A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
An orphan crosses the country and comes back to the town where his mother is buried.
A shopkeeper keeps selling goods after his funeral, and the whole village comes to see him.
A man meets a hypnotist he distrusts, then sees his fiancée arrive in town without warning.
A missing farmer is seen miles from home just as his son becomes the chief murder suspect.
A police superintendent’s idea of justice changes each time a biting dog seems to belong to someone more powerful.
An orphan girl races through an approaching storm to find a kindly cobbler who can free her brother from a hollow tree.
A young man hides declarations of love inside the roar of a sled ride, leaving a frightened girl unsure whether hope or the wind is speaking.
A comfortable reformer judges a village priest unfit for service, then learns what hunger looks like when pride tries to hide it.
A retired lieutenant spends a sweltering day condemning the town’s idle natives while his own hours slip away.
A married young woman crosses the river at night to meet an idle village watchman, knowing the morning will demand an answer.
Once a year, a lazy village drunk becomes an exacting artist whose work belongs to an entire community.
At Christmas, an elderly village couple hires a letter writer to reach the daughter they have not heard from in four years.
Two schoolboys arrive home for Christmas with maps, a pistol, and a secret plan to cross Siberia and seek gold in America.
A village choirmaster drills his singers for months to impress a visiting count who may not care to hear them.
A peasant asks every authority he can find to free his convicted brother, but no one can tell him where justice actually resides.
At an Epiphany fête, three prosperous old men recall what severe cold meant before wealth protected them from it.
Two tipsy lawyers take a wrong turn after a long walk from the station and break into the wrong country cottage.
A merchant who signed bank audits he never read cannot understand why the law treats carelessness as complicity.
A wealthy village family's corrupt business and private rivalries draw a poor young bride into a struggle over money, conscience, and power.
Two men look up at a flock of starlings, and an entire town manufactures a crisis around their gaze.
Returning to his changed hometown, an aging architect confronts the cost of a divorce he once left others to arrange.
Stranded by a blizzard beside a suicide, a young magistrate begins to see the hidden ties between official duty and human suffering.
A merchant’s self-righteous tale about an orphan’s mother forces two unhappy village women to consider the limits of obedience.
A sick Moscow waiter returns with his wife and daughter to the village he remembers, only to find a family trapped by poverty, drink, and fear.
