jeffson discovers an ominous purple cloud which transforms his Arctic adventure.
M. P. Shiel · Sci Fi · 18 ch
Set in the early 1890s, The Special Correspondent tells the story of Claudius Bombarnac, special correspondent from the Parisian newspaper Twentieth Century, assigned to travel the newly completed Grand Transasiatic Railway running from Uzun Ada (on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea) to Peking (Beijing), China. Over his thirteen-day journey he meets an eclectic cast of characters, including an impatient American businessman, a detached English lady, a Russian major, a French actor and actress, a young Chinese noble accompanied by an eccentric Doctor, and a German baron racing to circle the globe in thirty-nine days—perhaps a nod to Verne’s Around the Word in Eighty Days, published twenty years earlier. As he meets them, Bombarnac assigns each a number in his notebook, and seeks to get to know them as they travel together.
Jules Verne · Adventure · 29 ch
Philo Vance is a snobbish art collector who happens to be the longtime friend of John Markham, the New York County District Attorney. When a wealthy Wall Street broker is found shot in his own home, Vance finds himself drawn into the case. Seeing both Markham and the police content to accept the superficial evidence of the crime scene, Vance must intervene, and elucidate an entirely different approach to solving the mystery.
S. S. Van Dine · Mystery · 30 ch
In Looking Backward, well-to-do Julian West of Boston falls asleep for 113 years and awakes to find the world of 2000 fundamentally changed. An old man and his daughter care for him and take him on a tour of the new world. In the new society, a single nationalized corporation-state under a single political party guarantees work, comfort, and luxury to everyone in the “industrial army.” Looking Backward is a watershed utopian novel following in the path laid by books like Thomas More’s Utopia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s The Year 2440.
Edward Bellamy · Sci Fi · 29 ch
John Ridd, a young yeoman farmer, chances upon a beautiful girl in an injudicious visit to a secret valley. It’s a brief but life-defining moment, for John falls in love at first sight. Yet there are complications.
R. D. Blackmore · Adventure · 76 ch
The iconic Tarzan, a man raised by apes in the African jungle, finds himself in the treacherous land of Pal-ul-don while searching for his abducted wife Jane. There Tarzan faces new challenges and dangers, including savage dinosaurs and powerful prehistoric creatures. As he navigates through this perilous world, Tarzan becomes embroiled in the conflicts between different tribal factions, as well as the intrigues of the cities that dot the landscape.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 26 ch
Robert Louis Stevenson’s fascination with the mid-18th Century Jacobite rebellion in Scotland led to the production of his classic Kidnapped, along with its later sequel, Catriona. The Master of Ballantrae —written only a couple years after Kidnapped —shares the same evocative historical setting. The story revolves around the fractious relationship of the two sons of the Lord of Durrisdeer: the elder and duplicitous James, and Henry, the stolid younger brother.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Adventure · 15 ch
The narrator, a man from “back East” on his way to a cattle ranch, stops in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, and witnesses the enigmatic title character—the Virginian—rope a wild pony after many other cowboys failed. The Virginian is revealed to be the narrator’s escort to his destination, where the Virginian is employed. After getting a taste of the Western way of life in town, the two set off on the remaining 263-mile journey to the ranch, sparking a friendship.
Owen Wister · Adventure · 38 ch
Uneducated and regularly mistreated by his master, his filth only matched by his moral and spiritual baseness, Tom is a typical Victorian chimney sweep. While on a special job at a noble’s estate, prejudice pins a crime on him and he flees in fear of retaliation. The chase eventually takes him to a stream in which he bathes for the first time and, doing so, finds himself reborn as a water-baby.
Charles Kingsley · Fantasy · 10 ch
Kipps is the story of Arthur “Artie” Kipps, an illegitimate orphan raised by his aunt and uncle on the southern coast of England in the town of New Romney. Kipps falls in love with neighbor friend Ann Pornick but soon loses touch with her as he begins an apprenticeship at a drapery establishment in the port town of Folkestone. After a drunken evening with his new friend Chitterlow, an aspiring playwright, Kipps discovers he is to inherit a house and sizable income from his grandfather.
H. G. Wells · Comedy · 20 ch
Tarzan the Untamed continues the adventures of Tarzan, the orphaned child raised by apes in the African jungle. It is the seventh book in the Tarzan series and was first published as a six-part serial in The Red Book Magazine from March through August, 1919, with the story continued as “Tarzan and the Valley of Luna” in a five-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly in March and April, 1920. The novel was later compiled and published as a complete book in 1920 by A.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 24 ch
Published in 1925, The House Without a Key introduces the kindly detective Charlie Chan, conceived by Earl Derr Biggers as a counter to the “Yellow Peril” stereotypes common in the era’s society. John Quincy Winterslip, having been sent by his family to convince his aunt to return to Boston, arrives in Honolulu to find that a rich family member with a shady past has been murdered. Detective Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department recruits John to aid in the investigation.
Earl Derr Biggers · Adventure · 23 ch
In this conclusion to the Psammead Trilogy, Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane are reunited with the cantankerous Sand-fairy. While the old creature can’t grant them wishes anymore, it points them towards an old Egyptian amulet that can grant their hearts’ desire—in this case the return of their parents and baby brother. While their amulet is only half of a whole, it still acts as a time portal which they use to visit locales like Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis, and even a utopian future in search of the missing other half.
E. Nesbit · Fantasy · 14 ch
Young Osberne seems destined for greatness. As a fearless boy, he shows a willingness to fight. He’s helped at key times in his life by a mysterious friend who appears briefly to give aid or to provide magical gifts.
William Morris · Fantasy · 68 ch
A man of unusually large stature and dexterity arrives at a boardinghouse on the wind—literally—while its unsuspecting lodgers look on in shock. The man, Innocent Smith, performs comic, eccentric, and dastardly acts which are examined and put to trial by the residents and renowned experts. Lawyers on both sides of the question of Innocent Smith’s guilt bring revelatory correspondence to the trial.
G. K. Chesterton · Comedy · 10 ch
Robert Lewis Stevenson continues the story of David Balfour, starting directly where Kidnapped left off. Compared to Kidnapped, Catriona is much more of a comedy of manners, politics, and romance than a simple action-adventure story, but it still has several of Stevenson’s trademark escapades, imprisonments, and daring escapes. The title character David Balfour attempts to navigate, to his own peril, his apparent role in the Appin murder, the subsequent trial of James of the Glens, life among high society, and the machinations of James Macgregor Drummond, the father of David’s great love, Catriona.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Adventure · 33 ch
In a small Mormon community in southern Utah, Jane Withersteen, a young, unmarried Mormon woman faces growing pressure to marry a local elder of her church. Elder Tull, a polygamist, already has two wives and seeks to marry Jane not just for her beauty, but to take control of the ranch her late father passed on to her. Jane’s resistance to marriage only serves to increase the mounting resentment against “Gentiles” (non-Mormons) in the area.
Zane Grey · Adventure · 23 ch
Not content with having hollowed out the center of the Earth in his earlier novels At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar, in The Moon Maid Edgar Rice Burroughs has his hero voyage to the Moon, which also turns out to be hollow and inhabited on the inside by human-like creatures. The hero and his companion have a series of adventures there, and discover both the sophisticated Va-gas and the malevolent Kalkars. Time passes, and we turn to following the hero’s descendants as they fight against an invasion of the Earth by the Kalkars.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 15 ch
The titular Vathek is a powerful caliph who, though intelligent and capable, has a tendency to indulge in sensuality. A mysterious traveler arrives in his kingdom and mesmerizes Vathek with a promise of dark powers and hedonism beyond imagination. Vathek becomes obsessed with the supernatural possibilities, and, goaded on by his power-hungry mother, embarks on a journey of blasphemy and debauchery.
William Beckford · Fantasy · 6 ch