A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
An orphan crosses the country and comes back to the town where his mother is buried.
A frightened schoolboy’s failed Greek exam becomes a family crisis about poverty, ambition, and punishment.
A drunken father asks his patient son for money, then confesses every lie without finding the strength to stop repeating them.
Two small children make newborn kittens the center of their world, while the adults around them barely notice the stakes.
A seasoned prosecutor discovers that reasoning with his seven-year-old son is harder than addressing any court.
An eight-year-old starving on a Moscow street fixates on a restaurant sign and an unknown food called oysters.
Olenka can live only through someone else’s passions, adopting each beloved’s work, worries, and opinions as her own.
As a child lies gravely ill, his mother and longtime doctor confront a question that has festered between them for years.
On Easter Eve, a worried deacon asks a learned priest to condemn his wayward son in a letter neither man can truly own.
A pregnant hostess endures a long name-day party while resentment, jealousy, and fatigue expose the strain in her marriage.
A starving she-wolf raids a forest hut for a lamb and carries off an unexpected captive with no sense of danger.
A widower watches his daughter grow into an exact copy of the wife whose death he once desired.
A boy accompanies his doctor father across a dark lake to help a woman in labor, entering a night of pain, birth, and adult mystery.
A young Harvard poet and his older bride cross the Atlantic determined to begin a perfect marriage, but Europe has other distractions.
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 traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
A married woman’s secret meetings are repeatedly interrupted by the toddler who sleeps in the next room.
After their child vanishes with a traveling circus, two aging parents spend years searching roads and city churches for one familiar face.
A lonely Parisian’s plan for a generous Christmas supper with a stranger develops an alarming complication before bedtime.
Lonely and aging, a Parisian baron travels south to meet the grown son he secretly supported but has never seen.
Three protected schoolboys share a railway carriage with a woman whose sudden crisis defeats every adult precaution.
