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62 books found.

• Oliver Twist

  By Charles Dickens

  Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 and as a three-volume book in 1838. The story follows orphan Oliver Twist, who, after being raised in a workhouse, escapes to London, where he meets a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin, discovers the secrets of his parentage, and reconnects with his remaining family.

  53 chapters · About 680 minutes of published text

• Persuasion

  By Jane Austen

  Persuasion is the last novel completed by the English author Jane Austen. It was published on 20 December 1817, along with Northanger Abbey, six months after her death, although the title page is dated 1818. The story concerns Anne Elliot, an Englishwoman of 27 years, whose family moves to Bath to lower their expenses and reduce their debt by renting their estate to an admiral and his wife. The wife's brother, Captain Frederick Wentworth, was engaged to Anne in 1806, but the engagement was broken when Anne was persuaded by her friends and family to end their relationship.

  24 chapters · About 362 minutes of published text

• Peter Pan

  By J. M. Barrie

  Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, often known simply as Peter Pan, is a work by British novelist J. M. Barrie, in the form of a 1904 play and a 1911 novel titled Peter and Wendy. Both versions tell the story of Peter Pan, a mischievous little boy who can fly, and has many adventures on the island of Neverland that is inhabited by mermaids, fairies, Native Americans and pirates. The Peter Pan stories also involve the characters Wendy Darling and her two younger brothers John and Michael, Peter's fairy Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, and the pirate Captain Hook. The play and novel were inspired by Barrie's friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family.

  17 chapters · About 204 minutes of published text

• Pride and Prejudice

  By Jane Austen

  Pride and Prejudice is a novel by English author Jane Austen. Written when she was aged 20–21, it was her third novel written and became the second to see print when it was published in 1813. A novel of manners, it follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness.

  61 chapters · About 531 minutes of published text

• Sense and Sensibility

  By Jane Austen

  Sense and Sensibility (working title: Elinor and Marianne) is the debut novel by English author Jane Austen, appearing in 1811. It was published anonymously: By A Lady appears on the title page where the author's name might have been. The novel is probably set between 1792 and 1797 and follows the three Dashwood sisters and their widowed mother as they are forced to leave the family estate in Sussex and move to a modest cottage on the property of a distant relative in Devon. There the two eldest girls experience love and heartbreak that tries the contrasting characters of both.

  50 chapters · About 516 minutes of published text

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  By Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of short stories by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, first published on 14 October 1892. It contains the earliest short stories featuring the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, which had been published in twelve monthly issues of The Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892. The stories are collected in the same sequence, which is not supported by any fictional chronology. The only characters common to all twelve are Holmes and Dr. Watson, and all are relayed in first-person narrative from Watson's point of view.

  12 chapters · About 454 minutes of published text

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  By Mark Twain

  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (also simply known as Tom Sawyer) is a novel by Mark Twain (1835-1910) published on June 9, 1876, about a boy, Tom Sawyer, growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1830s–1840s in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel, Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime.

  35 chapters · About 303 minutes of published text

• The Blue Castle

  By L. M. Montgomery

  The Blue Castle is a 1926 novel by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, best known for her novel Anne of Green Gables (1908). The story is set during the early 1900s in the fictional town of Deerwood, located in the Muskoka region of Ontario, Canada. Deerwood is based on Bala, Ontario, which Montgomery visited in 1922. Maps of the two towns show similarities.

  45 chapters · About 296 minutes of published text

• The Call of the Wild

  By Jack London

  The Call of the Wild is an adventure novel by Jack London, published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively more primitive and wild in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primal instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.

  7 chapters · About 138 minutes of published text

• The Castle of Otranto

  By Horace Walpole

  The Castle of Otranto is a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first Gothic novel. In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – A Gothic Story. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day Gothic romance/horror books, films, art, music, and the Goth subculture.

  5 chapters · About 150 minutes of published text

• The Great Gatsby

  By F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Great Gatsby is a 1925 tragedy novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire obsessed with reuniting with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.

  9 chapters · About 209 minutes of published text

• The Hound of the Baskervilles

  By Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of the four crime novels by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set largely on Dartmoor, Devon, in England's West Country and follows Holmes and Watson investigating the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound of supernatural origin. This was the first appearance of Holmes since his apparent death in The Final Problem and the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles led to the character's eventual revival.

  15 chapters · About 257 minutes of published text

• The Invisible Man

  By H. G. Wells

  The Invisible Man is an 1897 science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialised in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man to whom the title refers is Griffin, an optical scientist who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light. He carries out this procedure on himself and renders himself invisible, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. A practitioner of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction.

  28 chapters · About 209 minutes of published text

• The Island of Doctor Moreau

  By H. G. Wells

  The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was published on 1 January 1896. The novel is set between 1 February 1887 and 5 January 1888. The text of the novel is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat. He is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The novel deals with a number of themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, human interference with nature, and the effects of trauma. Wells described it as "an exercise in youthful blasphemy."

  22 chapters · About 186 minutes of published text

• The Lost World

  By Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Lost World is an adventure and science fiction novel by British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle recounting an expedition to a remote plateau in the Amazon basin of South America where dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals still survive, along with a tribe of vicious ape-like creatures that are in conflict with a group of indigenous Indians. The work introduces the character of Professor Challenger, who leads the expedition (and who would appear in later Conan Doyle stories), and is narrated in the first person by the journalist member (Edward Malone) of the exploration party.

  16 chapters · About 328 minutes of published text

• The Man Who Was Thursday

  By G. K. Chesterton

  A poet-detective infiltrates a council of anarchists whose members are named for the days of the week, and nothing is what it seems.

  16 chapters · About 252 minutes of published text

• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

  By Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of short stories by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, first published late in 1893 with 1894 date. It was first published in the UK by G. Newnes Ltd., and was published in the US by Harper & Brothers in February 1894. It was the second collection featuring the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, following The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Like the first it was illustrated by Sidney Paget.

  12 chapters · About 415 minutes of published text

• The Mysterious Affair at Styles

  By Agatha Christie

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the first mystery novel by British writer Agatha Christie, introducing her fictional detective Hercule Poirot. It was written in the middle of the First World War, in 1916, and first published by John Lane in the United States in October 1920 and in the United Kingdom by The Bodley Head (John Lane's UK company) on 21 January 1921.

  13 chapters · About 245 minutes of published text

• The Odyssey

  By Homer (translated by Samuel Butler)

  The Odyssey is one of two major epics of ancient Greek literature attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest surviving works of literature and remains popular with modern audiences. Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is divided into 24 books. It follows the heroic king of Ithaca, Odysseus, also known by the Latin variant Ulysses, and his homecoming journey after the ten-year-long Trojan War. His journey from Troy to Ithaca lasts an additional ten years, during which time he encounters many perils and all of his crewmates are killed.

  24 chapters · About 550 minutes of published text

• The Phantom of the Opera

  By Gaston Leroux

  The Phantom of the Opera is a Gothic horror novel by French author Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serial in Le Gaulois from 23 September 1909 to 8 January 1910, and was released in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte. The novel is partly inspired by historical events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century, and by an apocryphal tale concerning the use of a former ballet pupil's skeleton in an 1841 production of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz. It has been successfully adapted into various stage and film adaptations, most notable of which are the 1925 film depiction featuring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical.

  26 chapters · About 363 minutes of published text

• The Picture of Dorian Gray

  By Oscar Wilde

  The Picture of Dorian Gray is an 1890 philosophical fiction and Gothic horror novel by Irish author Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, while the novel-length version was published in April 1891. As the only novel written by Wilde, it is widely regarded as a classic of both Gothic and English literature, having been adapted many times for films, stage, plays, and other forms of art performances.

  20 chapters · About 341 minutes of published text

• The Scarlet Letter

  By Nathaniel Hawthorne

  The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a historical novel by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to lead a new life of repentance and dignity. As punishment, she must wear a scarlet letter 'A' (for "adultery"). Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.

  23 chapters · About 294 minutes of published text

• The Scarlet Pimpernel

  By Baroness Orczy

  The Scarlet Pimpernel is the first novel in a series of historical fiction novels by British author Baroness Orczy, published in 1905. It was written after her stage play of the same title (co-authored with her husband Montagu Barstow) enjoyed a long run in London, having opened in Nottingham in 1903.

  31 chapters · About 372 minutes of published text

• The Secret Garden

  By Frances Hodgson Burnett

  The Secret Garden is a children's novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett first published in book form in 1911, after serialisation in The American Magazine (November 1910 – August 1911). Set in England, it is seen as a classic of English children's literature. The American edition was published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company with illustrations by M. L. Kirk, and the British edition by Heinemann with illustrations by Charles Robinson. Several stage and film adaptations have been made of The Secret Garden.

  27 chapters · About 349 minutes of published text