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深时之井
岑既白
工程师严铎在崖顶宅邸的晚宴上，当众演示了一枚沿时间维度消失的陀螺，并声称自己造出了可载人的溯时舱。一周后，他拖着断腿、拄着金属撬杆狼狈归来，讲述他抵达九千年后的临渊市废墟：地上住着甜美柔弱、不问昨天的云民，地下井道里藏着昼伏夜出、供养全城的井民。他的机器在落地当夜失窃，被锁进白隼像的基座。为找回机器，他结识了云民姑娘眠眠，一同远赴万年博物馆青瓷宫寻找工具，却在归途的长夜里眼睁睁看着她被井民拖入井中。他下井寻回机器，逃出那座以人为粮的地下屠场，又独自飞向暮海、冻海与三千万年后的黑暗。归来八天后，他再度启程，只留下一份授权书、一把铜钥匙和一朵谁也叫不出名字的四瓣干花。
The Red and the Black
Stendhal, trans. Horace Barnett Samuel
Julien Sorel is the son of a provincial carpenter in the France of the Restoration: frail, proud, with a prodigious memory for Latin and a secret admiration for Napoleon. Since a military career is closed to a young man of his station in peacetime, he chooses the other road to advancement and becomes an abbe, hiding his true ambitions behind a mask of piety. His employment as tutor to the children of the mayor of the small town of Verrieres, M. de Renal, draws him into the world above his birth. Julien is resolved to be respected and, quietly, to have his revenge on the class that despises him. His affair with Madame de Renal begins partly as a calculated act of conquest, then turns into something he neither planned nor understands. Forced to leave town when the affair is exposed in an anonymous letter, he enters the austere seminary of Besancon under the protection of the abbe Pirard, learns the hard lessons of clerical politics, and is finally recommended to the Marquis de la Mole of Paris as a secretary. In the capital Julien rises fast. He is Useful, discreet, and increasingly trusted; he wins the friendship of the marquis and, more dangerously, the love of the marquis's proud, brilliant daughter Mathilde. Stendhal watches his hero with a surgeon's eye, tracing every calculation of vanity, class, and desire in a society where the color of a uniform or a cassock decides a man's fate. First published in 1830, this Chronicle of 1830 is among the founding novels of psychological realism, and its verdict on ambition without principle remains as sharp as ever.
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
A nameless engineer arrives in the decaying Massachusetts mill town of Starkfield and, stranded by a winter storm, lodges with Ethan Frome, a tall, lame, silent farmer whose ruined body and ruined farm are the talk of the village. What the narrator pieces together from neighbors' memories is the story this book tells. Twenty-five years earlier, Ethan was a young man with a knack for engineering and a hope of leaving the farm for a life in town. Instead he stayed to bury his parents, then married Zenobia, one of the nurses who helped tend them. Zeena turned out to be a hypochondriac, silent and sour, and the farm sank deeper into debt and snow. When her cousin Mattie Silver, an orphan with no money and no prospects, comes to help with the housework, her warmth and laugh bring the kitchen alive, and Ethan discovers in himself a capacity for feeling that his marriage had buried. Over a single winter, as Zeena's suspicions harden and a trip to town brings a decisive answer about Mattie's future, Ethan is caught between duty, poverty, and a love he cannot speak. The whole story moves toward one evening and one mad, desperate ride down the snowy hill past the old elm, with tragic consequences. First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is Wharton's spare New England tragedy, a compact study of conscience and circumstance in which the frame narrative returns at the end to show how completely a single choice can shape a life.
Martin Eden
Jack London
Martin Eden is a rough, unlettered sailor in Oakland who saves an art student from a gang of thugs and is invited home to dinner. There he meets Ruth Morse, his host's sister: pale, refined, college-educated, everything the working-class world he comes from is not. He falls in love at first sight, and the visit sets the course of his life. To make himself worthy of Ruth, Martin decides to become educated and to become a writer. He teaches himself grammar from a reference book, reads voraciously in the library, sleeps five hours a night, and writes story after story, essay after essay, from the kitchen of the small house he shares with his sister and her family. The manuscripts come back from the magazines with unfailing regularity. His neighbors think he is mad, his family thinks he is idle, Ruth's family thinks he is beneath them, and Ruth herself asks him to take a steady job and give up his dream. Martin refuses. He keeps writing through hunger and rejection, sustained by his belief in his own work and by the image of success that will let him marry Ruth. Only Joe, a workmate at a laundry, and Lizzie Connolly, a working girl who loves him without conditions, stand by him. Then everything reverses. When a magazine finally accepts one story, the editors who ignored him for years discover him, publish everything they hold, and turn him into a fashion. The same drawing rooms that shut their doors now open them wide. London's novel, first published in 1909, is a fierce and clear-eyed account of ambition, class, and the machinery of literary fame, and it ends with one of the most quietly devastating final chapters in American fiction.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy
At a country fair in Wessex, a drunken hay-trusser named Michael Henchard sells his wife Susan and their baby daughter to a sailor for five guineas. When he sobers up and realizes what he has done, he is too proud to chase after them. Instead he swears an oath before God: for the next twenty-one years he will not touch a drop of liquor. The oath is the first of many grand gestures by which Henchard tries to bargain with fate, and the novel follows him for the whole span of that vow. Henchard rises. Through tireless work and an unforgiving temper he becomes the richest grain merchant and the mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy's imagined market town built on the wool trade and old customs. But his character is his own worst enemy: headlong, jealous, quick to take offense and slow to forgive. Susan returns years later with a grown daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, believing herself a widow, and Henchard remarries her, only for new and old secrets to begin unraveling his position. Into the town comes Donald Farfrae, a young Scotsman with modern methods and an easy charm. Henchard hires him, then quarrels with him, then spends his remaining years competing with the man who out-sells him in grain, out-manages him as mayor, and, without ever meaning to, wins the love of nearly everyone Henchard cares about. As his fortunes turn, Henchard pays in kind for every rash act, and Hardy lets the bill come due with almost biblical patience. First published in 1886, The Mayor of Casterbridge carries the subtitle The Life and Death of a Man of Character, and it is one of the great tragic novels of English literature: a study of a self-made man undone by the very qualities that made him.
海堤
闻舟
江州旧户江家负债累累，祖宅江湾老宅被父亲江慎行出租给退役军官柯海生夫妇，全家迁去云城另租小院。二小姐江若蘅二十七岁仍独身——八年前，她在母亲挚友林慧娴的劝导下，解除了与穷船长顾承远的婚约。承远远航八年，如今衣锦还乡，而租下老宅的柯太太正是他的姐姐顾静宜。枫桥镇沈家重逢，承远待若蘅刻意冷淡，转而与沈家小女慧琳谈笑周旋。石塘湾海堤上一行人散步，慧琳逞强跳堤坠伤，若蘅临危指挥救下她，承远震怒自责，也第一次看清若蘅的冷静与担当。江家定居云城后，堂兄江聿修对若蘅殷勤备至，实则觊觎江家产业；老同学孙慕贞揭穿他早已成婚、图谋家产的真面目。承远误以为若蘅与聿修相好，赌气返船；云城大剧院音乐会上两人误会加深，白云饭店里承远写下诀别信，若蘅赶来相认，八年积怨一朝说破，重修旧好。父亲借彩礼摆谱，被若蘅顶回——这一次她不再听人摆布。聿修与白秀芝的勾当败露，慧琳、慧贞各得归宿，承远赎还江湾老宅，若蘅终于等到那个等得起的人。
年关账
旧书摊主
腊月二十九，江州落雪。放贷人严九龄照旧锁在永昌巷三楼的办公室里封账：员工为病儿请假被拒，外甥送来的腊味被他丢进贴着「待处理」的储物柜，面馆里有人当面骂他铁公鸡，他只回了句「凭合同」。当晚，死去七年的老友陆同舟踏着铁链进了门——生前他也放贷，死后每一笔狠账都化作脚下一环。老友留下话：今夜起，三个「灵」会依次带他重看来路、满城与身后。过去之灵把他带回漏风的寄宿教室，带回妹妹素秋踏雪来接他的校门口，带回齐万福仓库里那场橘子的舞会，也带回未婚妻白露摔门而去的那间筒子楼——他终于看清，自己是怎么把「钱」从过日子的帮手，一步步供成了主子。现在之灵领他飘进员工家热气腾腾的年夜饭，飘过桥洞下环卫工的电煮锅、海上水文站里的冻饺子、渡轮底舱的一碗泡面，还让他听见袍子底下两个瘦孩子的耳语：到了年三十，锅里就会有饺子的。未来之灵一言不发，只带他看自己死后的清算现场：债主散尽、遗物贱卖，墙上一张墨迹未干的告示写着「免息窗口」，落款是他最看不起的员工。大年初一清晨，严九龄从冷被窝里惊醒，摸到镜子、摸到心跳，发现一切还来得及。他给基金会回拨电话，把员工的儿子小满送进手术室，傍晚坐上了外甥家年年为他空着的那把椅子。永昌巷三楼的窗从此夜夜亮灯，桌上立着一块牌子：免息窗口——小本生意，一年内还清的，利息全免。旧年关里最难的那笔账，他终于记在了自己名下。
换命
旧书摊主
信托公司董事长林执信收到一封信：失踪十八年的心外科名医裴望之还活着，在临江市青山疗养院里修钟。当年万家集团为掩盖撞死行人钟守贵的真相，栽赃裴望之受贿与医疗事故，他入狱八年，把所知真相写成证词藏进牢房墙缝，狱友钟守仁替他抄了一份，一藏就是二十二年。女儿裴语卿把他接回滨江，万家现任当家人万秉章父子闻讯步步紧逼。万家弃子温谨言揣着亡父万鸿儒遗嘱里复制的行车记录仪视频回到临江，要为钟家巷讨一个公道，却被抓进看守所；容貌与他酷似的律师沈砚舟在押送途中以己换人，让温谨言带视频脱身，自己在厂房大火中替死。视频引爆全网舆情，旧案重启：钟守贵案系交通肇事逃逸，裴望之再审无罪，万秉章、万骏驰被依法逮捕。温谨言与裴语卿在海边小镇开了一间钟表铺，把沈砚舟留下的旧表修好挂在柜台后面；老钟在回迁小区楼下支起修鞋摊，拒绝了万家送来的慰问金。
朱墨
旧书摊主
县木器坊出身的少年沈聿，凭一手好字和过目不忘的本事，被县长宋知行请进家里做家教。宋家规矩多、门难进，他只想借这道门走出去。县长夫人温枝待他温柔周全，两个人暗生私情；保姆赵小翠把话漏了出去，流言传遍县城，宋知行不动声色地把他赶出了家门。沈聿经退休语文老师章慎言牵线，进了江州师范的图书馆，又经师范校长周伯言举荐，进北京孟府替退休部委领导孟伯钧管理书房。孟家小姐孟未晞倨傲又天真，两人互相较劲、互相吸引，最后有了孩子。孟伯钧托人回青川查他的底细，旧日流言被翻出来；温枝在庞四海和庙里居士的逼迫下写下毁谤他的信，信送到了孟府。沈聿身败名裂，回到青川，在慈云寺里刺伤了温枝。他当庭认罪，在法庭上把上流社会的体面撕开一角，被判死刑。孟未晞四处奔走，温枝也写了翻供的信，都没能拦住行刑。沈聿被葬在青川县西边的山坡上；三天后，温枝也死在了宋家老宅的槐树下。
蜃楼
旧书摊主
码头水手陆潮生在临洲港老码头救下被混混围住的大学生林屿，被请进林家做客，由此认识林屿的姐姐林晚照。这个只上过小学、连字都认不全的水手，第一次走进有水晶灯和钢琴的客厅，也第一次生出一个念头：他要读书，要写作，要配得上这个姑娘。他白天泡在图书馆，夜里在阁楼写稿，退稿信堆了一箱又一箱，稿费连房租都付不起。最穷的时候，他去洗衣厂站过十四个小时的熨烫线，冬天把最后一件厚外套送进当铺，发着高烧还趴在桌上写。房东唐玉英常端一碗热汤放在他门口，不敲门，也不说话。诗人韩墨存是他唯一的精神知音，两个人在江边的小酒馆里彻夜谈哲学和文学，直到韩墨存死于肺病，把那首没人要的《蜉蝣》留给他。林晚照终究顶不住家庭压力跟他分了手，写给他的绝交信里说，是我自己要写的。多年以后，陆潮生的作品终于被人看见，一夜之间他出了书、上了热搜，从前看不上他的人争着请他吃饭，林晚照也跪在酒店的地毯上求他回头。可他忽然发现，他爱过的从来不是眼前这个女人，而是自己在阁楼里一天一天造出来的幻影。他把房子留给房东，把钱分给姐姐和工友，独自登上一艘开往南太平洋的邮轮。码头上裁缝铺的姑娘远远望着他，他没有回头。船行到赤道附近那片没有风的海，他夜里翻过船尾栏杆，沉进深海。他一生追的爱情、名声和学问，到头来都是一座海市蜃楼。