A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
A passenger feels an inexplicable bond with a young woman on an Atlantic crossing.
A boy sets out for water on a snowy night; his footprints end halfway to the spring.
A physician tests a friend’s fear of an inherited watch and sees how serious it is.
Identical twins share more than a face as one brother’s engagement turns dangerous.
Lost in a California forest, Halpin Frayser dreams of a deadly encounter with someone he knows.
A missing farmer is seen miles from home just as his son becomes the chief murder suspect.
A Union soldier returns to the Tennessee home he left after a bitter family split.
A newly married couple’s perfect evening at a country station ends when an unexpected trainload recognizes them.
A bored lover gains a child’s confidence, then turns the boy’s secret meetings with his father into ammunition for an adult quarrel.
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 student asks his volatile father for money to return to Moscow, turning an ordinary family dinner into a reckoning none can resolve.
A self-assured critic and his widowed sister grow apart when her search for moral certainty challenges his literary convictions.
A toddler’s first walk beyond the nursery turns ordinary streets, strangers, animals, and sounds into an overwhelming new universe.
At a remote Siberian ferry, a hardened exile tells a homesick young man that survival depends on wanting nothing.
When his sister leaves home for a married neighbor, a self-described liberal rides out to settle the scandal and tests his own beliefs.
A weary court official reaches his summer villa hungry for dinner and rest, only to find that family life has no place ready for him.
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.
A sleepy family turns the last evening before Lent into an earnest campaign of lessons, tea, ritual, and still more food.
While showing an architect a condemned tenement, a landlord recalls how one family’s ordinary poverty became a rapid descent.
At his daughter’s requiem, a proud village shopkeeper tries to reconcile religious judgment with the child he barely knew.
A pilot risks a solo flight to Mars, where a hidden survivor and a silent alien intelligence reveal why Earth’s missions never came home.
A man answers a childhood friend’s urgent summons and enters a decaying estate where the house and its last family seem bound together.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
