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.
A young engineer in a Yorkshire cutlery town introduces machinery, and the trade unions warn him, then blow up his workshop - while a doctor's daughter, a flooded reservoir and an old crime run alongside.
The stories where Wessex stops being pastoral: a schoolmaster's wife who cannot forgive her son's face; a man who exchanges his child; a tranter's tale told on a carrier's van; the son who is ashamed of his mother at Oxford.
Eugene of Savoy: refused a commission by Louis XIV, he took service with the Emperor instead and spent forty years beating the French and the Turks - Zenta, Blenheim, Belgrade - while building the Belvedere and buying books.
A retired civil servant lives in a corner of Petersburg and spends forty pages telling the reader why every comfortable idea about reason and progress is a lie, before he consents to tell a story at all.
Hallblithe's betrothed is carried off by sea-raiders, and he follows her to the Glittering Plain - a land where nobody dies, nobody ages, and nobody is permitted to leave.
A missionary's wife dies in the far north, a trapper raises the child alone in a cabin at the edge of the barren lands, and sixteen years later the girl has to be told who she is.
A woman must decide whether to give herself to the man she loves before he goes - and the book is the argument, conducted in the open, about what she owes to convention and what to herself.
London's socialist fables: a tribe that invents property, a strike-breaker's world, the Unparalleled Invasion in which the West solves China by germ warfare - written in 1910 and unbearable to read now for the right reasons.
France, 1642: a young marquis of great family comes to court in love, joins the conspiracy against Richelieu, and learns what the Cardinal is - and what Louis XIII is worth as an ally.
Melville and a shipmate are put in irons for refusing duty aboard a whaler, jailed by a comic English consul in Tahiti, escape, and go beachcombing across the island - planting potatoes, dodging missionaries and watching a culture being dismantled by people who mean well.
A stranger falls from the Cathedral gallery in a quiet English close, and the dead man had come to Wrychester to look for something that a canon, a clockmaker and a solicitor would all rather he had not found.
A Russian sits bound in an Indian camp, watching his last companion die slowly, and offers his captors a bargain - a potion that makes a man's skin proof against any blade, and he will prove it on his own neck.
A Huguenot family flees Louis XIV's France after the Revocation and ends up in the forests of Canada among Iroquois and coureurs de bois - Versailles in the first half, the wilderness in the second.
Nuremberg in 1281: a smith's forge, a knight, a girl of the patrician class, and an Emperor - Rudolph of Hapsburg - holding a diet in a city where the guilds and the old families are not speaking.
Dostoevsky at short range: a clerk who believes he has a double, a Christmas story about a beggar boy, the confession of a man who ruined a girl by being right about everything.
A young officer follows a respectable married woman into a street where no respectable woman goes, and pulls the thread of a secret that leads to the Devorants - a criminal brotherhood with a chief who was once a convict.
A quiet college in the American woods, a girl left in the care of its president, and a man who comes to take her away - with a student who loves her and will not say so.
A Mounted Policeman goes north after a killer and finds a woman who confesses to the murder herself, a river of burning forest, and a family that has been protecting somebody for years.
Kent Knowles writes boys' adventure stories he despises, lives with his sister on Cape Cod, has not left the town in twenty years, and is generally agreed to be a quahaug - a clam that shuts.
A thoughtful young Roman under Marcus Aurelius moves through the philosophies on offer - Epicurean, Stoic, Christian - testing each against the fact that he will die.
In a shabby Paris boarding house, an old vermicelli merchant sells his last silver to keep two daughters in gowns they will not thank him for, and a law student decides which way he intends to climb.
Elizabeth of Russia is on the throne, and somewhere in Europe is a girl who should be - the daughter of an empress, raised without a name, and worth a great deal to anyone who can produce her.
A young man of the Second Empire decides, on the death of his father, to live entirely without illusions - no religion, no scruple, no love - and applies the programme with complete success to politics, marriage and a mistress.
A man of twenty-seven leaves London on foot to find the ideal woman, and meets several who are not her - a barmaid, a widow, a girl in a wood - while talking to the reader about books, wine and the folly of the whole enterprise.
Twelve months in the life of Bob Stubbs, a swindler with no talent for it, told by himself: the boots he never paid for at school follow him through the militia, a courtship, a debtor's prison and back.
France, 1572: an English boy and a French girl are married as children to settle a lawsuit, and meet again as strangers in Paris in the week of St Bartholomew.
A prosperous family loses everything, and the daughter goes out to work in a New York shop - where the hours, the standing and the manager between them do what the fire could not.
Morristown, the winter of 1780: Washington's army is freezing and mutinous, a Jersey farmer's daughter is courted by two officers, and somebody is passing information.
A girl is born under a shadow - her mother, a dancer, was cast off by a husband who never forgave her - and the same trap is set for the daughter twenty years later.
