Allan Quatermain, the sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, was first serialized in Longman’s Magazine in the U.K. and subsequently published as a novel in 1887. In it we see the eponymous hero reunited with his companions to travel to Africa on a dangerous and adventuresome quest to try to find a legendary tribe of white-skinned people, the Zu-Vendi.
H. Rider Haggard · Adventure · 27 ch
At age thirty, Madeleine Lee, a wealthy, wellborn widow, has tired of Gilded Age New York and its shallow society. She decides to spend the winter in Washington with her sister, renting a house on Lafayette Square, within easy reach of all the intense partying, horse-trading, and other activities that politics requires. As she makes friends (and enemies) with the locals, one question remains uppermost in Madeleine Lee’s mind: “Who, then, is right?
Henry Adams · Comedy · 14 ch
Greenmantle is the second of John Buchan’s novels to feature Richard Hannay, a Scottish intelligence office in the British army, and as such is the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps. The book gives the account of Hannay and his associate’s separate journeys through war-torn Europe to Constantinople to thwart an uprising that is poised to throw the Middle East, India, and North Africa into disarray, changing the course of the war. The book was popular when first published and although it has never been made into a film, the director Alfred Hitchcock was said to prefer Greenmantle to The Thirty-Nine Steps, and considered filming it on several occasions.
John Buchan · Adventure · 23 ch
Trapped in a failing shop and a loveless marriage, Mr. Polly stages his own death and walks away to start life over. Wells turns one man’s comic rebellion into a warm story about courage and second chances.
H. G. Wells · Comedy · 10 ch
The Beasts of Tarzan, the third book in the Tarzan series, was first published in All-Story Cavalier magazine in 1914. It was later published as a novel in 1916. Tarzan’s old enemy, Nikolas Rokoff, escapes prison and plans his revenge by kidnapping the Tarzan’s son, the heir of Greystoke.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 21 ch
In the late 19th century, Lewis Carroll —better known these days as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland —was also an established mathematician who had published many books and papers in the fields of algebra and logic. His mathematical interest extended to the setting of puzzles for popular consumption. The stories collected here cover varied subjects including the cataloguing of paintings, the number of times trains will pass each other on a circular track, the most efficient way to rent individual rooms on a square, and many more.
Lewis Carroll · Comedy · 14 ch
After being shipwrecked in the South Pacific, cousins Dick and Emmeline Lestrange are stranded upon an island, fortunately populated with plentiful resources and the beauty of nature. With the guidance of the ship’s cook, the only other survivor, they learn how to live off the land, foregoing their civilized upbringing and adopting a more primitive way of life. Of course, with this environment and its pleasures come a great number of dangers, from animal attacks to hazardous weather, and as Dick and Emmeline mature they experience one of the strongest forces of nature: love.
H. de Vere Stacpoole · Adventure · 49 ch
Frank Cowperwood is a teenager living in Philadelphia when he comes across a lobster kept in a tank. As the lobster lunges at and devours the other sea creatures helplessly trapped with it, Frank decides that this pitiless example of nature red in tooth and claw is the most effective way of advancing in wealth and human affairs. After making some easy money acting as a middleman for a castile soap distributor, Frank quickly finds himself amassing a fortune in business and investments as the Civil War tears across America.
Theodore Dreiser · Drama · 61 ch
Tom and fellow sailor Toby escape from their duties onboard a whaling ship and fall in with savages on Nukuheva (Nuku Hiva) of the Marquesas Islands. The islanders welcome them to their tropical paradise, but the two runaways must remain on guard to find out if these savages are truly friends or foes. Typee was Melville’s first novel, written after his own voyages and experiences on a whaling ship to the Marquesas and beyond.
Herman Melville · Adventure · 38 ch
Although known for her later experiments with style and structure, Virginia Woolf set out in her early novels to master the traditional form. Her second novel, Night and Day, presents itself as a seemingly conventional marriage plot, complete with love triangles, broken engagements, and unrequited affections. Beneath these conventional trappings, however, the book’s deeper concerns are resolutely subversive.
Virginia Woolf · Drama · 34 ch
The Wings of the Dove is perhaps the most well-received of Henry James’s novels. First published in 1902, it follows Kate Croy and Merton Densher, an engaged couple in late-Victorian London, who meet Milly Theale, a wealthy American heiress. Milly, though young and lively, is burdened with a fatal disease.
Henry James · Drama · 38 ch
Georges Duroy returns to Paris from military service in Algeria penniless. After meeting up with an old friend, he finds journalism work at a renowned newspaper. He gradually climbs the ranks to chief-editor—but all this time, he hasn’t been using his wit as a writer, but rather the clever manipulation of the women around him, to get ahead.
Guy de Maupassant · Drama · 18 ch
Miles Coverdale is a young poet who goes to work on a communal farm in New England. He joins other idealists who seek to leave behind what they see as a corrupt society, and to live off the land by honest work. They will escape the world, and at the same time improve it by their example.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Drama · 30 ch
After discovering an injured squirrel, young Tommy Stubbins is introduced to Doctor Dolittle. Enamored by the Doctor’s ability to speak with animals and his wonderful house full of creatures from around the world, Tommy convinces the Doctor to take him as an apprentice. Together with Polynesia the parrot, Jip the dog, and an African prince named Bumpo, they set out in search of the famed naturalist Long Arrow, son of Golden Arrow, who has gone missing.
Hugh Lofting · Adventure · 61 ch
The House of the Wolfings tells the tale of a band of German Goths living in a wood they call the Mark. Their lives are idyllic until the long shadow of the Roman Empire threatens the peace in their land. Thiodolf, the leader of the Wolfings and a descendant of the ancient gods, must rally the surrounding tribes to defend their home and way of life.
William Morris · Fantasy · 32 ch
Thuvia, Maid of Mars moves the focus of Burroughs’ Martian series to Carthoris, the son of the human John Carter and Martian Dejah Thoris and the prince of Helium. Princess Thuvia of Ptarth and Prince Carthoris of Helium are in love. Fate, however, is against them: the princess is promised to another, the Jeddak of Kaol, Kulan Tith.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Fantasy · 14 ch
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
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
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 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