Etsuko, a Japanese women living alone in England, contemplates the recent suicide of her eldest daughter, mingling the tragedy with memories of the devastation of Japan during World War II, and the calamities of her own life.
Christopher Banks, an English boy who was orphaned after his parents disappeared in Shanghai under suspicious circumstances, returns to Shanghai twenty years later in the hopes of learning what really happened to his parents.
The portrait of a perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England. He begins to question whether his long-time service to Lord Darlington was truly given to what he thought was "a great gentleman".
A portrait of adolescence at that hinge moment in life when self-knowledge brings intimations of one's destiny. Kathy has a reunion with two childhood friends. Together they indulge in a nostalgic odyssey into their lives at Halisham, an isolated country school in the English countryside, and subsequently they learn the truth about their childhoods.
Thirty-one-year-old Kathy, along with old friends from Hailsham, a private school in England, are forced to face the truth about their childhood when they all come together again.
Five interconnected stories in which music is an intrinsic theme follow the struggles of a once-popular singer desperate for a comeback, a songwriter who is unwittingly involved in a failing marriage, and a jazz musician who wrongly believes that plastic surgery will secure his career.
Christopher Banks, an English boy who was orphaned after his parents disappeared in Shanghai under suspicious circumstances, returns to Shanghai twenty years later in the hopes of learning what really happened to his parents.
Ryder, a pianist of international renown, arrives in a European city he cannot identify to give a concert he cannot remember scheduling, and finds himself involved in the lives of people who are strangers to him but seem to know him well.
