A woman reluctantly visits her old friends in Grimsby for the weekend, feeling like their good times are far behind. Though the conversations are genial, she considers how they've changed over time.

A first-generation Welsh man goes back to his father’s hometown for a funeral, where the neighbor’s son was crushed under his father’s toppled stone gate. Suddenly his father, who has lived morosely but peaceably in his decrepit cottage, finds the town has turned against him. A Welsh man’s father falls in disfavor with his hometown when the neighbor’s child is crushed under his toppled stone gate.

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 solitary young hotel clerk finds himself enticed by a mysterious, sophisticated writer. Both desire intimacy, but find their romance obstructed by unspeakable kinds of loneliness.

As the entirety of the United Kingdom begins to shift and float towards the United States, a man has to contend with the changes to his daily routine and the possibility of his town of Brighton being forced next to New York.

A teacher on the Lower East side meets a friendly man with a presence resembling a dead English poet.

Two men putting on a production for their New York theater company seek out a legendary, elderly actor, but upon finding him, they meet a man as dilapidated as the theater he once worked for.

A couple with a rocky marriage argues over fetching a newspaper, which becomes a catalyst for their impending divorce. When they unexpectedly reunite over a decade later, the former couple witnesses how their lives disparately transformed thanks to the fateful newspaper.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

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.