A Canadian graduate student and his wife are living in France and often socialize with their peers at concerts and dinner parties. They soon make friends with an established novelist, but as the student continues to meet people he begins to question who he can trust and who his real friends are.

In intense discussion a group leader ponders aloud, asking why hermits hide and what defines outcasts, among other cerebral queries. A group of friends discusses the oddities they have seen and perceived in their lives leather-clad hermits and criminal astronauts among them. They debate the purpose of hermitage, the classification of outcasts, and the purpose of their own reflections.

Lynnie is a young, working-class girl who works at the Stone House in town and wastes her days making stories about the lives of the people around her, which she tells to her friend, Isobel. But when rumors start to circulate, Isobel mysteriously moves away, and Lynnie is left wondering why.

An older woman and self-proclaimed loner is forced to engage with others at her accounting job after she is pushed to socialize by her managers. This, as well as her invasive obsession with the young woman next door, leads her into uncomfortable self-reflection and new experiences.

A teenage girl is swept into the wealthy side of her coastal town by her new boyfriend, but soon finds that she longs for adventure and freedom outside of his superficial social scene.

Across two difficult decades, two siblings come together and drift apart.

A man walks into a bar in Atlanta and becomes intrigued by a clique of regulars. After marrying one of their sisters, causing a rift between her and her brother, he realizes that the bar will not cure his loneliness.

A young man invites a tourist to his favorite London café and recounts the strangest affair he’d ever had with a woman he picked up there; a woman who challenged and changed him. A young, beguiling man picks a tourist out of a group and invites him to see the real sites of London, not the tired and disappointing spectacles. He takes the tourist to the Café de Paris, an old but grand establishment with the promise of dancing and young ladies. The man admonishes his companion to loosen up, stay and drink, and while they wait for the evening to unfold the man begins a story.

A young girl decides to run away with her best friend to a strange city only known in stories with the help of her talking dog after he loses everything in a world where success is scored to determine social status. But can they actually escape the controlling society they're running from?

When a mysterious new member joins a group of struggling authors, the friends discover that they may have a supernatural creature in their midst, who can grant a single author success above all the others—but at a cost.