England in 1714, with the Jacobites waiting: a young man with a name he cannot use, a highwayman who is a gentleman, a smuggler's coast and a plot that reaches to the throne.
A hired man carries an orphaned boy across the north country of New York State in a wheelbarrow, and raises him with tall tales, hard work and unshakable loyalty - until the war comes.
Born to a Black mother and a white father he barely knows, the narrator grows up not realizing he's seen as Black until a schoolteacher points it out in front of the class.
England and France, 1346: a knight, the girl he cannot marry, a murder to avenge, Crecy - and then the plague comes up the roads out of the east and settles the argument for everyone.
A gentleman is found shot at his own chateau gate, and every fact points to the young count who was seen leaving - who will not say where he was, because saying it would ruin a woman.
An anthropologist from the twenty-fifth century arrives in a London suburb to study the taboos of the natives - money, marriage, property, rank - and reports on them exactly as an Englishman would report on Polynesians.
A young man goes to sea against his father's advice, survives storms, slavery and a shipwreck, and finds himself alone on an island where the only proof another human exists is a single footprint.
The year 2000: an inventor has built a shell that can bore to the centre of the earth, and another man is fitting out a ship to reach the Pole under electric light - and what the drill finds under Sardis is not rock.
An old apothecary in a New England town, a great-granddaughter, and a cordial in a cupboard that may be the elixir of life - Hawthorne's last work, broken off at his death.
Versailles at its zenith: d'Artagnan and his friends have grown old in a court where the young king has fallen in love with a maid of honour, and where Fouquet's fall is already being arranged.
Trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage to a wealthy but paralyzed aristocrat, Constance Chatterley finds passion and meaning with her husband's gamekeeper - a relationship that crosses every line of class and propriety in 1920s England.
A deposed king of a Mediterranean kingdom is running a restoration out of a villa in Tangier - selling shares in it to anyone who will buy, including a woman who loves him and a man who is keeping the accounts.
An officer sees, at a country house in 1819, the woman he lost at the crossing of the Berezina seven years before - and she does not know him, or anything, and has not spoken since.
A prison governor takes in the infant daughter of a woman he has just seen hanged for murder, raises her with his own child, and tells neither which is which - then watches for the inheritance to show.
Sketches of a French marriage: the courtship, the wedding night, the first baby, the nurse, the mother-in-law, the boredom, and a great deal that the 1860s did not put in print.
A landowner is told, in his own house, that his relief work during the famine is worthless and his wife despises him - and the story simply follows what he does next.
A young scribe and illuminator leaves Holland to make his fortune, is separated from the woman he loves by a forged letter, and walks across fifteenth-century Europe - Burgundy, Germany, Rome - while she waits.
Tyrol, 1809: an innkeeper leads the mountain peasants against Napoleon and Bavaria, beats a regular army three times at Bergisel, is abandoned by his own Emperor, and is shot at Mantua by French order.
New France and New York in the 1690s: an English boy and a French officer, Frontenac's Canada, the Iroquois, and a feud carried across thirty years and two colonies.
A woman of the new century marries, divorces, and marries again - and Churchill follows her through Newport, Paris and the courts to ask what a modern American woman is entitled to want.
Edinburgh, 1858: a shepherd's dog follows his master's coffin to Greyfriars kirkyard and refuses to leave the grave - for fourteen years, through the dog-licence laws, the Lord Provost, and the whole of the Old Town.
A young minister with no gift for preaching is sent to the foothills of the Rockies, where the ranchers call him the Sky Pilot and treat him as a joke - until a girl is thrown from a horse.
Mr Hogarth leaves his fortune to a nephew nobody knew existed, and his two nieces - raised as heiresses and educated like men - are left with nothing and must earn.
A Paris bank fails, and the cashier has vanished with twelve hundred thousand francs - or has been left holding a theft arranged by men who will dine out that evening.
A small European kingdom, a dying king, a duchess who wants the throne for her line, an Austrian loan falling due, and an American who happens to be in the capital.
Higgs returns to Erewhon twenty years after escaping by balloon, and finds that his ascent has become a religion - Sunchildism - with temples, a priesthood, relics and a professional interest in his never coming back.
The daughter of a railway millionaire buys a Norman castle and cannot decide anything - church or chapel, one suitor or the other - while a young architect restores her battlements and a photographer forges a picture.
A starving escaped convict returns to Paris and wakes among mountains of cabbages: Les Halles at dawn, the belly of the city, where the fat shopkeepers who have everything decide that the thin ones are dangerous.
A widower with a farm needs a housekeeper, and a girl with nowhere to go needs a roof; they marry as a business arrangement, on terms, with the terms stated.
Eliph' Hewlitt sells Jarby's Encyclopaedia of Knowledge and Household Recipes door to door through the small towns of Iowa, and decides to marry a woman he has not met, using the encyclopaedia as his method.
Mabel Waring arrives at a fashionable party in a dress she had made specially for the occasion - and within moments is convinced that everyone in the room can see exactly how wrong it is, and exactly how wrong she is.
A man falls, and wakes in a world thousands of years hence where the family is the state, the house is the world, war is forgotten and the passion that drove his own century has been bred out.
A seventeen-year-old chevalier meets a girl being sent to a convent against her will, and throws over his family, his studies and eventually his honour to keep her - repeatedly, each time worse.
London, 1728: a stage-struck girl named Lavinia Fenton is cast in a new ballad opera about thieves and gaolers, becomes the toast of the town overnight, and leaves it all for a duke.
A young man kept in the wrapping by his father until he is twenty-eight - betrothed since childhood to a girl he has never seen - is finally released into Europe, and falls immediately for a clever woman who has no intention of marrying him.
A mining town in the Canadian west: an owner, a union organiser, a strike, and a young minister who thinks he can stand between them and is told by both sides to choose.
Henry Fleming enlists dreaming of glory and gets his first real taste of war within days - the noise, the confusion, and a moment of pure animal panic that sends him running from the line.
The Wessex short stories: the hangman who comes to supper and does not say what he does; the three strangers; a wife who takes her husband's arm to a dead man's hand for a cure; the Trumpet-Major's Melancholy Hussar deserting for love.
Holland, 1672: a mob tears two statesmen apart in the street while a quiet gentleman in Dordrecht goes on trying to breed a black tulip worth a hundred thousand florins.
Jamaica and Ireland at the turn of the eighteenth century: a man convicted of a killing he did not do, transported, and a woman who will not accept the verdict.
