With only his wife by his side, a promising young boxer flees communist Poland to chase his dream of becoming the greatest fighter in history.

Women enter and exit a science fiction author’s life, over the course of a few years, after the author loses the woman he considers his one true love.

Carla Harris, a beautiful but not so successful actress from L.A., witnesses how her husband is tragically killed in an attempt to save a woman from her male attacker. She travels to her parents’ home in a small town in the mountains to get some rest only to be repeatedly harassed by redneck locals and a teenager. The local sheriff refuses to help and so it all ends up in a gang rape and with Carla’s parents shot dead. Carla survives and escapes from the mental hospital to seek bloody revenge.

Fourteen-year-old Mackenzie is sent to live with her uncle in Juneau when her mother can’t care for her anymore. The living situation quickly takes a turn for the worse, and she runs away to rejoin her mother in Seattle. While on her dangerous journey of sleeping in cars and breaking into hotel rooms, she’s drawn to Rene, a lonesome backpacker looking for tranquility in the wilderness.

Newspaperman Bill Bradford becomes a special agent for the tax service trying to end the career of racketeer Nick Carston. Julie Gardner is Carston’s bookkeeper. Bradford enters Carston’s organization and Julie cooperates with him to land Carston in jail. An informer squeals on them. Julie is kidnapped by Carston’s henchmen as she is about to testify

Xiao Xiao is sold into arranged marriage with a 2 year old boy, who she must raise as his nanny until he is old enough to marry her. She is expected to honour tradition and to toe the line so far as social proprieties are concerned, but the young girl rebels against the edicts of her elders until at 16, she falls in love with another man.

Maureen Trant and her younger sibling Dani share a strong connection, but local boy Court Foster threatens to throw their bond off balance. Dani and Court meet first and have a flirtatious rapport — but when he meets Maureen, he falls hard and they begin a passionate affair. The new couple try to keep their love hidden from Dani, but she soon learns the truth, disavowing her sister. But a heartbreaking accident later reunites the girls.

13-year-old Gunther Strobbe grows up surrounded by alcohol, trash and his completely useless father and uncles. Slowly but surely, he’s being prepared for the same hapless life. Can he defy his destiny?

Minka is a teenage Polynesian boy living in the heart of the city. With his P-addicted mother well on the way to going completely off the rails, three people enter his life – each with a promise – each with the power to destroy.

Ernests (70) and Alvine (64), two married postal workers, have developed a scheme to win a trip to Rome, but Alvine’s rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s disease complicates their plan.

The world has been reshaped by the invasion of ghosts via the wireless internet. Cities are deserted, technology has been destroyed and the few remaining human beings eschew anything electrical in order to avoid a confrontation with the soulless ghosts that now wander the planet. Most of the ghosts are doomed to a repetitive loop of something they did while they were still despairing humans (a man repeatedly hangs himself, for example), but there are some ghosts so locked in denial, they do not know they are dead. They continue to haunt their homes, wrapped in fear that their souls will soon be torn from them.

The story of missionary Graham Staines who was martyred in India in 1999. “The Least of These” shares the story leading up to the murders of the Australian Christian missionary and his sons, Philip, 10, and Timothy, 6, who were helping a community of lepers in India.