The Lady of the Barge
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
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The Land That Time Forgot
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
The Last Chronicle of Barset
The Last Chronicle of Barset is the sixth, and as its title would suggest, final novel in Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire. Like the earlier books, it was serialized in Cornhill Magazine, with a hardcover edition coming out in 1867. It brings together many of the characters who had appeared in series’ earlier novels, and rounds off a number of story threads that those novels began.
Anthony Trollope · Drama · 84 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
The Last of the Mohicans
The Last of the Mohicans is one of the most famous tales of pioneer American adventure. Set during the French and Indian War, Mohicans tells the tale of the journey of two daughters to meet their father, a colonel, at Fort William Henry. The road is long and dangerous, and they, along with their American and Native guides, encounter adventure at each step.
James Fenimore Cooper · Adventure · 34 ch
The Laughing Cavalier
A young woman in 17th century Holland inadvertently overhears the details of a plot to kill a political figure. The principal figures in the plot, one of whom is her brother and another her former lover, hire an insolent English mercenary to kidnap her to get her out of the way until their deeds are done. From there very little goes according to plan.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 48 ch
The Law and the Lady
The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins was published in 1875. As in many of Collins’ novels, it deals with themes considered sensational or scandalous by Victorian society, and features a strong-willed, intelligent woman unwilling to be bound by society’s conventional attitudes. It also treats the subject of disability with some compassion, featuring a man born without legs as a major character.
Wilkie Collins · Drama · 51 ch
The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel
At the scene of Marat’s death, in an infamous cabaret in the old section of Paris, in an old abandoned château on the outskirts of the city, in a prison in the midst of the September massacres—the Scarlet Pimpernel and his League may be in all of these places, or they may be in none of them. In these eleven stories Chauvelin, Robespierre, and several other officials each make their attempts to catch the Pimpernel as he intervenes on the side of the innocent and helpless. The question in these stories is not really whether they will snare him, but how he will make his escape—and in some cases, whether he’s there at all.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 51 ch
The Leavenworth Case
Horatio Leavenworth, a wealthy and widowed philanthropist, raises his two beautiful orphaned nieces, Mary and Eleanore. One of the cousins, Mary, is his designated heir. When Mr. Leavenworth is murdered in mysterious circumstances, a young lawyer is called upon to support the distraught cousins.
Anna Katharine Green · Mystery · 40 ch
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is one of the most popular books ever written in the English language, published in innumerable editions and translated into almost every language of the world, not to mention the many versions created in film, television and even radio. First published in 1719, it can also claim to be one of the first novels ever written in English. Written in the form of an autobiography, it describes the life of the eponymous narrator Robinson Crusoe.
Daniel Defoe · Adventure · 20 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 Little White Bird
The Little White Bird is generally divided into three sections: the first chronicles the narrator’s life in London, beginning with how he came to know a little boy named David (who joins him on his adventures), and describes other matters of his everyday life. The second section tells the story of how Peter Pan came to be a “betwixt-and-between” and his adventures in Kensington Gardens, including his interactions with the birds as well as the fairies hidden in the park. Finally, the third section of the book revisits London with the narrator and David.
J. M. Barrie · Fantasy · 26 ch
The Lodger
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
The Lost Continent
The Lost Continent, initially published as a serial in 1899, remains one of the enduring classics of the “lost race” genre. In it we follow Deucalion, a warrior-priest on the lost continent of Atlantis, as he tries to battle the influence of an egotistical upstart empress. Featuring magic, intrigue, mythical monsters, and fearsome combat on both land and sea, the story is nothing if not a swashbuckling adventure.
C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne · Fantasy · 21 ch
The Lost Girl
Alvina Houghton is the only daughter of James Houghton, a merchant in the English Midlands whose business sense is insufficient to ensure his family’s prosperity. Alvina is independent-minded and struggles to fit in with the society around her—none of the available men spark her interest, and she begins training as a maternity nurse more out of a sense of obligation than of duty. As her father’s business continues to do poorly, he decides to open a theater, with Alvina helping by playing the piano.
D. H. Lawrence · Drama · 18 ch
The Lost World
Even though Doyle is most famous for his Sherlock stories, he was also a prolific novelist, and The Lost World is one of his more famous non-Sherlock novels. Like many novels of the day, it was first published serially. In it we meet a group of adventurers who head to a deep South American jungle to explore rumors of long-lost dinosaurs.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Adventure · 17 ch
The Luck of Barry Lyndon
The Luck of Barry Lyndon was first published as a serial in Fraser’s Magazine, then later as a complete volume entitled The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. —a title Thackeray disliked, but that was selected by his publisher. Thackeray had great difficulty composing the novel, and found himself frequently frustrated in his attempts to get Barry out of yet another jam.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Comedy · 20 ch
The Magic City
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
The Magnificent Ambersons
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 Maid of Sker
Having been invalided out of the British navy, Davy Llewellyn plies his trade as a fisherman on the south coast of Wales. Investigating the wreck of a boat during a wild storm, he discovers an infant girl—the eponymous “maid of Sker”—whom he adopts. Her beauty and wit win a place in his heart that his own orphaned granddaughter can’t compete with.
R. D. Blackmore · Drama · 69 ch