A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A timid husband’s devotion to his son is shaken by a charge that turns family love into an unbearable question.
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.
A poor family builds its hopes around an absent uncle’s promised fortune during a long-awaited holiday to Jersey.
At a quiet spa, a traveler meets a frail young woman and her nervous father, whose strange afflictions share one terrible cause.
A lover of darkness wanders through Paris as the familiar city falls silent and dawn seems to recede beyond reach.
A miserly Norman farmer resists his son's marriage, then finds his rigid household altered by love, loss, and the demands of survival.
A hard Norman farmer faces a Prussian court-martial and calmly explains why enemy scouts have been vanishing.
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 thrifty Norman widow takes in a small dog, then discovers that protecting her property carries an unwelcome cost.
An imperious old maid’s final illness exposes the private life she never allowed anyone to see.
An aging bachelor revisits the one love he never declared and asks the question that could make his quiet life seem wasted.
Amid Cannes’s flower festival, two fashionable women compare the vanity and danger hidden inside the wish to be desired.
A lifelong sportsman considers marriage at fifty, then travels to Paris to test whether neglect has left him unfit for it.
Bullied because he has no father, a village boy asks a kindly blacksmith to give him a name his classmates cannot mock.
A man with no obvious catastrophe explains why thirty years of repetition and one drawer of old letters have made life unbearable.
A dying woman hires an advocate to find the son who vanished after discovering the secret at the center of her household.
A lavish wedding breakfast paid for by an estranged daughter turns awkward when the groom chooses the wrong song.
A novice lawyer asks a jury to see murder not as a mystery of evidence, but as the final consequence of one man’s blind reverence.
A sheltered mill owner’s wife discovers Parisian flirtation, then mistakes the force of a dream for love.
After his parents die, a blind farmhand becomes the target of a household’s escalating cruelty in rural Normandy.
After forty years of silence, an aging woman walks across Normandy to see the son she was forced to surrender after a secret affair.
