Synopsis examples: 7 annotated synopses, from one paragraph to a page

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE · Synopsis

In rural Hertfordshire, ELIZABETH BENNET, the sharp-witted second of five daughters with no fortune, takes an instant dislike to the proud, wealthy FITZWILLIAM DARCY, and readily believes the charming officer GEORGE WICKHAM when he says Darcy cheated him. When Darcy proposes, insulting her family as he does, she refuses him and accuses him of parting her elder sister from the man she loves, his friend. Darcy's letter in reply proves that Wickham is a liar who once tried to elope with Darcy's teenage sister for her money, and Elizabeth sees how badly she has misjudged both men. When her youngest sister runs off with Wickham, Darcy secretly pays him to marry her and saves the family from disgrace. Learning what he did, and that his feelings haven't changed, Elizabeth accepts his second proposal, and her sister marries his friend.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL · Synopsis

On Christmas Eve in London, EBENEZER SCROOGE, a rich old miser, refuses his nephew's invitation to Christmas dinner, turns away two men collecting for the poor and grudges his underpaid clerk, BOB CRATCHIT, a day off. That night the ghost of his late partner, JACOB MARLEY, appears wrapped in the chain he forged in life and warns that the same fate awaits Scrooge unless three spirits can change him.

The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge the lonely schoolboy he was, the warm party thrown by his old employer, and the young woman who released him from their engagement because money had taken her place in his heart. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes him to the Cratchits' small, happy Christmas dinner, where the youngest son, TINY TIM, walks with a crutch, and warns that the boy will die if nothing changes. Then it shows him his nephew's party, where the guests make a game of his meanness.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows a death no one mourns. Businessmen joke about the funeral, a charwoman sells the dead man's bed curtains, and the Cratchits grieve for Tiny Tim. At last the spirit points to a neglected grave, and Scrooge reads his own name on the stone.

Scrooge begs for the chance to change and wakes on Christmas morning in his own bed. He sends the Cratchits the biggest turkey in the shop, gives generously to the charity he refused, and joins his nephew's dinner. The next day he raises Bob's salary, and he becomes a second father to Tiny Tim, who does not die. Ever after, it is said of Scrooge that he knows how to keep Christmas well.

FRANKENSTEIN · Synopsis

The story is told through the letters of ROBERT WALTON, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice, who takes aboard an exhausted stranger and writes down his history.

VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN grows up in Geneva in a loving family, alongside ELIZABETH LAVENZA, an orphan his parents raised and the woman he means to marry. At the University of Ingolstadt he becomes obsessed with the secret of life, and after nearly two years of solitary work he builds a body from parts taken from charnel houses and dissecting rooms and brings it to life. The moment the creature opens its eyes, Victor is horrified by what he has made, and he flees. The creature vanishes, and Victor falls into a fever from which his friend HENRY CLERVAL nurses him back.

Months later Victor's young brother is found strangled, and a servant girl of the family is convicted of the murder because a portrait the boy wore is found in her clothes. She is executed. Victor glimpsed the creature near the scene and knows the truth, but says nothing, sure no one would believe him.

High in the Alps, the creature confronts him. It tells Victor how it learned to speak and read by secretly watching a family of cottagers, how they drove it off in terror when it showed itself, and how rejection turned its kindness to rage. It killed the boy on learning he was a Frankenstein, and planted the portrait on the servant. It demands a female companion as hideous as itself, promising that the two will vanish into the wilds of South America.

Victor agrees and goes to the Orkney Islands to do the work. But as the creature watches through the window, he imagines a race of such beings and tears the half-made female to pieces. The creature vows, “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” It strangles Clerval, and Victor, charged with the murder in Ireland, spends months in prison before he is cleared.

Back in Geneva he marries Elizabeth, sure that the creature means to kill him on their wedding night. Instead it kills her, and his father dies of grief soon after. With nothing left, Victor hunts the creature across Europe and into the Arctic, where Walton's ship picks him up.

Walton's crew demands to turn for home, and he agrees. Victor dies aboard the ship, and that night Walton finds the creature grieving over his body. Its revenge has brought it no peace. It says it will burn itself on a funeral pyre at the northernmost point of the globe, leaps onto an ice raft and is carried away into the dark.

THE GREAT GATSBY · Synopsis

In 1922 NICK CARRAWAY, a young Midwesterner back from the war, moves to West Egg, Long Island, to learn the bond business, and rents a small house beside the mansion of JAY GATSBY, a mysterious millionaire famous for his parties. Across the bay in East Egg live Nick's cousin DAISY BUCHANAN and her husband, TOM, a rich, brutish former football star who keeps a mistress, MYRTLE WILSON, the wife of a garage owner in the grim valley of ashes on the road to New York.

Nick, who tells the story, is invited to one of Gatsby's parties and finds his host formal, charming and full of stories about himself. Through Daisy's friend JORDAN BAKER, with whom Nick begins a romance, he learns the truth: Gatsby and Daisy fell in love five years earlier, when he was a penniless army officer, and she married Tom while he was overseas. Gatsby bought his house to be across the water from hers. He asks Nick to invite Daisy to tea.

The reunion rekindles the affair, and Nick learns that the legend is newer and shadier than it looks. Gatsby was born James Gatz to poor farm people in North Dakota, and his fortune comes from bootlegging. He wants more than an affair: he wants Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him.

On a stifling afternoon in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, the confrontation comes. Tom exposes Gatsby's bootlegging, and Daisy, though she says she loves Gatsby, cannot say she never loved Tom. Driving home in Gatsby's car with Daisy at the wheel, they hit and kill Myrtle, who runs into the road. Daisy doesn't stop, and Gatsby resolves to take the blame.

That night Nick sees Tom and Daisy through their kitchen window, reconciled over a late supper. Myrtle's grief-crazed husband, told by Tom that the car was Gatsby's, finds Gatsby in his pool the next afternoon, shoots him dead and then kills himself.

Nick arranges the funeral. Gatsby's father comes from Minnesota; the crowds who drank at his parties do not, and Tom and Daisy have left town without a forwarding address. Sickened by their carelessness, Nick ends things with Jordan and goes home to the Midwest. On his last night he looks across the bay toward the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, the light Gatsby reached for, and thinks about a dream that was already behind him when he began.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES · Synopsis

A country doctor brings SHERLOCK HOLMES and DR. WATSON a family legend and a death. For generations, the story goes, a spectral hound has haunted the Baskervilles of Dartmoor. Now the head of the family, Sir Charles, has been found dead on his estate, apparently of a heart attack, and near the body the doctor saw the footprints of a gigantic hound.

The heir, SIR HENRY BASKERVILLE, arrives from Canada and is at once sent an anonymous warning to keep away from the moor. Someone steals one of his boots from his London hotel, and a bearded man follows him through the streets. Holmes, claiming business in London, sends Watson to Baskerville Hall with Sir Henry to watch and report.

On the moor, Watson finds suspects everywhere. The butler signals into the dark with a candle. A friendly naturalist, JACK STAPLETON, lives nearby with his sister, BERYL, who secretly urges Sir Henry to go back to London. A convict has escaped from the prison on the moor. Watson learns that the butler and his wife have been feeding the convict, her brother, and that a local woman had asked Sir Charles to meet her on the night he died. Then he tracks down a stranger living in a stone hut and finds Holmes, who has been investigating in secret all along.

That night a scream draws them to a body in Sir Henry's old suit. It is the convict, wearing clothes the butler gave him, dead from a fall as he fled the hound. Holmes now sees the design. A family portrait shows that Stapleton is a Baskerville, the son of Sir Charles's disgraced younger brother, and next in line for the estate. Beryl is his wife, not his sister, and she sent the warning. Stapleton was the bearded man in London. He bought a huge dog, painted it with phosphorus so it would glow, and used the stolen boot to set it on Sir Henry's scent. He used the local woman to lure Sir Charles out at night, and the old man, already weak in the heart, died of fright when the hound came at him.

Holmes uses Sir Henry as bait. As he walks home across the moor from dinner with Stapleton, fog rolls in, the hound leaps out of it, and Holmes and Watson shoot it dead just in time. In Stapleton's house they find Beryl tied up. Stapleton has fled into the Grimpen Mire in the fog, and all they find is the boot he dropped: the bog has swallowed him. Shaken but safe, Sir Henry sets out on a voyage around the world with the doctor to recover his nerves.

LET THE RECORD REFLECT · Synopsis

NELL BRANNIGAN, 38, has been the official court reporter in Courtroom 4B of a western Pennsylvania courthouse for eleven years, and she is good at it because she has trained herself to hear sound, never meaning. The habit began in 2013, when her father, a roofer, was convicted of setting a warehouse fire on the word of a witness nobody in town had seen before. He died in prison four years later, still saying he was innocent.

During a routine arson trial, a witness describes the fire in the same nineteen words that stranger used at her father's trial. Nell knows that transcript nearly by heart, and testimony that exact isn't memory. Someone wrote it.

Breaking the first rule of her job, she starts investigating a case she is paid only to record. Nights in the county archive turn up the same sentences in four other fire cases, each built on a witness found by DALE KERRIGAN, an insurance investigator who now sits two rows behind the prosecution. The pattern points to a scheme: owners burn failing buildings, Kerrigan supplies a paid witness who puts a convenient local man at the scene, and the insurers pay out on arson by a stranger.

Her husband begs her to stop. She can't, because the defendant this time is nineteen, with no record. She mails the old transcripts anonymously to his public defender, but the judge refuses to compare testimony from other cases and calls the match a coincidence. Kerrigan learns from the archive's request log who pulled the files and tells the judge that the court reporter's own father was convicted of arson. Nell is removed from the trial and suspended. Her husband moves out.

With nothing left to protect, Nell goes looking for where the nineteen words began. She finds them in the file of a 2011 insurance lawsuit: Kerrigan's own report on an earlier fire describes the flames in exactly those words, two years before any witness spoke them under oath. She gives the report to the public defender, and at the hearing he wins, Nell takes the stand. For the first time in her career, her own words go on the record. Confronted with the report, one of the paid witnesses breaks down and names Kerrigan.

The charges against the nineteen-year-old are dropped, Kerrigan is charged with fraud and witness tampering, and the district attorney asks the court to reopen her father's case. The court does not take Nell back: a reporter who has testified in a case she transcribed can't be neutral again. A year later she captions live television, her husband has come home, and on the day her father's conviction is vacated, she reads the order aloud at his grave.

WHAT THE RIVER CARRIED · Synopsis

At forty-six I am a tax accountant in Pittsburgh, recently divorced, with a father in memory care who no longer knows my name. Clearing his house, I find my grandfather's logbook from 1951, the year he built a wooden boat in his garage and took it down the Ohio River alone, a few months after coming home from Korea. Nobody in the family ever mentioned the trip.

I decide to rebuild the boat, which has rotted under a tarp for decades, and follow the logbook downriver. The first half of the book is that winter: learning to steam-bend oak from a retired boatbuilder in Beaver who refuses to let me pay him, and visiting my father, who talks about the boat as if he built it himself.

The second half is the river, 981 miles from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois. The logbook's entries thin out as I go, and in Louisville I find out why. A woman whose mother knew him tells me my grandfather made the trip to deliver a letter to the widow of a man from his unit, and stayed with her family for a month.

I reach Cairo in October, and my father dies the week I get home. At his funeral I read from the logbook, and I finally see what the men in my family did with grief: they moved. I had been doing the same since the divorce. The book ends with the boat in my own garage and my first winter in years without a plan to leave.