A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
Six years after separating over her affair, a proud baron wakes on a train opposite the wife he barely recognizes.
A nostalgic former clerk recalls the sunny Sunday walk when helping a lost couple led him far from his map and his innocence.
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 road trip through Normandy leads to a chapel keeper who sells homemade saints and measures his drunkenness by degrees.
On his wedding night, an ardent Norman sportsman must choose between his waiting bride and suspected poachers.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
A provincial music lover enters a Paris artist’s studio expecting celebrities and finds himself drafted into a chaotic housewarming.
A narrator studying a famously irresistible man finds the strongest clue to his charm in a woman’s portrait at home.
A reluctant officer accepts a respectable woman’s devotion and finds that her passion will not permit an easy retreat.
A rural assize tries two drunken men whose attempt to price a wife by volume turns marriage, commerce, and justice into grotesque comedy.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
Two sheltered brothers discover Parisian freedom until their formidable priest uncle arrives at the worst possible hour.
A sharp-tongued rail traveler records the sights, absurdities, and unsettling stories encountered along the French Riviera.
A landowner recalls forcing his pregnant servant into a marriage arranged to protect his own name.
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.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
When a grandmother asks a gentle priest why he chose solitude, he recalls the childhood attachment that taught him to fear ordinary happiness.
An aging servant’s daily walk with his mistress prompts a question about thirty-five years of loyalty—and an answer neither has voiced.
A French settler in colonial Algeria recalls the restless woman whose freedom never fit the life he tried to give her.
