A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A grieving traveler follows an unexplained beacon to an abandoned Welsh tower.
After drinking an alchemist's unfinished elixir, a lovesick young man begins to outlive everyone he knows.
A prosperous man guards a grave whose story begins with a runaway schoolboy and a haunted young woman.
A poor steward's daughter marries the lord who saved her from a burning home.
Two young pilgrims seek shelter with a Swiss baron haunted by the daughter he drove away.
A Polish exile in Naples finds love while carrying papers that could imperil an empire.
Two devoted sisters face the terrible cost of loving an outlaw.
A Swiss orphan torn between gratitude and love must reckon with a revolution gathering in her valley.
Exiled by his own pride, a reckless nobleman accepts a stranger's miraculous bargain.
A fugitive from a Texas gunfight is offered a dangerous new identity in a distant coastal country.
A ruthless Texas outlaw, a determined ranger, and the woman between them move toward a reckoning in the thorny frontier.
After watching the woman he loves marry another man, a proud bachelor reconstructs the misunderstanding that destroyed his chance.
A proud former Confederate officer is offended when an actor turns his old-fashioned manners and clothes into a theatrical sensation.
A young man searching for a vanished singer rents a decaying room whose lingering traces seem to answer his longing.
A struggling typist finds a small, private universe in the star she watches through the skylight of her attic room.
Two working New Yorkers spend a week pretending to be wealthy guests at a Broadway hotel and find an unexpected kindred spirit.
Years after leaving school, a former pupil remembers the aging English teacher his class turned into an object of relentless laughter.
A moonlit song outside a village house becomes the first chapter in a legend about Japan’s shape-shifting badgers.
A university professor receives a bereaved mother whose composed manner appears to embody the ideal he has made of Japanese restraint.
A Chinese landowner who can drink without ever growing drunk submits to an eccentric monk’s treatment for the creature said to live inside him.
When a devil disguised as a missionary plants a mysterious crop in sixteenth-century Japan, one cattle dealer makes a wager to learn its name.
Impoverished in Tang-dynasty Loyang, Tu Tzuchun is offered a second fortune by an enigmatic old man—but begins to want something different.
A gangly schoolmaster courts a farmer’s daughter in a drowsy Hudson Valley town haunted by a headless horseman.
