A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
Two tipsy noblewomen trade secrets, and one boasts of turning a servant’s devotion into summer entertainment.
A confirmed skeptic of love recalls the moonlit boat ride that briefly unsettled all his carefully reasoned certainty.
A society observer explains why a fashionable countess is said to have killed her daughter without committing a crime.
A poor family builds its hopes around an absent uncle’s promised fortune during a long-awaited holiday to Jersey.
A rural postman, primed by a grisly newspaper report, hears screams behind shuttered windows and races to stop a crime.
A poor clerk spends a rare bonus on a grand family outing and a hired horse meant to restore his aristocratic dignity.
A boisterous sergeant seeking nightlife in a quiet Breton town follows one wrong turn into a social disaster.
Unable to sleep in an old family bedroom, a guest discovers secret love letters hidden beneath its severe former occupant’s portrait.
An aging bachelor revisits the one love he never declared and asks the question that could make his quiet life seem wasted.
Amid Cannes’s flower festival, two fashionable women compare the vanity and danger hidden inside the wish to be desired.
A young marquise determined to escape her jealous husband hires an expert accomplice to produce evidence no court can ignore.
A shopkeeper’s unwanted kiss becomes a scandal, and the charming friend sent to repair it proves no model of restraint.
A lavish wedding breakfast paid for by an estranged daughter turns awkward when the groom chooses the wrong song.
A novice lawyer asks a jury to see murder not as a mystery of evidence, but as the final consequence of one man’s blind reverence.
A sheltered mill owner’s wife discovers Parisian flirtation, then mistakes the force of a dream for love.
An art dealer lends a cash-strapped baroness a Renaissance Christ and trusts her to invent a profitable story around it.
After forty years of silence, an aging woman walks across Normandy to see the son she was forced to surrender after a secret affair.
A country doctor recounts the lifelong devotion of an itinerant chair mender to a village chemist.
A doctor’s attempt to protect a newborn at a Breton christening collides with custom, cold, and drink.
After burying a man celebrated for his honesty, his children open a private confession that forces them to choose between truth and family honor.
An austere officer returns from maneuvers burdened by one lapse and insists on confessing it to his far more worldly wife.
A grieving lover hides in a cemetery overnight, where the dead begin correcting the respectable lies carved above them.
On her first trip to Paris, a newlywed becomes alarmed when her husband does not rejoin her after boarding an omnibus.
A dying woman on the sunny Riviera remembers the cold Norman marriage that made illness feel like her only path to escape.
