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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29 summaries, page 1 of 2
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 1984
In a state that watches everything and rewrites the past daily, one clerk risks his life to think for himself and to love.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | Iron Gold
Ten years after the revolution, its hero, its victims and its exiles discover what freedom really costs.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | Light Bringer
A beaten Darrow crosses the Solar System to find allies while his rival Lysander reaches for a crown.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | Red Rising
A teenage miner on Mars is remade as one of the ruling Golds to bring down the empire that hanged his wife.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's final masterpiece: a murder in a provincial Russian family becomes a battle over God, freedom, suffering and love.
Book Summary | The Idiot
A gentle prince returns to Russia and tests whether pure goodness can survive money, pride and obsessive love.