A servant reads his master's face too well, guesses the secret of an old murder, and learns that a gentleman's reputation is a machine that can pursue a man across an entire country.
A gentleman's son with no money signs on as a boy before the mast for the Liverpool run, and finds that the sea is a trade like any other, staffed by men who despise him.
Whitewashed fences, buried treasure, a faked funeral, and a terrifying turn in a pitch-black cave - Tom Sawyer talks, schemes, and swindles his way through the most vivid boyhood ever put on the page.
A young man with a broken heart takes work at a Cape Cod lifesaving station where the keeper is also hiding from a woman, and the two of them agree that females are the ruin of everything - after which a summer cottage is let next door.
A young man pursues Yvette, the beautiful daughter of a Marquise whose salon is not quite what it appears - and discovers, slightly before she does, exactly what her mother is and what that makes her.
A penniless cavalry veteran with a good moustache is given a job on a Paris newspaper and discovers that every rung above him - press, salon, ministry - can be reached through a woman.
Quatermain tells a hunting club how he was hired by Maiwa, a chief's daughter, to make war on the man who had her child killed - an elephant hunt, a stockade, and a small campaign fought with borrowed rifles.
Four young people in Rome - an American sculptor, a copyist, a dark woman with a past, and an Italian count who may not be entirely human - and a death on the Tarpeian Rock that binds them.
Clarissa Dalloway spends a single June day in 1923 London preparing to host a party that evening - buying flowers, greeting old friends, and drifting through memories of a life's roads not taken, while across the city a shell-shocked war veteran named Septimus Warren Smith moves toward his own crisis.
A middle-aged American in Florence, comfortable and finished with life, is courted by a girl of twenty and by her chaperone, who is his own age - and behaves badly, then better, then badly again.
Hawaii not as advertised: the missionary family that owns the island and cannot say so, a leper colony at Molokai, a sheriff, a surfer, a Chinese storekeeper.
A wild stallion nobody can take, a horse-hunter who wants him, and the girl who gets to him first - in the canyon country of Utah, with a river and a fire coming.
An orphan is taken in by relatives who use her as a servant, and a rich uncle is expected home from India - after which everyone's manners improve remarkably.
A Petersburg student betrays a revolutionary to the police, is sent by them to Geneva to spy on the exiles, and finds the dead man's sister waiting there.
Two prospectors find a cabin in a fold of the California hills with a woman in it and no explanation, and the arrangement they come to shapes the next fifteen years.
Twenty-two lives in one Ohio town, seen through a young reporter who will leave and a doctor who never did: the unmarried teacher, the man with the beautiful hands, the woman who married the wrong brother.
Golden Walter, fleeing a bad marriage, sails away and comes to a land beyond the world's edge, where a Lady, a Maid and a Dwarf live in a house in a wood - and the Maid tells him at once that the Lady will destroy him.
A scientist in the Egyptian desert has found the force behind matter itself, and a woman who understands it better than he does intends to decide what is done with it.
Charles Pooter, a City clerk of no importance whatever, keeps a diary: the tradesmen are insolent, his son is a disappointment, his jokes are unappreciated, and he has just painted the bath red.
Egypt, Maine - a mill town - goes broke when the bank fails, and a scheme to print local currency, a mill owner, and a young man with nothing to lose take it from there.
A Parisian girl of fifteen, adored and neglected, discovers her widowed father is to marry her mother's friend, and runs - into a convent, a career and a decade of finding out what she is worth.
The second panel of the trilogy: a boy of fourteen at the awkward age, jealous, ashamed of his hands, in love with a footman's opinion of him, watching his family from a corner.
New York, 1863: a girl who takes nothing on faith, three men in love with her, and the Draft Riots - five days in which the city tore itself apart and the mob hunted black New Yorkers through the streets.
Alexandria under the first Ptolemies: a sculptor takes a girl of Tennis as his model for Arachne, the mortal who challenged a goddess at the loom and was punished for winning.
England, 1535: an abbot wants the estate of a knight's daughter, and the dissolution of the monasteries is about to hand every argument to whoever moves first.
A San Francisco Jewish family, a daughter who falls in love with a gentile doctor, and a father who will not have it - argued out on both sides with respect and no melodrama.
A shipwrecked Englishman is carried to Peru before the conquest and taken for a god by the Chanca; the Incas make a Virgin of the Sun of the woman he loves, and the penalty for touching her is known to everyone.
A widow's son and daughter persuade her to move back to the family home she left, and the family - grandfather, cousins, the whole arrangement - closes over them.
Lizzie Eustace has a diamond necklace worth ten thousand pounds, and the question of whether it was hers to keep occupies the courts, the family lawyers, two suitors and all of London.
A Volga merchant's son inherits the barges, the money and the trade, and cannot make himself want any of it - he drinks, he asks people what life is for, and nobody in the merchant world has an answer.
The Great Trek from a Boer woman's side: Suzanne Botmar's daughter loves an English castaway, and the family goes north with the wagons to Natal - to Retief's embassy, Dingaan's kraal, and the massacre at Weenen.
Seven stories about art and the people it ruins: a Nebraska boy who sees a Rodin and cannot go home, a sculptor's body brought back to the prairie town that produced him, a schoolteacher taken to a matinee at Carnegie Hall and destroyed by it.
Sacha, petit garcon timide, gourmand de mots, grandit a Leningrad entre sa mere francaise, nee de pere inconnu, et son pere conservateur au Musee Russe.
A vicar of absolute faith discovers his daughter is pregnant by an officer going back to the front, and must choose between his religion and his child.
The back-story of the voice from Wieland: how a Pennsylvania farm boy discovered he could throw his own speech, and what a man with money and an interest in secret societies then made of him.
A pocket diary is found in the snow, and Joseph Muller - small, shabby, apologetic, the best man in the Vienna police - reads a life out of it and works back to a death.
An old country cure loses his patrons when the chateau is sold to Americans, and prepares to hate them - then meets the two young women who have bought it.
How Quatermain married: a girl he knew as a child, found again in the veld after her father's trek has come to grief, a Boer neighbour who wants her, and a baboon-woman on the hillside who wants something else.
An American reporter in London goes looking for a man who has vanished, and finds a house in a respectable square where somebody is being held - and cannot get anyone official to believe it.
A priest of the old religion, exiled to the Yucatan colony, is recalled to an Atlantis ruled by an empress who took the throne with her own hands - and the mountains have begun to smoke.
For readers of Nicholas Sparks and Karen Kingsbury, the life of a brilliant boy yearning to belong changes forever when he's sent to North Carolina's Outer Banks amid the mysteries, loss, and confusion of childhood in this heart-stirring coming-of-age novel by the international bestselling author of the Miramar Bay series.
