On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott, widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with both Italy and a handsome Italian much younger than herself, and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband’s family send Lilia’s brother-in-law to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but he arrives too late. Lilia marries the Italian and in due course becomes pregnant again. When she dies giving birth to her child, the Herritons consider it both their right and their duty to travel to Monteriano to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman.

The novel begins in the 1790s in the coastal town of Monkshaven. Sylvia Robson lives with her parents on a farm, and is loved by her rather dull Quaker cousin Philip. She, however, meets and falls in love with Charlie Kinraid, a sailor on a whaling vessel, and they become engaged, although few people know of the engagement. But Charlie gets press-ganged and have to leave without a word.

Monsieur Lecoq is a captivating mystery, historical and love story : Around 11 o'clock, on the evening of Shrove Sunday 18.., close to the old Barrière d'Italie, frightful cries, coming from Mother Chupin's drinking-shop, are heard by a party of detectives led by Inspector Gévrol. The squad runs up to it. A triple murder has just been committed. The murderer is caught on the premises. Despite Gévrol's opinion that four scoundrels encountered each other in this vile den, that they began to quarrel, that one of them had a revolver and killed the others, Lecoq, a young police agent, suspects a great mystery...

Monsieur Lecoq is a captivating mystery, historical and love story: Around 11 o'clock, on the evening of Shrove Sunday 18.., close to the old Barrière d'Italie, frightful cries, coming from Mother Chupin's drinking-shop, are heard by a party of detectives led by Inspector Gévrol. The squad runs up to it. A triple murder has just been committed. The murderer is caught on the premises. Despite Gévrol's opinion that four scoundrels encountered each other in this vile den, that they began to quarrel, that one of them had a revolver and killed the others, Lecoq, a young police agent, suspects a great mystery...

This epic about French coal miners and the burgeoning labor movement is considered one of Zola's finest novels. - Summary by Matt Pierard

This historical novel is set in the 1100s in France and Jerusalem, following the First Crusade. Part of the story of Guy of Lusignan is told through the eyes of his fictional sister, Elaine. Guy travels to the Holy Land to reclaim it from the Saracens. Elaine follows afterward, finding upon arrival that her brother has fallen in love with Sybil, the sister of the leper king of Jerusalem. Queen Sybilla, a real historical character, is surrounded by political intrigue as she prepares to ascend the throne, which threatens her upcoming marriage to Guy of Lusignan...

Written by Baroness Orczy and first published in 1919, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is a sequel book to the classic adventure tale, The Scarlet Pimpernel. The book consists of eleven short stories about Sir Percy Blakeney’s exploits in rescuing various aristos and French citizens from the clutches of the guillotine. The stories which are listed below, are set in 1793 but appear in no particular order. They occasionally refer to events in other books in the series.

The Gold Sickle; or, Hena the Virgin of the Isle of Sen. A Tale of Druid Gaul is the first part of Eugène Sue's The Mysteries of the People; or, History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages, in which he intended to produce a comprehensive "universal history," dating from the beginning of the present era down to his own days. Sue's own socialist leanings made this history that of the "successive struggles of the successively ruled with the successively ruling classes". In the first volume we meet the Gallic chief Joel, whose descendants will typify the oppressed throughout the suite of novels...

The charming story of “Gudrun” is a romance of the old heroic period, written by some unknown poet of Austria or Bavaria in the thirteenth century. Next to the "Nibelungen Lied," it is the most important of the German epic poems...The same elemental passions are depicted. The men are brave, vigorous heroes, rejoicing in battle and feats of prowess; the women are beautiful, constant, and courageous. There are many fine delineations of character in the original, as well as vigorous sketches of northern scenery...

The Fifth Queen trilogy is a series of connected historical novels by English novelist Ford Madox Ford. It consists of three novels, The Fifth Queen; And How She Came to Court (1906), Privy Seal (1907) and The Fifth Queen Crowned (1908), which present a highly fictionalized account of Katharine Howard's marriage to King Henry VIII.

This is the fourth and final novel by Fanny Burney, the author of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla. "Who is "Miss Ellis?" Why did she board a ship from France to England at the beginning of the French revolution? Anyway, the loss of her purse made this strange "wanderer" dependent upon the charity of some good people and, of course, bad ones. But she always comforts herself by reminding herself that it's better than "what might have been..." This is not only a mystery, not at all. It's also a romance which reminds readers of novels by Jane Austen...

This is the story of Iola Leroy, a free-born, mixed-race woman who passed as white. Her true racial identity eventually discovered, she was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Later freed by the Union Army, she journeyed to find others of her family who had been disunited from each other and strewn across the south by the forces of slavery. In the process she also struggled to improve the economic and social station of African Americans. Iola Leroy is a story about race and gender roles during the antebellum and post-Civil War eras, "passing" and the associated socio-political consequences.

What were the lower Mississippi River, Gulf Coast regions, and Appalachians of North America like in the earliest colonial days? Full of untamed forests, wild animals, nuts, berries, and Indians. Chateaubriand spent many years exploring the area, and this early novella was inspired by his years spent with various Indian tribes, , primarily the Natchez. Amongst these natives, as the story goes, was a blind old patriarch named Chactas, revered for his wisdom and knowledge of the affairs of life, including many years spent learning the ways of Europeans...

Here are six stories, each one describing a disaster afflicting London, that were popularly serialized during 1903-1904 in Pearson’s Magazine. The tales depict a deep freeze and unprecedented snowfall; a heavy, blinding, paralyzing blanket of fog; a widespread killer virus; a fraudulent scheme causing financial panic; a minor electrical accident in a tunnel that spirals into catastrophe; and most of the city’s water supply, reportedly contaminated with deadly bubonic bacillus, puts the population in great fear of plague. Is the word “doom” in the book's title accurate, or is it just hyperbole?