A rich man decides New Hampshire needs him as governor, and finds the state is already owned - by the railroad, whose lawyers select the legislature the way a man picks a suit.
A handkerchief narrates its own life - from the flax field in Picardy, through a Paris workroom where a girl embroiders it into a fortune, to New York, where it is bought by people who need to be seen with it.
Basil Grant, a retired judge, and his brother investigate a series of impossible situations - a man paid to be a professional detainer, an agency that supplies real adventures to bored gentlemen - and the solution is always that someone has invented a trade nobody had thought of.
A poor man in a Paris garret keeps a journal of a year: the first of January, a beggar on the stairs, a rich cousin, a dead neighbour's furniture sold off.
Late Turgenev at his strangest: an officer convinced a tapping in the night is a summons from the dead; a man who tells the story of a woman he watched destroy herself; a dream that will not stay in its own head.
A congregation decides to do good in its own town, and discovers that charity administered by committee among neighbours is a different animal from charity sent abroad.
A socialist falls asleep after a meeting in Hammersmith and wakes in a Thames valley with no money, no prisons, no factories and no London - only workshops, gardens and people who find work a pleasure.
A gathering of the ghost story at its height: Le Fanu, Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Mrs Oliphant, Dickens's signalman on the line below the tunnel mouth.
Oliver Bacon, a jeweller who has clawed his way from a back alley to the top of Bond Street, receives a visit from a duchess bearing pearls of uncertain provenance - and an offer he understands is really a trap of vanity and desire.
An Ohio family - a judge, his wife, and a daughter recovering from an unsuitable attachment - is taken to Europe to get over it, and the Atlantic and the Dutch canals do not much help.
Julien Sorel is a carpenter's son with a brilliant memory, a burning ambition, and no intention of staying poor - so he uses whatever's in reach, a tutoring position, a seduction, a seminary education he doesn't believe in, to claw his way into a class that would otherwise never let him in.
Gaskell off duty: a traveller in France who blunders into a chateau where the guests are Puss in Boots, Bluebeard and the Sleeping Beauty, grown old; a curse on a Welsh house; a nurse's story with a child at the window in the snow.
A condottiero of Urbino is ordered to court a woman he has never met on behalf of a man who is not worth her, and discovers he would rather fight the whole duchy.
A boy and an escaped slave drift down the Mississippi on a raft, and in the space between the riverbanks, Twain stages one of American literature's fiercest moral reckonings.
A Talmud student from Antomir arrives at Ellis Island with four cents, and rises to be a millionaire of the New York cloak trade - losing, item by item, everything he came with.
Vera is a fraudulent medium, and knows it - and then, at a seance staged to swindle a rich woman out of an estate, she says something she could not have known.
Vermont in 1777: Burgoyne coming down from Canada, the Green Mountain Boys, Bennington, and a Tory's daughter caught between her father's loyalty and her own.
A New York lawyer inherits a Virginia manor from a cousin he never met, and finds that the house came with a legend, a locked chamber and someone already in residence.
An old Cossack colonel greets his sons home from the seminary by challenging the elder to a fist fight, and takes them both to the Sich to be made into men - where one of them sees a Polish girl.
A country lawyer watches his friend killed in a rigged duel by a nobleman who cannot be touched, and takes to the stage as Scaramouche to say from behind a mask what he cannot say in court.
A man with a burden on his back leaves the City of Destruction and walks: through the Slough of Despond, past Apollyon, through Vanity Fair, to the river he must cross alone.
Mr Carter and Miss Dolly Foster talk - about her engagement, his losses, other people's marriages - in a series of dialogues in which nothing is said outright and everything is understood.
El hombre por la mitad es una novela que explora uno de los grandes dilemas de nuestro tiempo: que queda de nosotros cuando aquello que nos definia puede ser reemplazado.
A steward's daughter, brought up in a forest lodge in the Argonne, comes into money and a mill, and two men want her - one for herself, one for the timber.
Lady Isabel leaves her husband and children for a man who does not want the burden, and returns - governess to her own children, unrecognised, in her own former house.
An Englishman inherits an estate in the Land of the Blue Mountains, on the Adriatic, and a woman in a shroud comes to his window at night, wet from the sea, and will not enter uninvited.
Sir Willoughby Patterne is handsome, rich, generous and admired, and the novel is the slow, exact demonstration of what it is like to be engaged to him.
An American widow in Paris wants to marry a compatriot, and her French husband's family will not release her - and the sister-in-law who explains why is doing something more complicated than refusing.
The Transvaal, 1880: two sisters on a Boer farm, an English officer both love, and then the war - the siege of Pretoria, a ride through the enemy lines, and a choice made by the sister nobody expected.
A young man goes to sea against his father's advice, survives storms, slavery and shipwreck, and finds himself alone on an island with a knife, a musket and twenty-eight years to fill.
A Norwegian sailor and his father sail through an opening at the pole into a world inside the earth, lit by a smoky central sun, where the people stand twelve feet high - and the survivor tells it as a deathbed deposition.
The third part of Tolstoy's autobiographical trilogy: Moscow University, a boy of sixteen who has decided to become perfect, the rules he writes in a notebook, his first drunk, his first calls on society, and the exam he fails.
