A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
An Indian prince’s cremation beneath the cliffs of Étretat confronts a French resort town with an unfamiliar rite.
A shaved moustache sends a society woman from bedroom complaint to a memory of recognizing French soldiers among the dead.
An opium dreamer explains why the imagined East offers him the peace and pleasure he cannot find in modern life.
An aging sportsman keeps hunting season alive through elaborate dinners, improbable anecdotes, and one coveted delicacy.
A self-proclaimed 228-year-old gentleman recalls evenings with Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and their sharp-tongued London circle.
A traveling showman arrives with electrical marvels and visions that draw a restless city toward a night of collective terror.
Maria leaves the laundry for a Halloween visit with the family she helped raise.
On the anniversary of Parnell’s death, campaign workers shelter from the rain and argue over Irish politics.
A boy waits for news of an ailing priest and struggles to understand the adults’ uneasy silences.
With Christmas near, a plantation household searches in the rain for three missing turkeys.
After saving for months, two twelve-year-old twins walk into town to buy their first shoes.
A town speculates about whom an awkward young woman will marry.
A poor market worker supports an older woman from the family he once served.
On her way to Mass, a girl stays with an elderly neighbor whom no one else can tend.
After emancipation, Aunt Peggy asks for a quiet cabin where she can spend her final days.
A woman who has never wanted children must care for a neighbor's four youngsters.
Babette may visit her cousins when the figs ripen, and she watches the trees each day.
An elderly freed man keeps trying to reach the family that enslaved him decades earlier.
A solitary narrator turns from people to the quiet of a summer night.
A casual reader finds an alien invasion hidden in plain sight inside the figures of speech in a paperback novel.
An aging prospector on a remote asteroid gives his work robot a personality and gains the companion he never expected.
On a crowded war-bound ship in 1864, a plague of lice gives two samurai factions something more urgent to fight about.
