A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A bitter coffin maker counts every human experience as a financial loss until illness at home forces a different reckoning.
Two chance encounters with remarkable young women leave a traveler pondering why beauty can bring as much sadness as delight.
Unable to sleep in a provincial chemist’s shop, a lonely young wife welcomes two officers whose late-night errand becomes open flirtation.
An impoverished old man can no longer feed the horse and dog that depend on him, yet neither anger nor dismissal can break their attachment.
A small-town mayor sees a visiting Persian dignitary as his best chance to acquire the decoration he covets.
A teacher terrified of disorder hides behind rules and routines, until a lively woman and her defiant brother disturb his sealed existence.
A wealthy engineer and a poor village try to become good neighbors, but suspicion and small grievances steadily undo their goodwill.
At his daughter’s requiem, a proud village shopkeeper tries to reconcile religious judgment with the child he barely knew.
On a cold Good Friday evening, a theology student tells two widows a Gospel story and is startled by their response.
Two impoverished hunters, unable to reclaim a pawned gun, walk to the spring woods to see whether the snipe have arrived.
When a reclusive professor’s familiar street begins to lose blocks and buildings, an old theory about reality becomes his only explanation.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
A town's most trusted man leads the hunt for a missing neighbor while every clue points to the victim's disgraced nephew.
A young couple follows a drunken local guide out of Cortina for an illegal trout-fishing trip that keeps slipping further out of reach.
A veteran returns to his Oklahoma home after the war and finds that the town, his family, and the future they expect no longer fit him.
In a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
Two hunters leave a lonely Norman château for midnight Mass and a condolence call that turns Christmas custom into grim comedy.
A skeptical country doctor recalls the Christmas night when fear, faith, and illness combined to produce what others called a miracle.
News of the Republic reaches a Norman village, where a self-important doctor turns national upheaval into a personal campaign for office.
A road trip through Normandy leads to a chapel keeper who sells homemade saints and measures his drunkenness by degrees.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
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.
After her only son is murdered, an elderly Corsican widow devises a patient and ruthless way to keep her vow of revenge.
