A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
In a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
A daring flirt makes her persistent admirer earn his chance during a wild-boar hunt at a Norman château.
News of the Republic reaches a Norman village, where a self-important doctor turns national upheaval into a personal campaign for office.
A celebrated society marksman provokes a duel, then spends a sleepless night confronting the fear his reputation cannot admit.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
A peaceable French merchant endures a Prussian officer’s insults until one final humiliation forces him to fight.
After fifteen years apart, a Parisian visits an old friend and finds domestic contentment masking a disturbing family amusement.
After a revered judge dies, his private papers expose a lifelong authority’s hidden appetite for killing.
A childless couple’s expected inheritance comes with one condition, turning marital respectability into a desperate financial problem.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
A provincial music lover enters a Paris artist’s studio expecting celebrities and finds himself drafted into a chaotic housewarming.
A reluctant officer accepts a respectable woman’s devotion and finds that her passion will not permit an easy retreat.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
Two sheltered brothers discover Parisian freedom until their formidable priest uncle arrives at the worst possible hour.
After her only son is murdered, an elderly Corsican widow devises a patient and ruthless way to keep her vow of revenge.
An old woman explains why a ring of a child’s blond hair has made her consider herself a widow all her life.
A suspicious husband takes his wife on a nocturnal hunt, convinced the quarry will expose her betrayal.
When a grandmother asks a gentle priest why he chose solitude, he recalls the childhood attachment that taught him to fear ordinary happiness.
An aging servant’s daily walk with his mistress prompts a question about thirty-five years of loyalty—and an answer neither has voiced.
A doctor explains how a married woman, a dead lover, and an imminent homecoming demanded instant deception.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
An eighty-six-year-old health fanatic studies every local death, determined to prove that caution can defeat old age.
A married woman’s secret meetings are repeatedly interrupted by the toddler who sleeps in the next room.
After their child vanishes with a traveling circus, two aging parents spend years searching roads and city churches for one familiar face.
