Fiction Books

Fiction is the biggest shelf in the library, and the public domain era covers roughly its first two centuries — from the first true novels of the 1700s through the modernist experiments of the early 1900s. What holds this catalog together isn't a single style but a common ambition: writers using invented people and events to say something true about how people actually behave. You'll find the tightly plotted social comedies of Jane Austen next to the sprawling, obsessive voyage of Moby-Dick, and the nonsense logic of a children's book like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sitting a few shelves from Gothic tragedies like Frankenstein. If you're newer to classic fiction, the easiest entry points are usually the shortest and funniest books rather than the longest and most famous ones — reputation and readability aren't the same thing.

Where to start

Pride and Prejudice

The sharpest, funniest place to start if you've never read Austen — or any 19th-century novel — before.

Where to start

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Barely 100 pages and still one of the strangest, most quotable books ever written for children or adults.

Where to start

Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

A whaling voyage that becomes an obsession — dense, but the most influential American novel on this list.

246 books total in this collection, free to read with synchronized LibriVox audio.

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

Fiction Books

Pride and Prejudice

Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus

A Tale of Two Cities

A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Scarlet Letter

War and Peace

Metamorphosis

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete

Great Expectations

Dracula

Heart of Darkness

Ulysses

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Little Women

Emma

The Brothers Karamazov

The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories

Anne of Green Gables

The Count of Monte Cristo

The war of the worlds

Treasure Island

Sense and Sensibility

Mansfield Park

Jude the Obscure

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

Dubliners

The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Oliver Twist

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Peter Pan : $b [Peter and Wendy]

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Through the Looking-Glass

The Enchanted April

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Anna Karenina

A Study in Scarlet

The Adventures of Roderick Random

The Time Machine

Wuthering Heights

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Howards End

A Tramp Abroad

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Romance of Lust: A classic Victorian erotic novel

The call of the wild

The Jungle Book

The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Jane Austen A Linked Index of all PG Editions of Jane Austen

Crime and Punishment

Les Misérables

Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Secret Garden

The Turn of the Screw

Ethan Frome

Don Quixote

David Copperfield

Hans Brinker; Or, The Silver Skates

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 1

The Thirty-Nine Steps

The Well at the World's End: A Tale

Anthem

Life in the Iron-Mills; Or, The Korl Woman

The Moonstone

Ramona

The First Men in the Moon

The Lure of the Dim Trails

The Water-Babies

Bleak House

The Wrecker

The Diary of a Nobody

The Lone Star Ranger: A Romance of the Border

The Professor

The Night-Born

Rupert of Hentzau: From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim Sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda

Damaged Goods The great play "Les avariés" by Brieux, novelized with the approval of the author

Robbery under Arms A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Australian Goldfields