A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A rancher claims he killed his Chinese worker over a simple task, but a local witness tells another story.
A driver recalls how his little sister carried a village’s money through a forest after robbers attacked their father.
A timid traveler is mistaken for a space-polo expert, then forced into a deadly match with his ship and reputation at stake.
A mild bookkeeper’s quiet tour of the Solar System turns him into an asteroid-town marshal with an alien beast for backup.
A drunk skeptic mocks reports of strange accidents, then meets the official responsible for making unlikely events happen.
A reclusive naturalist follows a cryptogram from a found parchment into the South Carolina woods in search of pirate treasure.
A newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
A proud newspaper editor answers a rival's insult with a paragraph built around one letter, then the type runs out.
A road trip through Italy becomes a tour of suspicious officials, theatrical hospitality, and the small absurdities of a country under Fascism.
A boy follows his jockey father through the racecourses of Italy and France, learning to love the horses, the crowds, and the man who rides them.
A young couple follows a drunken local guide out of Cortina for an illegal trout-fishing trip that keeps slipping further out of reach.
A rural assize tries two drunken men whose attempt to price a wife by volume turns marriage, commerce, and justice into grotesque comedy.
A young Norman soldier asks his parents to judge the Black woman he hopes to marry on her character rather than her skin.
A rural court must decide whether an older woman can reclaim land from the young man she raised, supported, and expected never to leave.
A stagecoach full of villagers turns one man’s earache into a public medical emergency and a traveling comedy.
A miserly Norman farmer resists his son's marriage, then finds his rigid household altered by love, loss, and the demands of survival.
A servant tried for killing her newborn asks the court to hear how careful plans for motherhood collapsed in one night.
At a country christening, a priest discovers an unexpected tenderness as he holds his newborn nephew among the reveling family.
A farmer bargains with a deathbed nurse, turning his mother's final hours into a contest of rural thrift.
On a storm-lashed Norman night, a fisherman’s friend keeps filling his glass while someone waits at the drunkard’s home.
An upholsterer explains how a cherished fishing spot, two furious wives, and one unlucky punch brought him before a jury.
During a police roundup in rainy Paris, a young prostitute tells a passerby how poverty, abuse, and the law narrowed her choices.
A farming couple schedule a funeral around the colza crop, but the dying old man refuses to cooperate with their practical plans.
A hunter’s letter about woodcock season turns to a rural killing and the local idea of honor that judged it.
