A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
After promising his dying cousin that he will never love again, a grieving man leaves their hidden valley and faces a second love.
After saving a child from a Venetian canal, a mysterious man keeps a final appointment with the child's married mother.
A traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
An old woman explains why a ring of a child’s blond hair has made her consider herself a widow all her life.
After their child vanishes with a traveling circus, two aging parents spend years searching roads and city churches for one familiar face.
A naval officer recalls an Indian expedition where a prince’s troubling gift binds him to a child trapped by courtly power.
A childhood memory of an old seamstress opens onto the secret act of courage that shaped her entire life.
An aging actress welcomes a traveler into the flower-covered villa where she lives with portraits of the men who loved her.
At a Twelfth Night dinner, a guest asks how the household’s quiet companion came to live there and what her place has cost her.
In a quiet Paris garden, a young law student befriends two forgotten dancers who still inhabit the manners of another century.
A wandering painter befriends an eccentric Englishwoman on the Normandy coast and discovers the feeling beneath her reserve.
Alone in the house of her whole life, an elderly woman writes to a friend about memory, aging, and the objects that preserve vanished lives.
Bullied because he has no father, a village boy asks a kindly blacksmith to give him a name his classmates cannot mock.
On his wedding night, a reformed libertine receives an urgent summons that brings his abandoned past into his new marriage.
At her deathbed, a devoted younger sister asks forgiveness for the secret that has shaped both women’s lives.
At a Norman farm, a baron explains why the tenant who serves him faithfully also makes him feel like a forgiven culprit.
Years after abandoning a pregnant lover, a lonely clerk sees the child he never knew and seeks one brief chance to meet him.
A sheltered young wife befriends the woman named in an anonymous warning about her husband—and trusts them both.
A racing tide traps an insurance inspector and an English family on a wreck, creating a New Year he never forgets.
With her brother sick and her father avoiding work, Lolotte takes a cotton delivery into her own hands.
A boy shelters an injured wanderer while his Louisiana family faces losing the money for his schooling.
At Easter, a carpenter notices a poor young woman whom the village has overlooked.
An elderly freed man keeps trying to reach the family that enslaved him decades earlier.
A traveler with a broken buggy is mistaken for a soldier who never came home for Christmas.
