Wealthy and precocious teenager Juliet transfers from England to New Zealand with her family, and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. When their parents begin to suspect that their increasingly intense and obsessive bond is becoming unhealthy, the girls hatch a dark plan for those who threaten to keep them apart.

A little boy announces on his seventh birthday that he is a stranger named Danny, a grown man who died seven years earlier.

In the 14th century a village seeking escape from the Black Death are guided by a boy’s vision to tunnel into an abandoned mine and emerge into 20th century New Zealand.