Fiction 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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59 summaries, page 1 of 3
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 Court of Thorns and Roses
A mortal huntress kills a wolf that was really a faerie and is taken across the wall to a masked lord's enchanted, cursed court.
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.
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.
All the Colors of the Dark
In 1975 Missouri a one-eyed boy saves a girl from abduction and is taken himself, and the friend who refuses to stop looking for him spends decades chasing the truth.
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.
And Then There Were None
Ten strangers with buried secrets are lured to an island off the Devon coast, where a nursery rhyme begins counting them down one by one.
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.
Before We Were Yours
Five river children are stolen for a corrupt Memphis adoption home in 1939, and decades later a senator's daughter uncovers the trail.
Blood Will Tell
A teen search-and-rescue volunteer in Portland becomes the prime suspect in a murder, and his two friends race to clear his name.
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.
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.
Butcher & Blackbird
Two rival serial killers who prey only on other serial killers start an annual hunting contest, and somewhere between the crime scenes they fall in love.
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.
Fallen
Sent to a grim Georgia reform school after a fire she cannot explain, seventeen-year-old Luce is drawn to a cold, beautiful boy she is certain she has met before.
Fourth Wing
A fragile would-be scribe is forced into a murderous war college for dragon riders, where her wits, two dragons and her family's sworn enemy become her only way to survive.
Frozen River
In the winter of 1789 a Maine midwife examines a body pulled from the ice and sets out to win justice for a woman the town's judge would rather silence.
Glass Sword
On the run from the king who betrayed her, the Lightning Girl races to find others like herself, and fears what the fight is turning her into.
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.