Klara moves to a small town with his mother after the parents divorced. She feels alienated unable to make friends. Most of the girls in her class likes to ride and to get closer to them, Klara lies about being an experienced rider.

Piet, who is studying computer science, is as inexperienced sexually as he is intelligent. When he notices that his feelings for Klara, a fellow student, are not really reciprocal, he is deeply hurt. After trying out sleeping pills on himself, he drugs Klara, with unexpected consequences.

Klara, devoted to her work as a tax inspector, becomes infatuated with the dashing but irresponsible and cynical Marian who is about to be charged with tax evasion.

Heidi, is an eight-year-old Swiss orphan who is given by her aunt to her mountain-dwelling grandfather. She is then stolen back by her aunt from her grandfather to live in the wealthy Sesemann household in Frankfurt, Germany as a companion to Klara, a sheltered, disabled girl in a wheelchair. Heidi is unhappy but makes the best of the situation, always longing for her grandfather.

Living somewhere in present-day Quebec, Boris Malinowski has achieved all his goals. A freethinker, open-minded and proud, he also displays a certain arrogance when it comes to his successes. For some time now, his wife Béatrice, a Canadian government minister, has been bedridden, suffering from a mysterious depression. To escape from his wife’s agony, Boris begins a relationship with a colleague, Helga, and gets close to Klara, a young woman who works as a maid in Boris’s home. The sudden appearance of a stranger in his life forces Boris to come face-to-face with the world, with everything he takes for granted, with all his certainties.