A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A suitor under constant observation begins a secret affair, then mistakes the wrong woman at a château window.
A poor, naïve farm girl enters service with a wealthy widower whose demands soon extend far beyond cooking and cleaning.
A racing tide traps an insurance inspector and an English family on a wreck, creating a New Year he never forgets.
A Paris officer recognizes a former colonial soldier whose chaotic courage and appetite once shaped life inside a blockaded town.
A traveller pauses beside a dark reservoir and hears how two brothers faced a sudden, desperate accident there.
During the siege of Paris, two old fishing companions cross the French lines for one peaceful morning beside the Seine.
A chance meeting in a beer hall reveals why a once-privileged schoolmate has spent his adult life drinking at the same table.
A terrified Prussian straggler searches occupied Normandy for the safest possible enemy: someone willing to take him prisoner.
A solitary collector watches every object in his beloved house walk away into the night—and no explanation can make the sight less real.
A chance encounter in a provincial tobacco shop revives a vanished world of river outings, hard work, and ingenious schemes.
A bedridden tavern keeper’s furious wife finds an outrageous way to make him useful.
A failing shopkeeper finally tells his wife they face ruin, just as a family catastrophe offers an answer neither can admit wanting.
A stranger on a train recounts a second life in a future world, where love and private happiness stand against an approaching global war.
A stranded collector hatches an extinct giant bird on a lonely atoll and gains a companion that keeps growing.
The timid inventor of a working flying machine becomes a public hero—and discovers that everyone expects him to risk the first flight.
An inventor descends five miles beneath the ocean in a steel sphere and finds that the abyss is neither empty nor lifeless.
A vain minor poet mistakes his hunger for inspiration for a grand passion when a young admirer takes his rhetoric seriously.
A young builder finds a chest of silver beneath his fiancée’s garden and discovers that getting rich is harder than finding treasure.
A village shop assistant returns from three missing weeks with ashes in his pockets and a love he cannot explain or forget.
After crossing a feared secret society, an arrogant colonial traveler finds that revenge follows him from Sierra Leone to London.
A young schoolmaster receives a golden fruit said to grant perfect knowledge, just as he begins his respectable new career.
After five years and most of his fortune, Monson must decide whether his flying machine is ready—or whether ridicule has forced the decision.
A young man forbidden to risk his finest clothes chooses one moonlit night to wear them freely and embrace the world beyond his home.
An ironmaster invites his wife’s lover on a midnight tour of the furnaces, where every display of heat carries a threat.
