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Alone in his house by the Seine, a man keeps a diary. After a fine Brazilian three-master sails past on the river, he sleeps badly, and when he wakes he finds that the water in his carafe has been drunk during the night. He becomes convinced that an invisible being is living beside him. Is he mad, or is something really there? Maupassant never decides, and that doubt is what makes it frightening. The volume also includes other stories by Maupassant. You can read each one in one sitting in the language you are learning.

In a remote village on the Thames marshes, Archie, a poor young painter, wants to marry Lucy. Lucy's stepfather, Professor Braddock, a collector of mummies, sets one condition: Archie must pay for a rare mummy, that of an Inca king wrapped in green bandages. The professor's assistant goes to fetch it from Malta. But when the crate is opened, the mummy has vanished, and in its place lies the assistant's body, strangled. A misty detective puzzle, with a love story thrown in, by the author of “The Mystery of a Hansom Cab”, one of the greatest successes in crime fiction. Its absorbing plot makes it an enjoyable read in the language you are learning.

This collection brings together thirteen stories by the Irish-American writer Donn Byrne. In the title story, a former Broadway dancer is tried in New York for a murder committed ten years earlier. The policeman who brought her back from the South Seas tells the court how a shipwreck changed her. The other stories travel from Ireland to the Andes, from the streets of New York to the biblical times of Delilah and the Queen of Sheba: each story opens a different world. Lively and moving, they can be read one by one, at your own pace, in the language you are learning.

This collection brings together ten stories by Edgar Allan Poe. We enter the House of Usher, an old mansion that cracks along with the family who live in it. We attend the masked ball of Prince Prospero, shut away in his abbey while the Red Death ravages the land, and we listen to a murderer swear that he is not mad. Here too is the first case of the Chevalier Dupin: with this character, Poe invented the detective story, long before Sherlock Holmes. With the translation always in front of you, each story can be read in one sitting in the language you are learning.

One May morning in 1919, in London, the painter Philip Esdaile is hosting breakfast for his friends in his Chelsea studio. Suddenly an aeroplane crashes nearby, and two airmen clinging to the same parachute fall onto the roof: one is dead, while the other, Chummy Smith, a wartime friend of the painter, has survived. On the roof they also find a pistol that has been fired. Rather than call the police, the friends decide to keep the affair secret and find out the truth for themselves. The investigation is told by one of the guests. Its absorbing plot and ironic tone make it an enjoyable read in the language you are learning.