Browse hundreds of free online ebook samples from the authors and publishers at Smashwords. Once you find a book you want to purchase, click over to Smashwords to get the book in multiple DRM-free ebook formats.
|
|
Nightmares | by Jerome Brooke March 17, 2012 | $1.99 | 2148 words | Sample 20% |
| Fiction Anthology | |||||
|
|
Moorings | by Nancy Slavin March 17, 2012 | $4.99 | 115602 words | Sample 20% |
| Moorings follows 23-year old Anne Holloway as she journeys up to a small, Alaskan fishing town to find her biological father. Instead of finding what she came looking for, Anne realizes the past can never be untangled from people's memories, and damage from oil spilled under the surface never completey dissolves. Still, by making the journey, Anne discovers her true identity can be found within. | |||||
|
|
Soledad en la guerra | by JoaquÃn Padeira March 17, 2012 | $4.99 | 110763 words | Sample 20% |
| En los dÃas más cruentos de la Guerra Civil, un hombre intenta escapar del Madrid chequista en compañÃa de su familia. Sin embargo, sus planes pronto se verán alterados por las circunstancias... | |||||
|
|
Abraham The Anchor Baby Terrorist | by Sean Boling March 17, 2012 | $4.99 | 74998 words | Sample 30% |
| Raising a child is difficult enough while surrounded by the trappings of American culture; raising a child to be a terrorist in America only adds to the problems. | |||||
|
|
A Short Stay in Hell | by Steven L. Peck March 16, 2012 | $2.99 | 27595 words | Sample 15% |
| An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he'll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. | |||||
|
|
Gnawing the Bone: Dog Fiction | by Raud Kennedy March 16, 2012 | $4.99 | 49499 words | Sample 15% |
| What is your dog thinking? What puts a smile on his face? In this collection of dog fiction, dogs speak their minds in that straightforward manner only dogs have. They want to know why we do what we do. Why are humans obsessed with sex? Some of the dogs are from around the corner, others from the farthest reaches of the galaxy—and some even live on an Earth where dogs are the dominant species. | |||||
|
|
Before the Gates | by K. Zeth Ozbirn March 16, 2012 | $2.99 | 70232 words | Sample 10% |
| "Before the Gates" is a short story cycle masquerading as a novel, or, a novel masquerading as a short story cycle. Expressionistic and thematic, it follows its main characters as they deal with fate and consequence in the tumult resulting from the sudden loss of their hometown of Biloxi,MS. Each finds their own path. They find more questions than answers, madness and enigma instead of realism. | |||||
|
|
On a Darkling Plain | by R.P. Burnham March 16, 2012 | $3.99 | 116787 words | Sample 20% |
| Samuel Jellerson, 56 and forced into early retirement, is walking in the woods behind the family farm in Maine one fall day when he witnesses a priest molesting a boy. From this one event all the action in the novel follows and draws a wide cross section of the town into a theme that explores the nature of evil and its antidote empathy, the force that creates community, and fellow-feeling. | |||||
|
|
Rebecca | by Nealy Gihan March 15, 2012 | $0.99 | 2676 words | Sample 20% |
| No one seems to know what happened to Curt's pregnant girlfriend. Did she walk out on him? Was there foul play? He and her disappearance continue to be the talk of Crossroads Church. | |||||
|
|
The Farmer from Paypalia | by Ian Martin March 15, 2012 | $0.99 | 1763 words | Sample 30% |
| The filthy farmer from Paypalia is rudely interrupted by a visit from the morality police... This story was written in response to the aborted attempt by PayPal to censor the work of writers of erotica. | |||||
|
|
The Many Change and Pass | by R.P. Burnham March 15, 2012 | $3.99 | 138835 words | Sample 20% |
| The novel begins with the mercury poisoning of a small, impoverished boy and follows Chris Andrews, a ecological activist, Myron Seavey, a progressive librarian, and a dozen other characters, including the women Chris lives with in a house in Portland and the brother of the poisoned boy, Malcolm Kimball, who drops out of school, as they all deal with the implications of this poisoning. | |||||
|
|
Before and After | by Michael O'Leary March 15, 2012 | $2.99 | 7166 words | Sample 20% |
| Before and After/Neither Here nor There is a story of bohemian existential dislocation in which the two protagonists literally don't know where they are, what city in New Zealand they live in, Auckland or Dunedin, and their attempts to solve their dilemma leads to an hilarious exploration of dream/reality, personal and social dis-intergration. | |||||
|
|
A Broken Claw, A Cat's Eye Story | by Lander Kerbey March 14, 2012 | $0.99 | 7450 words | Sample 20% |
| As Winter wears on for Kion's mercenaries, Traleau tries to reach out to the two new captives who share his fate and his fearful position in the group. But when he does, he finds himself stepping into the histories of other named men, and the maelstrom of wills tangled up in them. | |||||
|
|
A Lovely, Indecent Departure | by Steven Lee Gilbert March 14, 2012 | $4.95 | 63866 words | Sample 20% |
| A Lovely, Indecent Departure is the riveting and emotionally-charged debut from a promising new voice in literary thrillers, and a captivating story about a mother’s love and desperation set amidst the heart wrenching landscape of child custody. | |||||
|
|
Brother of Cloud in the Water | by William Davey March 14, 2012 | $3.99 | 54804 words | Sample 20% |
| Brother of Cloud in the Water narrates his own story set in 1945 New Guinea. He is a tribal leader largely concerned with food and shelter for his tribe and keeping the enemy headhunters away. Then one day a strange flying thing lands and a beautiful red-headed white woman emerges. | |||||
|
|
A Mile in These Shoes | by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez March 14, 2012 | $3.99 | 60712 words | Sample 20% |
| These nine stories describe people who live on the margins of society, people who are often oppressed and always ignored. These stories give them voice and let the reader into their worlds on the edge. | |||||
|
|
Paradis 777 | by Werle Hugues March 14, 2012 | $3.99 | 37390 words | Sample 20% |
| Ce roman littéraire décrit avec précision les univers différents de deux adolescents issus de cultures qui se sont opposées par le passé. Les USA et le Japon! Mais parviendront-elles à se rejoindre? Vu par le petit bout de la lorgnette, tout est possible, mais l'histoire se heurte parfois à l'Histoire... | |||||
|
|
The Sense of an Ending : Behind the Story - (A Background Information Book Companion) | by Behind the Story March 13, 2012 | $3.99 | 4473 words | Sample 20% |
| Loved the novel? And you've devoured the last morsel of your savory book. Now what? If you still have the stomach that yearns for more, "Behind the Story" will be a most delightful surprise. Enjoy this basket full of hand-picked treats collected from various sources all over the internet, compiled as an easy, concise and info-rich serving just for you! Try your sample now! | |||||
|
|
Still Alice: Behind the Story - (A Background Information Book Companion) | by Behind the Story March 13, 2012 | $3.99 | 4814 words | Sample 20% |
| Loved the novel? And you've devoured the last morsel of your savory book. Now what? If you still have the stomach that yearns for more, "Behind the Story" will be a most delightful surprise. Enjoy this basket full of hand-picked treats collected from various sources all over the internet, compiled as an easy, concise and info-rich serving just for you! Try your sample now! | |||||
|
|
Buddha in the Attic: Behind the Story - (A Background Information Book Companion) | by Behind the Story March 13, 2012 | $3.99 | 6282 words | Sample 20% |
| Loved the novel? And you've devoured the last morsel of your savory book. Now what? If you still have the stomach that yearns for more, "Behind the Story" will be a most delightful surprise. Enjoy this basket full of hand-picked treats collected from various sources all over the internet, compiled as an easy, concise and info-rich serving just for you! Try your sample now! | |||||
|
|
Under The House | by Leslie Hall Pinder March 13, 2012 | $6.99 | 72638 words | Sample 20% |
| UNDER THE HOUSE is the story of the Rathbones, a prominent Saskatchewan family who live with a secret they're determined to keep. Only young Evelyn finds the courage to break down the wall of silence that keeps the truth at bay. Her ally is Aunt Maude, a timid woman who has lived with the secret from childhood. | |||||
|
|
I Just Had to Come Down Here Once | by Sean Monaghan March 13, 2012 | $1.49 | 3319 words | Sample 20% |
| A serial killer story. Bo has his methods, and they are elegant, refined and precise. What Bo doesn't know is that Sandy, his wife, has just as many secrets. | |||||
|
|
L.i.s.a. | by Nicholas Nicola March 13, 2012 | $3.99 | 156141 words | Sample 20% |
| LISA is a single mother in Sydney who - staring death in the face - travels along a psychological road akin to the pilgrim's journey in Dante's Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory & finally - Paradise. A human sojourn forcefully brought on by crisis & critically resolved by hope. | |||||
|
|
No Fixed Ground | by John Roman Baker March 12, 2012 | $5.99 | 83061 words | Sample 15% |
| NO FIXED GROUND by John Roman Baker is a vivid, hallucinatory novel that explores a young man’s experience of friendship, sex and obsession amid the sexual liberation of 1970′s England. Nicholas meets Peter and they begin an obsessional relationship that soon spirals out of control. They discover that between sanity and madness, life and death, reality and unreality, there is no fixed ground. | |||||
|
|
Superficial | by James Marshall March 12, 2012 | $0.99 | 14201 words | Sample 20% |
| Brief glimpses through the film of life. A layered look at the world from the eye of the beholder. Clouded, conflicted, translucent to its murky depths. | |||||
|
|
Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America | by Brian Backstrand March 12, 2012 | $3.99 | 62687 words | Sample 20% |
| There is a lot of hay in this collection of short stories, hay to cut,rake, bale, store and feed. And there is a lot of rusted machinery sitting in sheds and barns. But these bittersweet stories are about the people who are largely overlooked, people living with powerful memories,illness, telling their stories, discovering some small revelation about the meaning of existence and their own lives. | |||||
|
|
The Return | by Margaret Guthrie March 12, 2012 | $3.99 | 71611 words | Sample 20% |
| In The Return, two orphaned sisters return to their childhood home, thirty years after their parents murder hoping to find out what really happened. The perpetrator is dead, but will those who were with them talk? Lydia, a yoga teacher, feels her mother's spirit asking "Why?" Margie, a recent divorcee, abhors such notions, but as they both get involved in the community, surprising things happen. | |||||
|
|
Amalie in Orbit | by Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer March 12, 2012 | $3.99 | 57062 words | Sample 20% |
| Amalie Price has been coasting along in New York as a sheltered faculty wife who secretly freelances as a French porno translator, when she suddenly finds herself a widow at 40. Left with no financial resources by her activist husband, she must contend with her newly alienated teenage son, the threat of eviction from her Upper West Side apartment, and the need to earn a living. | |||||
|
|
Farther...Than He Wanted to Go | by Eugene Paul March 11, 2012 | $2.99 | 94341 words | Sample 15% |
| Matthew Torrio’s name was connected with two murders in Ontario. He heads west to Vancouver, hoping to put distance between himself and these events. His trail of mistakes follows him. First blackmailed, he is then forced to join one of the most powerful crime families in North America. In spite of all his mistakes, Matthew is doggedly determined and remarkably resilient. | |||||
|
|
The Mailbox | by Scott Pearson March 11, 2012 | $0.99 | 2808 words | Sample 25% |
| Ed and Claire, married for forty years and retired from farming, drive out to their mailbox every day. Every day Ed swerves their pickup toward the mailbox as if distracted then swerves back at the last moment. Claire always acts startled, and they laugh. One day Ed doesn't swerve back, but he's the only one laughing at their wrecked mailbox. | |||||
|
|
Night Voices | by Helen Hudson March 10, 2012 | $3.99 | 62215 words | Sample 20% |
| A seemingly peaceful village at the edge of Oxford seethes with the unspoken tensions and frustrations of a group of neighbors. A disparate group of women react in wildly different ways to their enigmatic young male neighbor. As in all her novels, Helen Hudson's theme is about the tragedy that befalls the most vulnerable among us when good people lack the courage to reach out to them. | |||||
|
|
You, Fascinating You | by Germaine Shames March 10, 2012 | $4.99 | 79336 words | Sample 15% |
| Behind Every Great Love Song is an Unforgettable Woman. | |||||
|
|
My Hometown Named Love | by Markus Ahonen March 10, 2012 | $5.99 | 40375 words | Sample 20% |
| My Hometown Named Love is a collection of twenty short stories about love for women seen from the men's point of view. These universal stories could happen anywhere, but the reader can find their way in Ireland, UK, Finland, Italy, France, United States or on a road trip across Europe. The warmly melancholic stories come alive as we have all yearned for love we were hoping for, or had to let go. | |||||
|
|
Where the Wind Blew | by Bob Sommer March 10, 2012 | $3.99 | 129127 words | Sample 20% |
| No one has called Peter Howell by his own name since he belonged to a radical student group in the 1960s. After an act of sabotage that turned deadly, Peter escaped and blended into the American landscape. Decades later, he enjoys the the affluence of the late 1990s with his wife and children. But his life unravels when an ambitious high school reporter uncovers his secret. | |||||
|
|
Child (Special Edition) | by David Bobis March 10, 2012 | $0.99 | 4877 words | Sample 15% |
| What would you do if your wishes instantly came true? Mesmerising, humorous and addictively raw, Child wisps its readers through a society of quick-fixes, misguided desires and the excessive need for things that in the end, may not actually be important. | |||||
|
|
Appetites | by Karen Walcott March 09, 2012 | $1.99 | 4530 words | Sample 30% |
| A fiction chapbook about a young midwife, her best friend and her best friend's father. | |||||
|
|
The Detective's Vice | by R.D. Byron-Smith March 09, 2012 | $3.99 | 96072 words | Sample 15% |
| In R.D. Byron-Smith's newest crime novel, the mentally ill son of a police detective helps hunt for a serial killer whose crimes are mysteriously linked to the novels of Ernest Hemingway, a manhunt that seeks clues in Hemingway's Paris of the 1920s, and leads the detective on a journey of personal reckoning with demons he has long suppressed, which include that his own son is a suspect. | |||||
|
|
Telling Tales | by John Wheatcroft March 08, 2012 | $3.99 | 95813 words | Sample 20% |
| Telling Tales is John Wheatcroft’s latest collection of ten stories that explore the human condition as well as (in the first and last work) the nature of fiction itself. The stories exemply the same qualities that led Jay Neugeboren in a New York Times Book Review to say of an earlier collection, “Mr. Wheatcroft ... gives us tales that are stark and memorable.†| |||||
|
|
Hunting for Sparrows | by Beatrice Gerard March 08, 2012 | $6.49 | 79509 words | Sample 20% |
| This playfully irreverent work of fiction stands stereotypes on end, creating an intricate literary jigsaw puzzle with an ending that will make you want to go back and try to reassemble the pieces. | |||||
|
|
The Beautiful Death | by Federico De Roberto March 08, 2012 | $1.90 | 10338 words | Sample 30% |
| The captain of the "Siracusa" has received orders to sail for Tangiers, where rebels have seized the Italian consulate. The blue peter is hoisted, and the sirens announcing the ship's departure echo off of the hills above Livorno. From all over the city, seamen and officers begin returning aboard--all of them, that is, but the junior lieutenant Luigi Carleoni, the ship captain's son. | |||||
|
|
Splendor from Darkness | by William Davey March 08, 2012 | $3.99 | 389726 words | Sample 10% |
| a novel about the North African campaign in World War II and then the French Resistance, but also much more: a novel showing human nature on the edge, how human love can spring up and triumph under the most trying and desperate situations, a novel with well over a hundred characters that display the entire range of human nature all perfectly delineated with telling and convincing detail. | |||||
|
|
The Belvedere | by Gloria Pearson-Vasey March 07, 2012 | $2.99 | 47020 words | Sample 15% |
| An elderly recluse reveals secrets from her past to her grandson. She recalls how she and her autistic cousin were left bereft by the unexplained death of the boy's mother, and how the children felt drawn to the belvedere by a compelling presence. | |||||
|
|
The Philter | by Stendhal March 07, 2012 | $2.15 | 11519 words | Sample 40% |
| "The Philter" is a dual-language edition of "Le Philtre," Stendhal's brief tale of a young Spanish woman's inexplicable passion for a circus rider from Naples. Both the original French tale and the newly translated English version are hyperlinked to facilitate swift navigation from one language to the other. | |||||
|
|
Goldfish Tears | by Curtis Ackie March 07, 2012 | Free! | 34084 words | Sample 20% |
| A collection of fourteen fantastical short-stories. | |||||
|
|
The Wallahs of Paper Jail (US) | by Ron May March 06, 2012 | $5.00 | 54288 words | Sample 15% |
| For the nonperson, everything must go, not one part at a time but all in a single great heave. | |||||
|
|
The Wallahs of Paper Jail (UK) | by Ron May March 06, 2012 | $5.00 | 54264 words | Sample 15% |
| For the nonperson, everything must go, not one part at a time but all in a single great heave. | |||||
|
|
AffectionAires Part 3 | by Jeffra Hays March 06, 2012 | $2.99 | 40891 words | Sample 15% |
| It's love, it's love, they know it's love./ How ever can they tell?/ Well, she can shove, and he turns dove./ With nose he rings her bell. | |||||
|
|
River Rats and Other Stories | by Jed Fisher March 06, 2012 | $0.99 | 18801 words | Sample 20% |
| A collection of short stories by Jed Fisher. Titles include: River Rats, A Day in the Life, Maple Leafs, Eat at Curly's, Lights, Life as a Book, Sheepskin, and A Trip to Seoul, plus Who Was That, a poem. (17K words) | |||||
|
|
My Movie | by David Pratt March 06, 2012 | $9.99 | 90025 words | Sample 5% |
| From the award-winning author of Bob the Book, My Movie showcases the remarkable range and versatility of David Pratt’s short fiction. Haunting, funny, surreal, and heartbreaking, My Movie brilliantly documents how we come to terms with being queer. | |||||
|
|
Love and Loyalty (and Other Tales) | by Maria Savva March 06, 2012 | $2.99 | 28670 words | Sample 20% |
| Love and Loyalty (and other tales), is Maria Savva's second collection of short stories. This is a diverse collection of stories, written over a period of ten years. Many of the stories were short-listed in various short story competitions. These are thought-provoking, memorable tales of life and love, luck and loss, deceit and lies, the unexpected and the true to life. | |||||