A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
An aging servant’s daily walk with his mistress prompts a question about thirty-five years of loyalty—and an answer neither has voiced.
An eighty-six-year-old health fanatic studies every local death, determined to prove that caution can defeat old age.
After their child vanishes with a traveling circus, two aging parents spend years searching roads and city churches for one familiar face.
A young Norman soldier asks his parents to judge the Black woman he hopes to marry on her character rather than her skin.
A charming idler marries a wealthy Englishwoman and devises a careful scheme to preserve both his allowance and his affairs.
Ten travelers flee occupied Rouen, but their escape stalls when a Prussian officer makes one passenger’s body the price of everyone’s freedom.
A childhood memory of an old seamstress opens onto the secret act of courage that shaped her entire life.
A rural court must decide whether an older woman can reclaim land from the young man she raised, supported, and expected never to leave.
A trusted servant attacks his master for money, then becomes the most devoted nurse the wounded man could ask for.
Hussars holding a ruined village turn Twelfth Night into an improvised feast before war abruptly reclaims the evening.
At a desolate tarn, a boatman shows a traveler the blood-red cross marking where the Wandering Jew supposedly died.
An uninformed bride mistakes her wedding night for an attack, then becomes convinced a playful dog bite has doomed her honeymoon.
A wealthy, childless couple offers two poor farming families money and security in exchange for adopting a son.
After a murdered child is found in a village wood, the mayor leads a search that finds no culprit but cannot quiet the countryside.
A traveler joins a sparsely attended funeral and learns how a town punished a woman for the violence done to her as a child.
A provincial town crowns its shyest young man as a model of virtue, then watches its solemn civic experiment take an unruly turn.
A Norman brothel closes for a country confirmation, carrying its lively household from familiar commerce into an unexpected sacred occasion.
During the Prussian occupation, a young Frenchwoman is drawn into an officers’ supper where humiliation sharpens into resistance.
A Norman farmer’s sudden passion survives rejection until an unexpected crisis puts old loyalties to the test.
A wandering painter befriends an eccentric Englishwoman on the Normandy coast and discovers the feeling beneath her reserve.
A stagecoach full of villagers turns one man’s earache into a public medical emergency and a traveling comedy.
A forgotten spa diary records twenty-five days of treatments, flirtation, boredom, and selective moral philosophy.
A nephew’s Good Friday prank sends a kindly Jesuit to the sickbed of his fiercely anticlerical uncle.
At a quiet spa, a traveler meets a frail young woman and her nervous father, whose strange afflictions share one terrible cause.
