A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A pregnant hostess endures a long name-day party while resentment, jealousy, and fatigue expose the strain in her marriage.
A provincial household prepares for a high-ranking uncle whose summer visit unsettles its routines, loyalties, and ideas about cultivated life.
A vanished rake, a locked room, and one foreign match send two investigators racing toward an elaborate murder theory.
On his last night in the country, a young statistician walks into the moonlit mist with his host’s daughter and an unexpected confession.
A boy discovers his governess’s secret romance and learns how much power a whispered threat can hold.
Prescribed total rest in a nursery with barred windows, a young wife begins to study the wallpaper.
A reclusive scholar's fixation on his cousin's teeth grows stronger as illness changes her body and mind.
A widower obsessed with his brilliant first wife brings a second bride into an abbey shaped by grief, opium, and dread.
A cruel young baron takes possession of a violent horse that may carry the spirit of his family's dead enemy.
A widower watches his daughter grow into an exact copy of the wife whose death he once desired.
An heir uses an immense fortune to create a private landscape meant to surpass nature without losing its beauty.
A man answers a childhood friend’s urgent summons and enters a decaying estate where the house and its last family seem bound together.
A prince walls his court inside a castellated abbey to outparty a plague — through seven colored rooms.
A wounded traveler finds a portrait so lifelike that he searches a book for the story of the woman it depicts.
A curious traveler visits a private asylum and joins an elegant dinner where every guest seems slightly out of place.
A young Harvard poet and his older bride cross the Atlantic determined to begin a perfect marriage, but Europe has other distractions.
Two hunters leave a lonely Norman château for midnight Mass and a condolence call that turns Christmas custom into grim comedy.
A daring flirt makes her persistent admirer earn his chance during a wild-boar hunt at a Norman château.
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.
An old woman explains why a ring of a child’s blond hair has made her consider herself a widow all her life.
A suspicious husband takes his wife on a nocturnal hunt, convinced the quarry will expose her betrayal.
When a grandmother asks a gentle priest why he chose solitude, he recalls the childhood attachment that taught him to fear ordinary happiness.
An old marquis confesses why one visit to a dead woman’s locked bedroom left him afraid of darkness for life.
