A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A celebrated cavalry officer returns from war expecting to reclaim his glamorous lover, only to confront a form of sacrifice he cannot understand.
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 charming idler marries a wealthy Englishwoman and devises a careful scheme to preserve both his allowance and his affairs.
A resentful farm boy assigned to care for an old horse turns an ordinary chore into a test of mercy.
A farm girl’s pregnancy forces her hard-nosed mother to weigh family honor against the price of a weekly coach ride.
A fashionable niece condemns modern manners, and her older aunt answers with a sharper lesson in observation.
A wealthy idler devotes himself to earning the red ribbon he has coveted since childhood, despite having done nothing to deserve it.
A trusted servant attacks his master for money, then becomes the most devoted nurse the wounded man could ask for.
Five bored men ask a doctor for a new pleasure, and his account of ether offers more temptation than warning.
An old school friend visits a conservative country household and treats their hospitality as permission to remake it.
A devoted hunter arrives late for the annual guillemot shoot carrying an obligation that tests the limits of his sporting priorities.
A dying Norman farmer entrusts his son with an address, a secret household, and an obligation no legal will records.
After four years at sea, a sailor returns to Marseille and meets a woman whose questions turn a night of celebration into dread.
Three protected schoolboys share a railway carriage with a woman whose sudden crisis defeats every adult precaution.
A wealthy, childless couple offers two poor farming families money and security in exchange for adopting a son.
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 pregnant widow is sued in open court by the married man she promised to pay for helping secure an inheritance.
A Norman farmer’s sudden passion survives rejection until an unexpected crisis puts old loyalties to the test.
A forester’s fearless daughter faces six lost Prussian soldiers alone in a snowbound forest house.
A timid husband’s devotion to his son is shaken by a charge that turns family love into an unbearable question.
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 nephew’s Good Friday prank sends a kindly Jesuit to the sickbed of his fiercely anticlerical uncle.
At a quiet spa, a traveler meets a frail young woman and her nervous father, whose strange afflictions share one terrible cause.
