A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A disabled beggar, rejected from every familiar door, sets out hungry across a winter landscape governed by suspicion and contempt.
An unemployed carpenter walks from town to town seeking work until hunger and official suspicion drive him toward collapse.
A Parisian libertine becomes consumed by a stranger whose identity remains beyond his reach.
A family’s hatred of hunting begins with two brothers and the immense wolf that turns their winter chase into a private war.
A hunter’s letter about woodcock season turns to a rural killing and the local idea of honor that judged it.
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 ferry passenger learns why an old friend’s marriage soured after his once-enchanting English bride became easier to understand.
A beautiful countess rebels against the husband who has used pregnancy to control her, choosing a revenge designed to poison his certainty.
A chance meeting in a beer hall reveals why a once-privileged schoolmate has spent his adult life drinking at the same table.
An exhausted French detachment facing a deadly winter march finds unexpected resolve after taking two civilians under its protection.
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 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 poor scholarship student makes one accidental movement during an exam and must decide whether winning matters more than his principles.
A stranded collector hatches an extinct giant bird on a lonely atoll and gains a companion that keeps growing.
An inventor descends five miles beneath the ocean in a steel sphere and finds that the abyss is neither empty nor lifeless.
Alone in a remote Borneo observatory, an astronomer discovers that the darkness inside the dome holds a threat far closer than the stars.
A vain minor poet mistakes his hunger for inspiration for a grand passion when a young admirer takes his rhetoric seriously.
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.
