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Several historical and literary figures are brought together through their notable relationships, marked by attraction, conflict, and mutual influence. Each pair reveals a unique dynamic combining passion, ambition, and rivalry. The narrative explores these connections from a storytelling perspective, highlighting their impact on individual paths. This book offers a series of vivid and accessible portraits. The author examines human relationships through famous and contrasting examples.

A chronicle published in 1889, the very year of the disaster. At the end of May 1889, endless rain swells the rivers around Johnstown, a factory town in Pennsylvania wedged at the bottom of a valley. On 31 May, upstream, an earth dam gives way and the lake it held back rushes down onto the town. The book gathers newspaper dispatches and eyewitness accounts: families taking refuge on rooftops, the fire in the wreckage piled against the stone bridge, the search for the dead, and then the help sent from all over the country. A first-hand record, direct and often deeply moving, of a tragedy that shook all of America.

An archaeologist travelling in Andalusia meets a wanted bandit, Don José, and then a Romani woman who tells fortunes in Córdoba. Several months later he finds Don José in prison, on the eve of his execution, and hears his confession. Once a corporal with a promotion in sight, José tells how he met Carmen, how he deserted and how she drew him into a life of smuggling. The novella explores jealousy, the freedom that Carmen yields to no one, and the learned traveller’s view of the Roma of Spain. Mérimée sets this story inside a scholarly inquiry that makes it all the colder.

Fyodor Karamazov, a debauched father, is set against his eldest son Dmitri over an inheritance and the same woman. Around them Ivan, tormented by the problem of evil, and Alyosha, a novice at the monastery, take opposite paths, while the servant Smerdyakov looks on. When the old man is murdered, suspicion falls on Dmitri, and the trial forces each of them to say what he believes. The novel explores guilt, freedom and faith in a world where all seems permitted. Dostoevsky pushes a murder story as far as asking who in a family is innocent.

Lucy Graham, an attractive young woman with a mysterious past, marries a wealthy man and settles into a comfortable life. But elements of her past resurface, raising the suspicions of Robert, a close acquaintance determined to uncover the truth. Tension builds around Lucy’s true identity and intentions. The story gradually reveals secrets and manipulations in a steadily growing atmosphere of suspense. The author crafts a gripping novel about appearances, deception, and the consequences of the past.

Emma Woodhouse, young, rich and sure of her judgement, has made a pastime of arranging the marriages around her. Convinced she is working for the happiness of others, she guides a friend of no fortune and reads everyone's intentions in her own way. Her arrangements slowly turn against the people they were meant to serve, and against herself. The novel explores self-deception, differences of rank in an English village, and the passage from certainty to doubt. Austen conducts a social comedy in which irony patiently corrects its heroine.

Lucy, a young Englishwoman traveling in Italy, discovers a freer and more intense world than the one she grew up in. Her meeting with George, a sincere and passionate man, challenges her certainties and social conventions. Back in England, she must choose between the safety of a conventional life and the pull of her true feelings. Through her journey, the novel explores the tension between desire and social norms. The author offers an elegant and luminous work about emancipation, love, and the courage to be oneself.

An American novel from 1915. One June morning, a young man who calls himself Walker Farr walks the roads of New England. He looks like a tramp, but he speaks like an educated man and hides his past. He stops in Marion, a cotton-mill town where typhoid fever strikes poor families. The cause is the river water sold by the company of Colonel Dodd, who also controls the state’s politicians. Asking nothing for himself, Farr joins the fight and meets Kate Kilgour, Dodd’s secretary. A lively novel about the courage of one man standing alone against a political machine.

An English novel, the second part of “a Romance of Sussex”. In 1908, in a seaside town in the south of England, Ruth, a former housemaid, marries Ernie Caspar, a working man who raises little Alice, born before their marriage, as his own daughter. The years pass: more children are born, Ernie loses his job, and the rent is owed to Alf, Ernie’s brother, who still desires Ruth. Joe Burt, a trade unionist from the North, falls in love with her. Strikes spread and the fear of war grows until the summer of 1914. A sensitive portrait of a strong and faithful working-class woman.

An American biography published during its subject's lifetime. John Algernon Owens tells the life of Willard Glazier, born into a modest family in New York State: a childhood on the farm, years as a schoolteacher, then the Civil War in the Union cavalry, capture, prison and escape. Having become a successful author, Glazier crosses the United States on horseback, then travels by canoe down the Mississippi, whose true source he claims to have found, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. An admiring portrait, rich in letters and articles from the period.

The Otis family, American and practical, buys an English manor said to have been haunted for three centuries. The ghost of Sir Simon multiplies apparitions, chains and bloodstains, without drawing from the newcomers the terror he expects. Humiliated by tenants who scrub away his effects and play tricks on him, he finds an unexpected listener in Virginia. The story explores the meeting of the New World with English tradition, and the room mockery leaves for compassion. Wilde begins with a parody of the ghost story, then changes its key.

Hermann, an officer in the engineers, watches his comrades play night after night without ever staking a single card. He learns that an old countess is said to hold the secret of three winning cards, obtained long ago in Paris, and resolves to wrest it from her. To get close to her, he pretends to love Lizaveta, a poor young girl whom the countess has taken in and who keeps her company, and one night he slips into the house. The story explores greed, cold calculation and the share of chance that no calculation can reduce. Pushkin holds the balance between character study and fantastic tale, never saying which one prevails.

Aboard a liner home from Asia, a sleepless passenger approaches the narrator at night and asks him to keep a secret. A German doctor posted to a remote station in the Dutch East Indies, he tells of a European woman who came to demand an illegal operation. His refusal, dictated by pride as much as desire, sends him after her like a man seized by madness. The story explores obsession, misplaced honour and the solitude of Europeans in the tropics. Zweig confines the confession to one night at sea, where a man's headlong run no longer stops.

A well-known novelist comes home on his birthday and finds a long letter from a woman whose name he does not know. In it she tells her whole life, from the day when, still a girl, she watched him move into her building in Vienna. For years she loved him without making herself known, met him without being recognised, and now writes to say everything. The story explores one-sided passion, anonymity and a life arranged around someone unaware of it. Zweig holds to a single voice throughout, in a confession that never pauses for breath.

Back from Europe, Dr. Simão Bacamarte settles in the small town of Itaguaí, in Brazil, and later founds an asylum there, the Green House, to study madness scientifically. His criteria widen week by week: first a respected citizen, then so many residents that the asylum ends up confining four-fifths of the town; after that, it is the most reasonable people who pass through its gates. The town grows uneasy, then rebels, while the scientist pursues his demonstration. This short tale explores the boundaries of reason and the power held by whoever draws them. Machado de Assis turns it into a cool satire, where irony serves as the diagnosis.

An American political and romantic novel from 1905. Jimmy Grayson, a young and almost unknown lawyer from the West, is unexpectedly chosen as his party’s candidate for President of the United States. Harley, a reporter for a New York newspaper, follows his campaign aboard a special train and falls in love with Sylvia, the candidate’s niece, a free-spirited young woman from Idaho. But financiers in the party want Grayson to stay silent on tariffs. A lively account of an election campaign and of the price of honesty in politics.

Ishmael, a sailor with no ties on land, signs on at Nantucket aboard the Pequod, a whaler under Captain Ahab. Maimed years earlier by a white sperm whale, Ahab has turned the hunt into an obsession to which he bends his whole crew. The ship works its way down the oceans, between whale hunts, forecastle stories and omens no one dares name. The novel explores obsession, the indifference of nature and the border between knowledge and excess. Melville weaves an adventure narrative, a scholarly enquiry into whales and a metaphysical meditation.

Washed up after a shipwreck, Edward Prendick is put ashore on a remote Pacific island inhabited by an exiled scientist and his assistant. The islanders, unsettling in their features, recite a Law like a prayer, and cries come at night from the laboratory. Prendick discovers the nature of Moreau's experiments and how fragile the order they impose is. The story explores the limits of science, the pain inflicted on living creatures and what separates man from animal. Wells makes of it a dark fable about creating without knowing what one creates.

An adventure novel set in the near future, when immense airliners link Plymouth and New York in thirty hours. The narrator, Sir John Custance, heads the British Air Police and has just become engaged to Connie Shepherd, an actress adored by London audiences. Pirates with silent engines are plundering airliners over the Atlantic, and they kidnap Connie, who has left for New York that very evening. Disguised beyond recognition, Sir John follows their trail to the coast of Cornwall. A fast-paced story that blends investigation and aerial adventure.

Rousseau begins from a statement: man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. He then looks for a form of association in which each, uniting with all, still obeys only himself. From this pact he draws popular sovereignty, the general will, law as the expression of all, and a government reduced to a servant. The work explores the legitimacy of power, equality, representation and the conditions in which a republic lasts. Rousseau grounds in reason what tradition had grounded on force or divine right, in firm and demonstrative prose.

In the One State, ringed by a wall of glass, people carry numbers and live by a fixed timetable in transparent flats. D-503, engineer of the spaceship Integral, keeps a journal meant for the peoples he will help conquer, until he meets I-330, who pulls him outside the rules. What he feels then has no name in his language. The novel explores freedom, happiness imposed from above, and what is left of a person when everything is shared. Zamyatin gives the modern dystopia one of its first forms.

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.