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Contending Forces

In response to the upcoming abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Charles Montfort, an English planter in Bermuda, decides to move his family (and his human chattel) to the southern United States in order to free his slaves on his own schedule. However, Montfort’s arrival arouses the jealousy and anger of his neighbors, who murder Montfort and capture his wife and sons as slaves. Several decades later, Charles Montfort’s lineage survives in the Smiths, a family of Black Bostonians headed by the matriarch Ma Smith, who keeps a boarding house alongside her daughter Dora and her son Will.

Pauline E. Hopkins · Drama · 23 ch

The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927, collects the final set of Sherlock Holmes stories authored by Arthur Conan Doyle. All of the included stories appeared previously in The Strand Magazine between October 1921 and April 1927. As usual, the mysteries generally purport to be accounts written by Holmes’s friend Dr. John Watson.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 13 ch

The Final Count

Chemist Robin Gaunt believes he’s discovered the key to lasting world peace—in the form of the horrific poison gas he’s just perfected. Gaunt is certain that once the British government has the formula, no nation will ever dare start a war, for fear of the consequences. But Gaunt vanishes before can turn over the formula, and people start turning up dead—victims of some unknown poison.

H. C. McNeile · Adventure · 14 ch

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

The Return of Sherlock Holmes is the third collection of Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1905. It includes stories published in The Strand Magazine in 1903 and 1904, bringing Holmes for the first time into the twentieth century. Doyle had memorably “killed off” Holmes in a struggle with his nemesis Professor Moriarty in the story “The Final Problem,” which had appeared in 1893 (and which is included in the collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes ).

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 13 ch

The Valley of Fear

The Valley of Fear is the final novel in the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The story originally appeared over several issues of the monthly Strand Magazine in late 1914 before being published as a standalone work. While Doyle would continue to publish Sherlock Holmes short stories until 1927, The Valley of Fear remains Holmes’ final long-form appearance.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch

His Last Bow

His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes is the fourth collection of Sherlock Holmes stories published by Arthur Conan Doyle. It begins with a preface by Dr. John Watson, supposedly written in 1917, assuring the reader that Holmes is still alive but living in quiet retirement in Sussex. This collection contains the well-known stories “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” in which Holmes has to track down stolen plans for a new kind of submarine; and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” in which a Cornish family is found one morning driven mad or dead, with expressions of horror on their faces.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 8 ch

The Wheels of Chance

A draper’s assistant takes to the road on a cycling holiday and falls in with a young woman riding alone along the English coast. A comedy of runaways, rescuers, and mistaken motives that turns into a gentle story of freedom and first love.

H. G. Wells · Comedy · 26 ch

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Choirmaster John Jasper has two secrets: an addiction to opium, and a burning love for Rosa, the fiancée of his nephew, Edwin Drood. When Edwin vanishes without a trace one night, his uncle becomes just one of the suspects in Edwin’s disappearance, as it turns out that several other residents of the town of Cloisterham also seek Rosa’s affections. Who’s the real murderer?

Charles Dickens · Mystery · 24 ch

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of Mark Twain’s most enduring novels. During a stay at a modern-day English castle, the narrator meets a mysterious stranger. The stranger, Hank Morgan, is an engineer from Connecticut, and proceeds to weave a satirical, biting, and hilarious tale of how he traveled back in time to find himself in the court of the legendary King Arthur.

Mark Twain · Comedy · 47 ch

The Gambler

In the fictional town of Roulettenberg, Germany, a Russian tutor to the children of a seemingly wealthy general is enticed to play roulette at the local casino. First playing for others (including his beloved Polina Alexandrovna), he soon gets a taste for the experience himself, which can lead in only one direction. Dostoevsky wrote this story based at least partially on personal experience.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · Drama · 17 ch

The Man Who Was Thursday

Sometimes described as thrilling, sometimes as comic, and sometimes as metaphysical or spiritual, The Man Who Was Thursday is perhaps a little of each. The tale begins when an undercover policeman infiltrates a mysterious Anarchist group. As the novel progresses, things become more comic and improbable, and eventually evolve in to a sort of abstract, dreamlike state.

G. K. Chesterton · Thriller · 16 ch

The Innocence of Father Brown

Father Brown is a Catholic priest, but a slightly unusual one in that he’s also an amateur detective. Unlike his more famous literary cousin Sherlock, Father Brown takes a less analytical and more intuition-oriented approach to solving the many murders that he happens to come across. This collection of short murder mysteries is Brown’s first appearance on the literary stage.

G. K. Chesterton · Mystery · 12 ch

The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady is widely held to be the outstanding work of Henry James’s “early” period, and among the finest novels of his entire career. When the eccentric Mrs. Touchett “takes up” her charming American niece, Isabel Archer, and returns with her to England, her husband and son, the invalid Ralph, are first mystified, then bemused. Soon, however, they are smitten, as also is their aristocratic neighbor, Lord Warburton.

Henry James · Drama · 56 ch

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Edgar Allan Poe is famed for his unsettling short stories, but he also wrote a full-length novel, his only one: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Framed as the recollections of an adventurous stowaway, Pym begins as a swashbuckling adventure novel, and after growing increasingly weirder, ends on a surreal note worthy of the best of Poe’s short stories. Despite Poe himself calling it a “a very silly book,” Pym went on to become one of his most-translated and influential works, coloring the themes of future adventure and weird fiction writers like Jules Verne and H.

Edgar Allan Poe · Adventure · 27 ch

The Story of Doctor Dolittle

The Story of Doctor Dolittle, the first installment in Hugh Lofting’s beloved Doctor Dolittle series, centers on a kindhearted British physician, John Dolittle, who has an extraordinary gift: the ability to communicate with animals. Set in early 20th-century England, the novel begins with Dolittle’s life in the quiet town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, where his unconventional methods and growing fascination with the animal kingdom spark curiosity and skepticism among his peers. When he discovers he can understand and converse with creatures in their own language, he’s propelled toward an adventure to Africa, where he seeks to cure a monkey epidemic just as he faces bankruptcy.

Hugh Lofting · Adventure · 22 ch

The Red and the Black

An ambitious young man of humble birth tries to rise in Restoration France by talent, love affairs, and calculated hypocrisy. A sharp portrait of desire colliding with a society built to contain it.

Stendhal · Drama · 76 ch

The Last Man

The Last Man chronicles the last days of humanity in the 21st century as it is slowly obliterated by a global pandemic. Radical changes and events across Europe—the king abdicates, turning England into a Republic; war erupts between Greece and Turkey—weaken the fabric of society, allowing an unknown and deadly disease to quickly spread across the world. Political leaders are disorganized; spiritual figures offer little comfort; science yields no answers.

Mary Shelley · Sci Fi · 31 ch

Hypatia

Philammon is a young monk living in an isolated Egyptian monastery circa 400 AD. He feels a longing to see the world, so he embarks on a trip to Alexandria, a city teeming with culture and learning. On his way he meets Pelagia, a beautiful courtesan traveling up the Nile with a band of Goths in search of Asgard.

Charles Kingsley · Historical · 32 ch

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a fictional autobiography of the eponymous narrator, contains—perhaps surprisingly—little about either his life or opinions, but what it does have is a meandering journey through the adventures of his close family and their associates. The book is famous for being more about the explanatory diversions and rabbit-holes that the narrator takes us down than the actual happenings he set out to describe, but in doing so he paints a vivid picture of the players and their personal stories. Published two volumes at a time over the course of eight years, Tristram Shandy was an immediate commercial success although not without some confusion among critics.

Laurence Sterne · Comedy · 322 ch

The Mill on the Floss

Published in 1860, The Mill on the Floss was the second novel published by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). Set in the late 1820s or early 1830s, it tells the story of two young people, Tom and Maggie Tulliver, from their childhood into early adulthood. Their father, Jeremy Tulliver, owns Dorlcote Mill on the river Floss, and the children grow to adolescence in relative comfort.

George Eliot · Drama · 59 ch