Told entirely in letters, a Welsh family and their servants bicker, court, and blunder their way through the spas and cities of Georgian Britain. A comedy of manners written from inside the mailbag.
Tobias Smollett · Adventure · 84 ch
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
The Lodger is the first known novelization of the Jack the Ripper story. It follows the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, a maid and butler. An eccentric lodger, Mr. Sleuth, arrives at their lodging-house just as a wave of horrific murders begins to sweep London.
Marie Belloc Lowndes · Mystery · 28 ch
Benjamin Disraeli was a remarkable historical figure. Born into a Jewish family, he converted to Anglican Christianity as a child. He is now almost certainly most famous for his political career.
Benjamin Disraeli · Drama · 72 ch
The narrator and his friends, Tad, Skippy, and Wampus, enjoy a calm but playful life in the small community of Birch Island along the Mississippi River. One day, a strange boy who has come to live on their island tries to make their acquaintance. Introducing himself as Oliver Parmenter Jones, or “Jibby Jones” due to his prominent nose, he quickly joins the group after fixing a motorboat and sharing incredible stories of the places he’s been.
Ellis Parker Butler · Adventure · 24 ch
Robert “Bobby” Merrick, a college-aged only child from a wealthy Michigan family, is neither expected nor inclined to do anything with his life except “loaf.” But when he indirectly causes the death of an esteemed Detroit brain surgeon, Bobby decides to change his ways dramatically to compensate for his role in the tragedy. In the course of this he discovers the deceased surgeon’s secret journal, which reveals a spiritual obsession that will transform Bobby’s life even further. Lutheran Christian minister Lloyd C.
Lloyd C. Douglas · Drama · 22 ch
Young Philip Haldane has been living a happy life with his beloved older sister Helen, their parents having died some years previously. But when his sister meets a childhood sweetheart—now a widower—and marries him, Philip is plunged into anger and bitter resentment. He extends this resentment to Lucy, the daughter of Helen’s new husband.
E. Nesbit · Fantasy · 16 ch
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
Trying to escape from her boring life, Hortense Daniel meets the mysterious Prince Rénine (or should we say Arsène Lupin?) who enlists her help to solve eight mysteries, starting with one that is for her very close to home. The pair’s travels take them across northern France as they help ease the path of true love, bring thieves and murderers to justice, and eventually to recover something very dear to Hortense’s heart. The Eight Strokes of the Clock is an Arsène Lupin novel by any other name, with Maurice Leblanc admitting as much in an opening note.
Maurice Leblanc · Drama · 9 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
Wild Animals I Have Known, a collection of short stories published in 1898, was Ernest Thompson Seton’s most popular work and one of the most popular fiction books of its day. The stories are largely independent of each other, with each one following the life of a different animal. They explore themes of survival in a world populated by humans and other creatures, and the challenges that each animal faces in its efforts to thrive.
Ernest Thompson Seton · Drama · 9 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
The Magnificent Ambersons, winner of the 1919 Pulitzer prize, is considered by many to be Booth Tarkington’s finest novel and an American classic. The story is set in the Midwest, where George, the spoiled and oblivious scion of an old-money family, must cope with their waning fortunes and the rise of industry barons in the automobile age. George’s antiheroic struggles with modernity encapsulate a greater theme of change and renewal—specifically, the very American notion of a small community exploding into a dark and dirty city virtually overnight by virtue of industrial “progress.” Tarkington’s nuanced portrayal of the often-unlikable Amberson family and his paradoxical framing of progress as a destroyer of family, community, and environment, make The Magnificent Ambersons a fascinating and forward-thinking novel—certainly one with a permanent place in the American social canon.
Booth Tarkington · Drama · 35 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
Passengers and crew aboard a river barge trade stories that range from comedy to the uncanny. The collection includes Jacobs’s best-known tale, about a talisman that grants its owner three wishes.
W. W. Jacobs · Drama · 16 ch
Otto likes to hunt and enjoy life, while leaving the rule of his small kingdom in the hands of his wife and her trusted advisor. He hears talk of socialist revolution in his land, and when he tries to take charge, he finds that it’s not so easy to resume his rule. With intrigue and betrayal at every corner, all the players must figure out where they really stand.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Drama · 24 ch
Life at the writer Mr. Britling’s estate in the Essex countryside is idyllic. Guests arrive, games are played, and minor love affairs play out. During the early summer of 1914 Germany is discussed, but talk of war is dismissed as fanciful and less important than the situation happening at the same time in Ireland.
H. G. Wells · Drama · 148 ch
The Old Wives’ Tale, considered to be one of Bennett’s finest works, begins in the 1860s, in the industrial “Five Towns” of the English Midlands, where he set many of his partially autobiographical stories. The novel follows the prosperous Baines family, who live above the successful clothing shop they own in the town of Bursley (based on Burslem, in Staffordshire). Even when the two Baines daughters were still young, their characters are already formed.
Arnold Bennett · Drama · 107 ch