A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
A provincial town crowns its shyest young man as a model of virtue, then watches its solemn civic experiment take an unruly turn.
A major turns military discipline on an entire fortified town for the sake of one forbidden meeting with a married woman.
A kindhearted coachman adopts an unwanted dog, but her devotion and unruly habits bring him to an impossible choice.
At a Twelfth Night dinner, a guest asks how the household’s quiet companion came to live there and what her place has cost her.
A dinner-table skeptic challenges tales of telepathy and prophecy, then offers two unsettling examples from his own experience.
In a quiet Paris garden, a young law student befriends two forgotten dancers who still inhabit the manners of another century.
A wandering painter befriends an eccentric Englishwoman on the Normandy coast and discovers the feeling beneath her reserve.
A bachelor’s playful affair takes a nervous turn when a fortune-teller links a beloved black cat to a past romantic disaster.
An old colonial officer recalls a seven-man punitive expedition whose celebrated success depended on ruthless deception and force.
A former prosecutor recalls the admired schoolmaster accused of feeding children sweets laced with glass and broken needles.
A man defends an unforgivable marriage by tracing the grief, resemblance, and desire that brought a father to it.
A young wife returns from Switzerland with a confession about one moonlit night beside Lake Lucerne.
In occupied Normandy, a mother awaiting news of her soldier son shares her isolated cottage with four courteous enemy troops.
A society observer explains why a fashionable countess is said to have killed her daughter without committing a crime.
Five penniless boating friends find their carefree life on the Seine transformed by the quick-witted young woman who takes the helm.
A rebellious law student smuggles a shopgirl into his strict Breton landlady’s house and learns her rules have unexpected limits.
A forgotten spa diary records twenty-five days of treatments, flirtation, boredom, and selective moral philosophy.
A poor family builds its hopes around an absent uncle’s promised fortune during a long-awaited holiday to Jersey.
A drunken wrong turn at a country wedding leaves a determined bachelor facing a second ceremony he never planned.
At a quiet spa, a traveler meets a frail young woman and her nervous father, whose strange afflictions share one terrible cause.
A Paris office clerk explains how one disastrous Sunday cured him of the country—and of marriage.
A frightened countess helps a wounded stranger cross a border, beginning a wordless bond neither dares disturb.
A seasoned boatman anchors for a quiet smoke on the Seine, only to spend the night trapped in fog, silence, and mounting terror.
A night of torch fishing on the Algerian coast leads an old school friend to disclose the jealousy that drove him from France.
