A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
At the Academy, Reginald treats paintings as scenery for a sharper subject: the people who come to admire them.
Asked to improve himself through parish work, Reginald turns a choir outing into a pagan spectacle.
Trapped at a joyless Christmas house party, Reginald answers worthy games and Old English revelry with inventions of his own.
Reginald designs a great modern drama from wolves, fashionable misery, social reform, and a marriage broken by politics.
Reginald composes a peace poem by rhyme, fashion, and biscuit tin, while facts and meaning wait their turn.
Reginald’s attempt at fashionable verse moves from wounded wombats to Persian eggs and an album its owner may regret.
A mother who reads her son's private mail receives exactly the scandal she has been looking for.
A sickly boy turns a hidden ferret into a private god against the guardian who controls every pleasure in his life.
A bachelor postpones a conventional proposal to escape afternoon tea and finds a more appealing match in an unconventional cup.
Vera's local almanac predicts the obvious, until one stubborn forecast needs Clovis to make it come true.
A tattooed masterpiece becomes municipal property, leaving the man who wears it trapped between art law and bodily autonomy.
A young Russian’s mysterious game bag hangs over tea while a fox-hunting major waits below for better news.
Two former lovers reunite on a steamer, only to find that their combined children may make a second chance unlucky.
An heir uncovers evidence in an old murder, only to learn that justice has a formidable rival in the dining room.
A stray hen ruins a bed of onions and gives two isolated West Country families a feud to sustain for generations.
Two social climbers sneak into a garden party and find a locked gate, a boar-pig, and a child with firm terms for rescue.
A family finally sells its dangerous horse, then discovers the buyer is about to marry one of their daughters.
A farmer invites his artist half brother to admire a prized bull, only to learn that a painted animal may be worth three times the living one.
A socialist hostess must choose between labor solidarity, an aristocratic guest, and the only cook who can make his favorite omelette.
At a grand hotel, a chef unveils his masterpiece just as the orchestra claims every diner’s attention.
A young farm wife longs to modernize the kitchen ruled by an indestructible old servant, until death signs gather around the house.
Three Burmese friends compare two acts of partition and ask why imperial democracy applies its principles so selectively.
A traveler laments modern war not for its deaths, but for erasing the disorder he finds picturesque.
A traveler confides how his tyrannical aunt vanished—and why her family paid kidnappers to keep her away.
