A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
In a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
In a Corsican mountain pass, a traveller hears how a timid orphan became the island’s most feared outlaw.
After a revered judge dies, his private papers expose a lifelong authority’s hidden appetite for killing.
After her only son is murdered, an elderly Corsican widow devises a patient and ruthless way to keep her vow of revenge.
A French settler in colonial Algeria recalls the restless woman whose freedom never fit the life he tried to give her.
When a fisherman’s arm is trapped in a trawling cable, his captain brother must choose between saving him and saving an expensive net.
A doctor’s attempt to awaken an intellectually disabled girl’s mind leads her family into a marriage that makes affection another form of confinement.
A resentful farm boy assigned to care for an old horse turns an ordinary chore into a test of mercy.
After four years at sea, a sailor returns to Marseille and meets a woman whose questions turn a night of celebration into dread.
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 kindhearted coachman adopts an unwanted dog, but her devotion and unruly habits bring him to an impossible choice.
A timid husband’s devotion to his son is shaken by a charge that turns family love into an unbearable question.
A miserly Norman farmer resists his son's marriage, then finds his rigid household altered by love, loss, and the demands of survival.
At a crowded riverside resort, a young man’s absolute devotion collides with a lover whose desires he cannot control or understand.
An imperious old maid’s final illness exposes the private life she never allowed anyone to see.
A farm servant’s brief romance leaves her facing motherhood, secrecy, and a marriage shaped by work, fear, and rural necessity.
On a storm-lashed Norman night, a fisherman’s friend keeps filling his glass while someone waits at the drunkard’s home.
A skeptical magistrate recounts an unsolved Corsican murder involving a secretive Englishman and a chained human hand.
A visitor wins the trust of a hermit whose retreat on a southern hill began with one devastating discovery in Paris.
A general challenges a dinner party’s easy use of the word “horrible” with two memories of people stripped of humanity.
A landowner’s annual hunting visit exposes a gamekeeper’s private crisis, then turns into a night of fire, flight, and irreversible violence.
A devoted widower pours all his love into the son his wife left behind, until an angry servant voices what the whole town knows.
A respected village priest receives a ragged visitor whose face and faded photograph reopen the betrayal that drove him into the Church.
