Under a Roman palace runs the Lost Water - an underground stream from the aqueducts - and above it a family is being sold up, a librarian is cataloguing what is left, and somebody is looking for what was hidden when the money went.
A young man dabbling in Thessalian witchcraft is turned into a donkey and passes from owner to owner - bandits, a baker's wife, a market gardener - hearing everything humans say in front of an animal, until a goddess takes pity.
A miser in a provincial town has a fortune nobody suspects and a daughter whose whole inheritance he intends to keep from her; then a bankrupt cousin arrives from Paris with good manners.
Two sisters keep a small shop in a New York basement, selling artificial flowers and buttons, and buy a clock for a birthday - which means meeting the man who repairs it.
Fabrizio del Dongo is seventeen, half in love with Napoleon, and desperate to see a real battlefield - so he runs off to Waterloo and gets exactly what he wanted, confused, terrifying, and nothing like the glory he pictured.
The old bishop dies, and the new one arrives with a wife who intends to run the diocese and a chaplain who intends to run the wife - while the cathedral close closes ranks.
A Hebridean uncle who has gone strange watching the breakers he calls the Merry Men take ships; Markheim, a murderer met by something in an empty shop; Olalla; Will o' the Mill; the Sire de Maletroit's door.
Horne Fisher knows everybody in England worth knowing, which is why he can solve any crime in the book and prevent almost none of them - the murderer is always a man the country cannot afford to hang.
Etienne Gerard, colonel of Hussars, is the bravest man in France and the vainest, and he tells you so himself - through Spain, Russia, Venice, the escape from Dartmoor and a wolf hunt with the Emperor.
A German town in the sixteenth century, a Jewish physician's daughter, a Christian boy, and one word - spoken, not meant - that decides both their lives.
Above a draper's shop in old Paris hangs a signboard so ancient nobody can read it; inside, a merchant's daughter is admired by a fashionable painter who has never once considered what she is used to.
On a June afternoon in 1939, the residents of an English village gather at a country house to watch the annual outdoor pageant - a sweeping, half-amateur survey of English history performed on the lawn.
The Exodus from the Egyptian side: an Egyptian scribe, a prince who will not be Pharaoh, and Merapi - a Hebrew girl the court calls the Moon of Israel - while the plagues arrive one after another and the priesthood explains each one away.
A rich young widower with a Catholic estate is worked on by a Jesuit who intends the property for the Church; the woman who loves him can see the whole design and has no standing to stop it.
A man sells the love letters a famous dead novelist wrote him - anonymously, for the money to marry - and then must live inside the marriage the money bought.
An American's sequel to The Count of Monte Cristo, published in 1878 and passed off for decades as Dumas's own - Dantes in the Paris of 1848, the revolution, and the debts the Count still owes.
Jessie Loring marries a man she does not love because everyone agrees she should, and gives him her hand and nothing else - for the rest of both their lives.
A young woman with no money takes a post as a lady's maid to a wealthy spinster, and finds that the household's secrets involve the architect she once loved.
A retired civil servant lives in a corner of Petersburg and addresses the reader with forty pages of argument nobody asked for: that reason will not make men good, that a man may choose his own harm simply to prove he is free.
Stories from a man who travelled where he wrote: a Spanish beggar boy who inherits, a Russian border, a Corsican vendetta, an English country house with a secret.
Two Englishmen - a lord and his cousin - come to Newport for the summer and are entertained by two American sisters; a year later the sisters come to London and discover what the lord's mother thinks of the arrangement.
Yasmini as a girl: a princess of mixed blood in a Rajput state, an English commissioner, a hidden treasure, and a Brahmin priesthood that intends to have both.
A married woman at a Louisiana seaside resort discovers, almost against her will, that she wants more than the life assigned to her - and refuses to pretend otherwise.
Guy Morville inherits Redclyffe and a family curse of ungovernable temper, and spends the book trying to be good in the face of a cousin who is quietly determined to think the worst of him.
A young woman arrives to run a village school on a pittance, and discovers that the vicar, the squire and the parents each have a different idea of what she is for.
A Transylvanian squire of enormous wealth and no occupation, a robber chief in the mountains who is a gentleman, and a girl in a manor house between them.
A French naval officer takes a temporary wife in Nagasaki for the length of his ship's stay, furnishes a paper house on a hill, and is faintly bored by all of it - including her.
A New York stenographer of romantic notions marries a handsome stranger against every warning and finds out who he is afterwards, in a cabin in the Carolina mountains.
Stories about American men making fools of themselves gallantly: a millionaire's son who joins the Red Cross to be near a nurse, a reporter, a soldier of fortune.
The war for Canada, 1758: a young Quaker officer, an Iroquois raid, captivity, and a fort on the Hudson where a Cornish sergeant keeps discipline in a wilderness nobody understands.
The doctor of a Barsetshire village has a niece with no name and no money, and the young squire whose estate is mortgaged to a railway navvy's fortune wants to marry her.
