A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A dying Norman farmer entrusts his son with an address, a secret household, and an obligation no legal will records.
A confirmed bachelor plans to marry a near stranger because one empty armchair has made solitude unbearable.
An uninformed bride mistakes her wedding night for an attack, then becomes convinced a playful dog bite has doomed her honeymoon.
A wealthy, childless couple offers two poor farming families money and security in exchange for adopting a son.
Spring fever draws a young man toward a stranger on the Seine, until another passenger offers an urgent warning about love.
A married couple stages an illicit evening together, only for honest questions to become more stimulating than the disguise.
A confirmed skeptic of love recalls the moonlit boat ride that briefly unsettled all his carefully reasoned certainty.
A man asks his doctor whether reason has led him to an invisible world—or into madness.
After a murdered child is found in a village wood, the mayor leads a search that finds no culprit but cannot quiet the countryside.
A man who fears his own hands demonstrates a power over minds and objects that leaves his friend unsure whether either of them is sane.
A traveler joins a sparsely attended funeral and learns how a town punished a woman for the violence done to her as a child.
In an asylum, a beautiful woman hides imaginary scars while a doctor explains the guilt behind her delusion.
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.
During the Prussian occupation, a young Frenchwoman is drawn into an officers’ supper where humiliation sharpens into resistance.
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 colonial Algeria, a traveler’s affair with a married woman leads him from sensual confidence into a reckless encounter under her husband’s roof.
A Norman farmer’s sudden passion survives rejection until an unexpected crisis puts old loyalties to the test.
A forester’s fearless daughter faces six lost Prussian soldiers alone in a snowbound forest house.
A stagecoach full of villagers turns one man’s earache into a public medical emergency and a traveling comedy.
A bachelor’s playful affair takes a nervous turn when a fortune-teller links a beloved black cat to a past romantic disaster.
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.
