Marc, in his 40s, is a professor of literature at the University of Lausanne. Still a bachelor — and still living with his sister Marianne in a huge, isolated chalet that they inherited when they were very young — he carries on one love affair after another with his students. Winter has almost ended when one of his most brilliant students, Barbara, suddenly disappears. Two days later, Marc meets Barbara’s mother, Anna, who wants to find out more about her vanished daughter.

It is 1941. It is winter. The sky is grey and a mist hangs over a typical small fishing town on the Atlantic coast of France. But things are not what they seem, and when something strange and beautiful washes up on the shore their lives will change forever.

A once-famous chef tries to find reconciliation with his hotel manager daughter, only to be mistaken for a tourist guide critic.

A young woman inherits her family's historic home on the coast of Brittany, a house she has not been to since her father died there when she was age 12.

1968 and 1969 in Paris: during and after the student and trade union revolt. François is 20, a poet, dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but won't throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend, Antoine, who has an inheritance and a flat where François can stay. François meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself. They fall in love. A year passes; François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. Opportunities come to Lilie: what will she and François do?

Five days before D-Day, the day of the last voyage of the Order of Sirius, a sect nestled in the Vaudoise Alps, Switzerland. Five days during which a community of 48 people, women, men, children, fed with esotericism and guided by a narcissistic guru, will test their faith and be deprived of their identity. Five days in which every gesture will be the last. Sirius is inspired by the massacre of the Order of the Solar Temple in 1994 in western Switzerland.