Years after the success of slave revolts in Louisiana and Haiti, a teenage girl learns the secret of a monster hidden in her mother's bedroom.

During his travels in the Pacific, a young man hears tales of a great adventurer. When he returns home and relays the news to his father, he discovers a long-kept secret.

Before leaving his home to fight in the Vietnam War, a young Hawaiian has to decide what to do about his favorite pet pigeon. While deliberating, he's forced to confront the responsibility he bears for his sister's mental instability.

A successful middle-aged lawyer brings home her little sister, a woman who was institutionalized at a young age. In attempting to sort out her sister's history and her own corruption, the woman encounters continually perplexing behavior from those around her.

A South Asian woman harbors a deep fascination with the ocean. When she works with renegade scientists to track a blue whale, the woman and the whale form a deep bond.

A young boy lives with his parents, former Libyan aristocrats exiles, in Cairo. Before, during, and after his mother's death he finds comfort in Naima, the family's maid with whom he shares a closer relationship than he does with his parents.

When a young girl's adopted sister confesses to the murder of her biological parents as a child, the girl must live with the weight of her secret.

A young woman guards the main exhibit of her family's London museum: The Emerald Coat, a garment which kills whomever dons it by permanently transporting them to another realm. The woman lives as a gatekeeper to death, wondering when she will fulfill what she believes to be her ultimate fate — putting the coat on herself, and leaving this world forever.

An orderly at an elder care facility discovers an unexpected connection to one of his elderly residents, a former mother superior at a Catholic orphanage with a horrific reputation for decades of abuse.

An aging hitman has felt unwelcome in the Ohio Italian Mafia ever since new leadership took over. But when the young new boss attempts to kill off the hitman, it ends up backfiring on him.