Suzie and Samuel have known each other since childhood. With their friend Judith, they form a friendly trio. Now in their mid-twenties, at the age when everything is possible but nothing is easy, they find themselves at a crossroads.

Five disturbing nightmares, ranging from the eerie to the erotic, guaranteed to keep you awake at night.

Rural France, the 1890s. Always in motion, Augustin wanders three times. First, as a youth, while a boarder near Bourges, he's lost in the woods and finds a chateau where an engagement party's in progress: there he falls eternally in love with Yvonne and she with him. Back at school, he hears she is in Paris, so he follows in a vain search and meets a woman, jilted by her lover. In the countryside a few year's later, Augustin's friend François finds Yvonne and brings Augustin to her. They marry, but the next day, Augustin leaves to fulfill a youthful promise he made to Yvonne's brother. François comforts the pregnant Yvonne as they await Augustin's return.

Three Irwin Shaw short stories are dramatized. In "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" a young married couple stop for a drink on a Sunday morning in Manhattan, and the conversation turns to the husband's fidelity. "The Monument" centers on the conflict between a popular bartender with a following in an upscale Irish bar in 1938 Manhattan and its owner, who is determined to introduce a more economical whiskey in the establishment over the barkeep's objections. In "The Man Who Married a French Wife" the influential American husband of a French woman is asked by her former lover, a former resistance fighter, to help him escape the country.

Three Irwin Shaw short stories are dramatized. In "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" a young married couple stop for a drink on a Sunday morning in Manhattan, and the conversation turns to the husband's fidelity. "The Monument" centers on the conflict between a popular bartender with a following in an upscale Irish bar in 1938 Manhattan and its owner, who is determined to introduce a more economical whiskey in the establishment over the barkeep's objections. In "The Man Who Married a French Wife" the influential American husband of a French woman is asked by her former lover, a former resistance fighter, to help him escape the country.

Aboard a steamship, a priest tells his fellow passengers his life story, which he admits is the story of a great sinner.

In 19th-century Russia, a peasant named Ivan Flyagin tells his his life story to fellow travellers aboard a steamship.

Tom Beauchurch , a successful New England lawyer, takes his wife Ginette to Paris for a second honeymoon. It is a Paris in the throes of the Algerian crisis; a crisis which soon threatens the very foundations of their marriage. A New York bartender refuses to lower his standards even when his boss threatens to sack him. Michael Loomis runs into trouble when he confesses to his beautiful young wife that he can't help eyeing the girls in their summer dresses ...

Tom Beauchurch , a successful New England lawyer, takes his wife Ginette to Paris for a second honeymoon. It is a Paris in the throes of the Algerian crisis; a crisis which soon threatens the very foundations of their marriage. A New York bartender refuses to lower his standards even when his boss threatens to sack him. Michael Loomis runs into trouble when he confesses to his beautiful young wife that he can't help eyeing the girls in their summer dresses ...

A conversation over dinner, between a married couple and a weary traveller, leads to unexpected revelations