Jonah's Luck
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Leisure readers who enjoy late Victorian popular fiction and plot-driven stories
- Students studying narrative techniques and serial publication traditions in English popular literature
- English learners seeking light public-domain English reading practice
- Genre fiction fans interested in the motifs of fate and coincidence
Not a good fit for
- Serious literary readers expecting profound social critique or complex psychological portraiture
- Readers who prefer modern fast-paced suspense and lack patience for old-fashioned narrative
- Readers who need a Chinese translation and are unused to reading English originals
Reading tips
- Read in chapter batches; after each chapter, note the main events and changes in relationships.
- Watch how "luck" is used as a device to advance the plot, and mark where coincidences occur.
- Compare with contemporary English popular fiction and compare techniques for ending chapters on suspense.
- English learners can read for plot first, then revisit unfamiliar words and sentence patterns rather than interrupting the rhythm with word-by-word lookup.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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Comments
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About the author
Fergus Hume (1859–1932) was a British novelist. Born in England, he moved with his family to New Zealand as a child, studied at the University of Otago and qualified as a lawyer. In 1885 he went to Melbourne, and the following year he published The Mystery of a Hansom Cab at his own expense, achieving instant fame; the book is regarded as a bestselling classic in the history of detective fiction. In 1888 Hume returned to England to settle, and thereafter devoted himself to detective and suspense fiction, producing more than a hundred works in his lifetime, of which 66 are held in this collection, including The Silent House, The Gentleman Who Vanished and The Spider. He died in Essex in 1932.
