A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
After the crucifixion, three Roman soldiers drink, joke, and circle the question of what it means to endure suffering.
In a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
Two hunters leave a lonely Norman château for midnight Mass and a condolence call that turns Christmas custom into grim comedy.
A skeptical country doctor recalls the Christmas night when fear, faith, and illness combined to produce what others called a miracle.
In a Corsican mountain pass, a traveller hears how a timid orphan became the island’s most feared outlaw.
A Parisian family’s summer outing opens a brief, charged interval between ordinary life and a happiness that cannot last.
A celebrated society marksman provokes a duel, then spends a sleepless night confronting the fear his reputation cannot admit.
A self-styled naïve bachelor warns husbands after a lover's drunken confession unsettles his ideas about courtship.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
In court, a wife's plea for divorce reveals a husband whose worship of ideal beauty has become a fevered obsession.
After fifteen years apart, a Parisian visits an old friend and finds domestic contentment masking a disturbing family amusement.
An eighteenth-century grandmother hears modern tales of jealous revenge and gives her sheltered granddaughter a scandalous lesson about love and marriage.
After a revered judge dies, his private papers expose a lifelong authority’s hidden appetite for killing.
Six years after separating over her affair, a proud baron wakes on a train opposite the wife he barely recognizes.
A childless couple’s expected inheritance comes with one condition, turning marital respectability into a desperate financial problem.
On New Year's Eve, a married woman asks her lover to prove whether his promises can survive a choice with real consequences.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
A reluctant officer accepts a respectable woman’s devotion and finds that her passion will not permit an easy retreat.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
After her only son is murdered, an elderly Corsican widow devises a patient and ruthless way to keep her vow of revenge.
After forty years in the same dim office, an aging bookkeeper takes a spring evening walk and sees the life he never lived.
An old woman explains why a ring of a child’s blond hair has made her consider herself a widow all her life.
A newlywed tells his oldest friend that marital passion is ruining his health, then finds an arrangement that restores him.
A suspicious husband takes his wife on a nocturnal hunt, convinced the quarry will expose her betrayal.
