Books
The big ideas from popular books, without giving the whole thing away. Get the GIST, then decide if you want the REST.
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30 summaries, page 1 of 2
1900: The Last President
An 1896 pamphlet by a New York lawyer imagines a populist outsider winning the White House and the republic coming apart, a Gilded Age warning that the internet rediscovered as prophecy.
1984
In a state that watches everything and rewrites the past daily, one clerk risks his life to think for himself and to love.
A Very Typical Family
Fifteen years after her actions sent her siblings to prison, Natalie Walker must return to Santa Cruz and reunite with them to inherit their late mother's house, in a darkly funny, tender debut about guilt, forgiveness and second chances.
Animal Farm
Farm animals overthrow their drunken master to build a society of equals, then watch the pigs who lead them slowly become the tyrants they replaced.
Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey
An 1893 children's fantasy sends a big-brained boy baron and his brilliant dog down a Russian well into a hollow earth of transparent people, a blind city of silver and a kingdom of ice.
Broken Country
On a Dorset sheep farm in 1968, a grieving wife's first love comes home with his young son, and a love triangle slides toward a killing and a murder trial.
Dark Age
Ten years after the revolution, Darrow's army is besieged on Mercury, the Republic's Senate is torn apart and Mars is overrun in the saga's darkest book.
Dear Edward
A twelve-year-old boy is the only survivor of a plane crash that kills his family, and must learn, slowly and with one fierce friend beside him, how to live afterward.
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver moves David Copperfield to the mountains of Virginia, where a red-haired boy nobody wants narrates his way through foster care, football glory and the opioid epidemic.
Everything I Never Told You
In 1977 Ohio, the favorite daughter of a Chinese American family is found drowned in the town lake, and her parents and siblings discover how little they knew her or each other.
Golden Son
Darrow, a Red miner remade as a Gold, turns his enemies on each other and carries his secret rebellion from Mars into a war across the solar system.
Hamlet
A grieving prince is told by his father's ghost to avenge a murder, and cannot be sure what to believe or how to act.
Iron Gold
Ten years after the revolution, its hero, its victims and its exiles discover what freedom really costs.
Jane Eyre
A poor, plain, fiercely principled orphan grows up through cruelty and privation, becomes a governess at a house full of secrets, and falls in love with its brooding master on her own terms.
Life of Pi
A sixteen-year-old Indian boy survives a shipwreck and drifts across the Pacific in a lifeboat he must share with a Bengal tiger.
Light Bringer
A beaten Darrow crosses the Solar System to find allies while his rival Lysander reaches for a crown.
Little Fires Everywhere
A wandering artist and her daughter rent a house in rule-loving Shaker Heights, and a custody fight over a baby sets two mothers, and two ways of living, against each other.
Morning Star
Broken by a year in the dark, a slave-born revolutionary rises again to lead a solar-system-wide war against the tyrants who rule it in the finale of the Red Rising trilogy.
Never Let Me Go
Three friends from an idyllic English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for, in Kazuo Ishiguro's quiet, devastating novel about love, memory and mortality.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of the Buendía family rise and unravel in Macondo, a jungle town where ghosts, plagues of insomnia and civil wars are all equally ordinary.
Out of the Silent Planet
A Cambridge philologist is kidnapped and flown to Mars, where he finds a world without sin that looks back at fallen Earth with pity.
Perelandra
C.S. Lewis sends Elwin Ransom to an unfallen Venus, where a new Eve faces a tempter and the fate of a world rests on one reluctant man.
Red Rising
A teenage miner on Mars is remade as one of the ruling Golds to bring down the empire that hanged his wife.
That Hideous Strength
C.S. Lewis closes his Space Trilogy on Earth, where a sinister scientific institute, a fraying young marriage and a sleeping Merlin collide in a battle for England's soul.