Ahmed, son of Diana and Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, falls in love with Yasmin, a dancing girl who fronts her father’s gang of mountebanks. She and Ahmed meet secretly until one night when her father and the gang capture the son of the sheik, torture him, and hold him for ransom.

One year after the unresolved murder of his wife, Shinji receives a mysterious message putting him on the right track to find the assassin. He follows his revenge instinct and disappears into the darkness of Tokyo, where he meets Tomoko, a young woman on the lam. During that night, they come across yakuza and lost souls, and their lives change drastically.

It’s the summer before 6th grade, and Clark is the new-in-town biracial kid in a sea of white. Discovering that to be cool he needs to act ‘more black,’ he fumbles to meet expectations, while his urban intellectual parents Mack and Gina also strive to adjust to small-town living. Equipped for the many inherent challenges of New York, the tight-knit family are ill prepared for the drastically different set of obstacles that their new community presents, and soon find themselves struggling to understand themselves and each other in this new suburban context.

Beautiful, wild, funny, and lost, Katie Kampenfelt takes a year off before college to find herself, all the while chronicling her adventures in an anonymous blog into which she pours her innermost secrets. Eventually, Katie’s fearless narrative begins to crack, and dark pieces of her past emerge.

As the youngest of the family, Sam is haunted by the notion that someday he could become the last remaining survivor, all alone. On a family vacation at the beach, he meets the unconventional Tess, who carries her own secrets around with her and shows him how the present moment can win out over memories and anxiety about what’s yet to come.

Ryan is making a documentary on his friend, Brett, about camping for the first time. However, once they begin camping, they discover that there is a mysterious figure that is hunting them.

Attractive Manhattanite Allison Jones has it all: a handsome beau, a rent-controlled apartment, and a promising career as a fashion designer. When boyfriend Sam proves unfaithful, Allison strikes out on her own but must use the classifieds to seek out a roommate in order to keep her spacious digs.

When a young American woman is sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church, she encounters a darkness that causes her to question her own faith and uncovers a terrifying conspiracy that hopes to bring about the birth of evil incarnate.

Jaap van Leyden is in charge of a shipyard in newly occupied Holland. At first he collaborates with the Germans because it is the easiest course to follow. Later a child’s rhyme reminds him of his patriotic duty, but how best to resist the Nazis without endangering his wife and fellow workers?

Yang Fan and her husband, Yuan Yong, and Xiao Fang, a restaurant attendant, continued from night to day, and from the sun to a treacherous night. The stories that happened to each other are absurd but extremely sad. The three people were bound to each other but could not leave each other.

Novalee Nation is a 17-year-old Tennessee transient who has to grow up in a hurry when she’s left pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend on a roadside in Sequoyah, Okla., and takes refuge in the friendly aisles of Wal-Mart. In short order, some eccentric, kindly strangers “adopt” Novalee and her infant daughter, helping them buck the odds and build a new life.

Near the end of WW2, prisoners of war are used in experiments to perfect the Arian race.