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 Monster Calls
A thirteen-year-old whose mother is gravely ill is visited at 12:07 by a monster made from a yew tree, who trades three stories for the one truth the boy cannot say.
Allegedly
Convicted as a small child of killing a baby, sixteen-year-old Mary finally has a reason to tell what really happened that night.
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 Throne
Victoria Aveyard's farewell to the Red Queen world: five novellas and a scholar's records that trace a kingdom from its apocalyptic birth to the hard, hopeful work of peace.
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.
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.
Light Bringer
A beaten Darrow crosses the Solar System to find allies while his rival Lysander reaches for a crown.
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.
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.
One of Us Is Lying
Five students walk into detention and only four come out alive, each with a secret the dead boy was about to publish, in Karen M. McManus's fast, addictive teen mystery.
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 Queen
In a kingdom split by blood, a poor Red thief discovers she has a power only the ruling Silvers should have, and is hidden at the heart of their court.
Red Rising
A teenage miner on Mars is remade as one of the ruling Golds to bring down the empire that hanged his wife.
Sunrise on the Reaping
Sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy is forced into the fiftieth Hunger Games and decides to fight the arena itself, in Suzanne Collins's prequel about propaganda and the cost of defiance.
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.
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's final masterpiece: a murder in a provincial Russian family becomes a battle over God, freedom, suffering and love.
The Idiot
A gentle prince returns to Russia and tests whether pure goodness can survive money, pride and obsessive love.