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.
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.
