A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
Amid Cannes’s flower festival, two fashionable women compare the vanity and danger hidden inside the wish to be desired.
A boastful Norman farmer turns the Prussian soldier billeted with him into a local joke, until humiliation becomes dangerous.
A farm servant’s brief romance leaves her facing motherhood, secrecy, and a marriage shaped by work, fear, and rural necessity.
A lavish wedding breakfast paid for by an estranged daughter turns awkward when the groom chooses the wrong song.
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.
At a country christening, a priest discovers an unexpected tenderness as he holds his newborn nephew among the reveling family.
A doctor’s attempt to protect a newborn at a Breton christening collides with custom, cold, and drink.
After burying a man celebrated for his honesty, his children open a private confession that forces them to choose between truth and family honor.
A law student turns a murderer’s preserved hand into a bell pull, dismissing every warning until terror enters his locked room.
A grieving lover hides in a cemetery overnight, where the dead begin correcting the respectable lies carved above them.
Two poachers on the Seine buy a dying donkey, turn its suffering into sport, and look for one more way to profit.
On her first trip to Paris, a newlywed becomes alarmed when her husband does not rejoin her after boarding an omnibus.
Years after an abusive fisherman vanishes at sea, his widow hears his commanding voice return inside her quiet home.
On a storm-lashed Norman night, a fisherman’s friend keeps filling his glass while someone waits at the drunkard’s home.
At a Norman farm, a baron explains why the tenant who serves him faithfully also makes him feel like a forgiven culprit.
Years after abandoning a pregnant lover, a lonely clerk sees the child he never knew and seeks one brief chance to meet him.
A dying woman on the sunny Riviera remembers the cold Norman marriage that made illness feel like her only path to escape.
An Indian prince’s cremation beneath the cliffs of Étretat confronts a French resort town with an unfamiliar rite.
An exile has built a fortune around one plan: return to the woman whose love ruined him.
A skeptical magistrate recounts an unsolved Corsican murder involving a secretive Englishman and a chained human hand.
A visitor wins the trust of a hermit whose retreat on a southern hill began with one devastating discovery in Paris.
A country gentleman records the invisible presence that seems to drain his strength, command his will, and turn his home into a prison.
