A Canadian schoolteacher sets up shop on a tiny, near-barren island off the coast of Labrador. Before long, what begins as a peaceful new life full of love and community becomes a cold, icy prison.

Chassidic Jew Joseph Gillis grapples with the artifice and hypocrisy of Harvard life, decrying the muddle of egoism and lunacy in the academic world even as he succumbs to it.

While comatose, a sixty-five-year old man reflects on his past love for a city called Williamstown as his grown children discuss his terminal illness.

On the night of his daughter's birthday, a middle-aged Canadian professor laments the death of his daughter's mother, who died in childbirth twenty years ago.

A lonely old man comes to visit a married woman's apartment, which she and her husband are renting out for the summer while they travel to Europe—however, the woman becomes suspicious that the old man is not actually interested in renting at all.

A retired, middle-aged man lives alone after leaving his wife and daughters in England and moving to Vancouver. Amid the growing certainty of death and the absence of any strong relationships, he realizes he must break out of the vacuum within which he lives.