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An American adventure novel. Peter Moore, a wireless operator on the Pacific liners, has the sharpest ears in his trade. In the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, a woman throws him a note from a window, ordering him to keep away and naming a distant city: Len Yang. A call for help in Morse code, a kidnapped young American woman, an escape by sampan on a river near Shanghai draw him towards the domain of the “Gray Dragon”, a master of cinnabar mines. A fast-paced mystery story, set in China at the start of the twentieth century.

A romantic and dramatic novel set in a mountain valley in Virginia in the nineteenth century. Sybil Berners, a wealthy heiress with a passionate nature, has just married Lyon, a young lawyer without fortune whom she adores. On their way home from their honeymoon, the couple take in Rosa Blondelle, a young Scottish mother ruined and abandoned by her husband, and bring her to Black Hall. Little by little, the guest’s charm awakens Sybil’s jealousy. One evening Rosa is found dying and accuses Sybil in front of everyone. A story of passion, suspicion and justice that shows how jealousy can destroy a happy home.

An English detective novel. In the autumn of 1918, the Heredith family is entertaining guests at their old moated manor house in Sussex. Violet, the young wife of the son of the house, is ill and stays alone in her room. During dinner, a scream and then a gunshot ring out upstairs: she is found shot dead, with no weapon and no trace, and the open window is six metres above the ground. A Scotland Yard detective, then a famous private investigator, take up the case. A classic puzzle, carefully built.

A novel of the American West. Around 1890, on the banks of the Kootenai River, near the border between Canada and the United States, a sixteen-year-old girl who lives alone among the Native Americans dives into the icy water to save a child. Dan Overton, a guide respected throughout the region, takes her to live among the white settlers, in the village of Sinna Ferry, in Idaho. There she calls herself Montana, refuses to say where she comes from and keeps the secret map of a place rich in gold. A lively portrait of a free and bold heroine, in a land of forests and gold prospectors.

An English romance. Stella, nineteen, born in Italy, runs away from a boarding school in Florence and takes refuge with her uncle, James Etheridge, an old, dreamy painter who lives on the banks of the Thames. There she meets Lord Leycester, the hot-headed heir to the neighbouring estate of Wyndward. Standing between them are the pride of a noble family, which intends another woman for him, and Jasper Adelstone, a lawyer ready to do anything to marry Stella. A love story full of twists and turns, carried by a frank and spontaneous heroine.

A giant tortoise saves the man who once nursed it, the youngest of three coati cubs disobeys his mother, and a flamingo pays dearly for its vanity. These eight tales give a voice to the animals of the Paraná, who work, quarrel and learn the hard way. People pass through them, as hunters or wounded men, and the forest goes on without them. The collection explores caution, mutual help and the laws of a nature that forgives nothing. Quiroga, who wrote these stories for his children, combines the humour of the animal fable with the precision of a man who lived there.

During the war of 1870, ten travellers leave Rouen, occupied by the Prussians, in the same stagecoach: local notables, two nuns, a democrat and a prostitute nicknamed Boule de Suif. Held at an inn by a Prussian officer who sets his conditions, they discover what their principles are worth. The young woman, the only one who shared her food with them, becomes the target of every kind of pressure. Around this story the volume gathers eleven other stories by Maupassant that have nothing to do with the war: tales of marriage, adultery, money and small middle-class compromises. A collection that shows Maupassant’s sharp, ironic view of social hypocrisy.

Raised in a Westphalian castle, Candide learns from his tutor Pangloss that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Driven out for kissing Cunégonde, he passes through war, the Inquisition, the Lisbon earthquake and the colonies of the Americas. Each disaster tests the lesson of optimism he keeps repeating without quite believing it. The tale explores evil, Providence, slavery and the vanity of systems that claim to explain everything. Voltaire moves forward in very short chapters, where irony does the work of argument.

In the Caucasus of the 1830s, several voices describe the same man: Pechorin, a Russian officer, brilliant and destructive. An old captain recounts the abduction of a Circassian girl, and the traveller who hears him later reads his notebooks. They tell of a season at the spa where Pechorin courts a princess out of boredom, and of a duel he conducts like an experiment. The novel explores boredom and what a generation does with unused strength. Lermontov assembles a broken portrait where the order of the stories matters as much as the events.

Alone in his Normandy house, a man keeps a journal of the disturbances that began when a Brazilian three-master sailed past. He sleeps badly, drinks from his carafe at night without remembering it, and becomes sure an invisible being lives beside him. His notes, methodical at first, become a struggle against a presence he can neither show nor name. Around it the volume gathers other tales by Maupassant, where fear and everyday cruelty work on narrow lives. The author explores the border between hallucination and reality, and never settles it.

A novel by the Canadian writer Arthur Stringer, published in 1915 and written in the form of a diary. A young woman from New York high society, suddenly ruined, marries almost without thinking Duncan McKail, a Canadian of Scottish descent, a former engineer who now grows wheat in western Canada. She discovers a plank shack in the middle of the prairie, a Swedish farmhand, hens, cooking and isolation. Day after day she tells everything to her friend Matilda Anne, who has stayed in Europe. A funny, frank account of learning a new life and a marriage.

In Kentucky, young Patricia Adair must save Rosemeade, the family home where her grandfather lives. She writes a play drawn from her great-grandmother’s love letters. In New York, the producer Godfrey Vandeford buys it without reading it: he wants it to fail, to teach his star a lesson. But Patricia arrives on Broadway full of confidence, and he falls in love with her. A lively and humorous romantic novel that moves back and forth between the meadows of Kentucky and the world of the theatre.

A gentleman of La Mancha has read so many books of chivalry that he sets out as a knight errant under the name Don Quixote. On a broken-down horse, with Sancho Panza, a talkative and practical farmer, he takes inns for castles and windmills for giants. His expeditions end in beatings and misunderstandings, while his squire waits for his island. The novel explores the distance between ideals and the world, and what his madness reveals about those who mock him. Cervantes mixes farce with melancholy in a book that invents its own commentators.

Settled in an abandoned windmill in Provence, the narrator sends his Parisian readers stories of the country and its people. Among them are Monsieur Seguin's goat, the priest of Cucugnan, Corsican lighthouse keepers and an old couple forgotten in their village. The pieces move between farce, legend and brief scenes where a life fits into a few pages. The collection explores rural Provence, its vanishing trades and the nostalgia of a man watching from a distance. Daudet writes a plain, musical prose in which humour often lets melancholy through.

Six dialogues by Seneca, each addressed to a friend or relative, are gathered here. The first argues that life is not short but wasted, spent on everything except living; others treat peace of mind, the happy life and studious leisure. The last two consider the firmness of the wise man, whom insult cannot touch, and why misfortune falls on good people. These essays explore the use of time, the mastery of the passions and what is genuinely in our power. Seneca writes as an adviser rather than a theorist, in phrases built to be remembered.

An American romantic novel. Edward Courtlandt, a wealthy American, returns to Paris after two years in the jungles of Burma to see Nora Harrigan again, an Irish-American soprano who sings at the Opera under the name Eleonora da Toscana. When he forces his way into her apartment, she fires a revolver and misses him, then disappears, and the newspapers talk of a kidnapping. The story moves to the shores of Lake Como, where a prince pursues her with his attentions. What happened between them two years earlier remains a mystery that the novel reveals little by little, between comedy and suspense.

A biography published in 1884 in a series on famous women. Florence Fenwick Miller tells the life of the Englishwoman Harriet Martineau, born in 1802 in Norwich into a family descended from French Protestant refugees. Deaf from her teenage years and without a sense of smell, she became a writer and won enormous success with stories that explain economics. The book follows her journey to the United States, where she took a stand against slavery, her five years of illness, her translation of Auguste Comte and her articles for a major London newspaper. A portrait of a free and tireless woman, drawing on unpublished letters.

A book of travel and history published in Boston in 1910 under the pen name Francis Miltoun. The author visits the residences of the kings of France, in Paris and around the capital: the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, Vincennes, Fontainebleau, Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Rambouillet, Chantilly, Compiègne. He also tells the story of the formal French garden and of the great royal hunts. Rather than dates, he gathers the anecdotes left by the old chroniclers. A lively walk through centuries of French history.

In nine sections of aphorisms, Nietzsche attacks the prejudices of philosophers and their claim to a disinterested truth. He examines where moral values come from, distinguishes a master morality from a slave morality, and questions the religious certainties of his time. His remarks range from the theory of knowledge to the criticism of manners. The book asks what values are worth and where they draw their authority. Nietzsche argues provocatively, in fragments rather than sustained proofs.

An English comic novel. In London, Lionel Mortimer, a young barrister without clients and a writer without a publisher, can no longer pay his rent. He stops a runaway horse and comes to the aid of a young woman, Beatrice Blair, who tells him a story about a secret treaty coveted by governments and asks him to help her burgle a house to get it back. Lionel gladly agrees. Other characters become involved, among them Tony Wild, a wealthy idler in search of thrills, and the affair leads all the way to a country inn. A light-hearted adventure, full of twists and humour.

Eight years earlier, Anne Elliot broke off her engagement to a penniless naval officer on the advice of those closest to her. Now the overlooked daughter of a family ruined by vanity, she sees Captain Wentworth return, wealthy and much admired. Meetings multiply within a narrow circle where nothing is said plainly and everyone watches everyone else. The novel explores regret, silent constancy and the weight of advice taken against one's own heart. Austen writes here in a graver key, attentive to lost time and to what a second chance demands.

One morning Josef K., a senior clerk at a bank, is arrested in his lodgings by two warders who tell him nothing of the charge and leave him free to go to work. The case proceeds without being explained to him, in the attic of a suburban tenement where a court sits among piles of files. K. consults an ailing lawyer, a painter who lives off the judges, and a tradesman swallowed by his own case. Every step draws him deeper into an administration no one has seen the top of. Published after Kafka's death, the novel examines guilt and authority.

A novel by the British writer Compton Mackenzie, published in 1911. In the eighteenth century, Curtain Wells, an imaginary English spa town, lives to the rhythm of its baths, balls and card tables, under the rule of Beau Ripple, its judge of elegance. Young Phyllida Courteen, whose mother wants to keep her from marrying because of an inheritance, is courted by Francis Vernon, a gambler deep in debt who talks of running away with her, while a young poet, Charles Lovely, tries to win her heart. A witty comedy of manners, written in the language of the eighteenth century.

An American novel. In Kentucky in 1925, sixteen-year-old Ellen Gaddy works on the family farm, founded by a French ancestor. Her father, a stern Catholic, pins all his hopes on her younger sister, Frankie, who studies the piano. Ellen falls for Christian, a young farmhand, who forces himself on her and then vanishes; pregnant, she hides her condition from her family and leaves the farm. The novel follows her over a dozen years, through the Great Depression, to the rhythm of the seasons, the animals and folk songs. A sensitive and unvarnished portrait of rural life.