A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
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.
An old colonial officer recalls a seven-man punitive expedition whose celebrated success depended on ruthless deception and force.
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.
Five penniless boating friends find their carefree life on the Seine transformed by the quick-witted young woman who takes the helm.
A forgotten spa diary records twenty-five days of treatments, flirtation, boredom, and selective moral philosophy.
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 rural postman, primed by a grisly newspaper report, hears screams behind shuttered windows and races to stop a crime.
A hard Norman farmer faces a Prussian court-martial and calmly explains why enemy scouts have been vanishing.
A writer reflects on the attraction and menace of cats before recalling a night when one seemed to rule an old castle.
A seasoned boatman anchors for a quiet smoke on the Seine, only to spend the night trapped in fog, silence, and mounting terror.
A night of torch fishing on the Algerian coast leads an old school friend to disclose the jealousy that drove him from France.
Unable to sleep in an old family bedroom, a guest discovers secret love letters hidden beneath its severe former occupant’s portrait.
At a crowded riverside resort, a young man’s absolute devotion collides with a lover whose desires he cannot control or understand.
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.
Alone in the house of her whole life, an elderly woman writes to a friend about memory, aging, and the objects that preserve vanished lives.
A respected provincial hostess maintains a secret hotel room for discreet affairs until one extra rendezvous collides with an innkeeper’s concealment.
