Ten-year-old Nikolenka is taken from the country to Moscow, and everything happens in the small print: the tutor's temper, the hunt, his mother's hands at the piano, the first lie he tells.
Twenty-odd tales written in a damp parsonage where Emerson had lived before him - a scientist who erases his wife's birthmark, a man who steps out of his life for twenty years to watch it from across the street, a garden whose beauty is fatal.
Professor Challenger announces that dinosaurs survive on a plateau in South America and dares the Royal Society to prove otherwise; a reporter, a sportsman and a rival scientist go with him to find out.
Lord and Lady Clonbrony live in London, spending the rents of an Irish estate they have not seen in years, while their agent squeezes it - and their son goes over incognito to look.
A body in the Vienna Stadtpark, a lamp that burned out at the wrong hour, and Joseph Muller - small, shabby, apologetic, the best detective in the police, and a man with a conviction of his own in the past.
A countess with no fortune and an unreadable face marries an English lord who dies at Venice, and the palace where it happened is now a hotel, with one room nobody sleeps in twice.
A Vermont girl of no family is taken up by a rich woman as a companion and carried to Italy - where the arrangement, and everyone's exact idea of what she is owed, comes apart.
Galusha Bangs, an archaeologist of enormous learning and no practical sense whatever, takes a room in a Cape Cod boarding house to recover his health, and finds himself defending his landlady's savings from a spiritualist and a bad investment.
Holland, 1672: a mob tears two statesmen to pieces in the street, and a quiet gentleman in Dordrecht goes on trying to breed a black tulip because a hundred thousand guilders are offered for one.
Charity Royall, raised out of a mountain settlement by the man who is now her guardian, spends one summer with a young architect from the city and understands, before he does, exactly how it will end.
An orphaned Englishman refuses his uncles' patronage, takes a clerkship in Brussels, and teaches at a girls' school run by a directress who has decided to marry him.
A New York man is delivered a mysterious carpet, wishes himself away on it, and wakes on a Mars of decayed cities, listless golden people who have forgotten everything, and a princess drawn away by the river of the dead.
A girl of extraordinary beauty is going blind, and will not wear the glasses that would save what sight she has - because they would spoil her face, which is the only capital she has.
A novice leaves his abbey for the world in 1366, joins a company of English archers under a knight of the old school, and marches into France where chivalry is already a business.
A young architect is sent to a remote Cornish parish to survey a church tower and falls in love with the rector's daughter; so, later, does the London critic who reviews his work.
A young Gascon arrives in Paris with a letter of introduction, a borrowed horse and a talent for being challenged to duels, and by nightfall he has three of them arranged.
A dozen Catholic priests on holiday in Rome sit up after dinner and tell each other, as professionals, what they have actually met: a possession, a house that will not be blessed, a deathbed that went wrong.
Rachel Vinrace, twenty-four and educated by nobody in particular, sails to South America on her father's ship and meets the English abroad - including a young man who wants to write a novel about silence.
A Japanese prince, the most charming man in London, is at the center of an affair in which two men die and an alliance hangs - and Inspector Jacks knows perfectly well who did it and can prove nothing.
A poor young tutor is hired by a shabby-genteel family drifting round the hotels of Europe, and finds his pupil is the cleverest person in the household and the only one ashamed of it.
A young Englishman at Aix-les-Bains meets a girl who is companion to a rich widow, and the next morning the widow is murdered and the girl has vanished - and everyone knows what to think.
Craig Kennedy, professor of chemistry at Columbia, solves crimes with a lie detector, a seismograph, a spectroscope and a portable X-ray, and explains the apparatus as he goes.
Two houses on the Yorkshire moors, three generations, and a love that neither party would call by that name - Emily Bronte's only novel was published under a man's name and dismissed as brutal.
A Zeppelin drops a passenger on the English coast, and he walks into the house of a woman who must now decide what she owes her country and what she owes an old debt.
Tom Grogan is a stevedore contractor on the Staten Island waterfront, hires and fires, faces down the union and the local bosses - and is a woman, running her dead husband's business under his name because no one would give a contract to a widow.
A Chicago street tough is shanghaied aboard a ship sent to kidnap an heiress, and the voyage takes them to a lost Japanese island and a headhunters' village - after which the real trouble is Chicago.
The son of an English earl is stolen at three by his father's enemy and raised as a swordsman who does not know his own name - and grows up to lead an outlaw band against the barons in the war of Simon de Montfort.
A professor of geology, a retired general, and a young engineer sit on a hot veranda west of the Rockies arguing about the sea that used to be there - and out in the desert is a mine called the Golden Fleece, a relic said to be Montezuma's, and a woman who knows more about both than she says.
Two hundred years after the Great War of 1914 severed the hemispheres, an officer of the Pan-American navy drifts across the forbidden thirtieth meridian and finds out what became of Europe.
Rouletabille is summoned to Petersburg: someone is poisoning a general in a locked villa, the household is above suspicion, and the police are the least trustworthy people in the house.
Two green stones out of a Russian church, a grand duke's daughter hiding in a New York boarding house, and a Bolshevik agent with a scarred hand hunting both.
Two charming people with no money marry on the understanding that either may leave the moment a better match appears, and spend a year borrowing other people's villas and honeymooning at their expense.
A Kansas farm, a marriage made for the land, and a woman who understands too late what she has agreed to - dust, wheat, mortgages, and a husband who is not cruel, only certain.
An American with a Central European face is mistaken for a mad king who has escaped his keepers - and finds that impersonating him is easier than explaining, and considerably more dangerous.
Fanny Price is sent at ten to live with rich relations who never let her forget the favor, and grows into the only person in the house with a working conscience.
Catherine Hayes, a servant girl, marries badly, poisons her way through it and is burnt at Tyburn - and Thackeray, sickened by novels that made criminals romantic, wrote her deliberately repellent to spoil the taste.
A Boston gentleman goes to sleep in a sealed underground chamber in 1887 and is dug out in the year 2000, in a city with no money, no advertising, no servants and no poor.
A surgeon performs a small operation on a young woman's brain so that she may see the god Pan, and years later a series of London gentlemen begin killing themselves.
A young wife, caught in a lie, tells her husband she has had a baby - and then has to produce one, at short notice, in a New York flat, with the help of a friend and a series of borrowed infants.
