Noah must leave her city, boyfriend, and friends to move into William Leister's mansion, the flashy and wealthy husband of her mother Rafaela. As a proud and independent 17 year old, Noah resists living in a mansion surrounded by luxury. However, it is there where she meets Nick, her new stepbrother, and the clash of their strong personalities becomes evident from the very beginning.

Erika Kohut, a sexually repressed piano teacher living with her domineering mother, meets a young man who starts romantically pursuing her.

37-year-old Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini believes she is unlucky in love, and so accepts a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Johnny, even though she doesn't love him. When she meets his estranged younger brother Ronny, an emotional and passionate man, she finds herself drawn to him. She tries to resist, but Ronny, who blames his brother for the loss of his hand, has no scruples about aggressively pursuing her while Johnny is out of the country. As Loretta falls for Ronny, she learns that she's not the only one in her family with a secret romance.

In 1940s Venice, after twenty years' marriage, retired art critic Nino Rolfe and his younger wife Teresa feel their passion waning. To help her shed her inhibitions and rekindle their relationship, the professor records his sexual fantasies in a diary.

Matt, a young glaciologist, soars across the vast, silent, icebound immensities of the South Pole as he recalls his love affair with Lisa. They meet at a mobbed rock concert in a vast music hall - London's Brixton Academy. They are in bed at night's end. Together, over a period of several months, they pursue a mutual sexual passion whose inevitable stages unfold in counterpoint to nine live-concert songs.

Traveling through an unnamed European country on the brink of war, sickly, intellectual Ester, her sister Anna and Anna's young son, Johan, check into a near-empty hotel. A basic inability to communicate among the three seems only to worsen during their stay. Anna provokes her sister by enjoying a dalliance with a local man, while the boy, left to himself, has a series of enigmatic encounters that heighten the growing air of isolation.

A jilted ex-girlfriend plots revenge after her former beau comes back to their hometown with a new lover.

Having been cut from his professional football team, down-and-out athlete Terry Brogan is in desperate need of money. Crooked nightclub owner and bookie Jake Wise offers Terry a hefty sum to go to Mexico and find his girlfriend, Jessie Wyler. Terry cannot turn the offer down. When Terry locates Jessie, the two fall in love. Terry reports that he failed to find her, but Jake sends someone else. Terry and Jessie's love must endure unexpected twists.

Nina is a young, carefree actress who arrives in Paris searching for her big break. There, she finds drama both on- and offstage as she becomes involved with three men: a mild-mannered real-estate agent who offers her stability, a bad-boy actor who lives dangerously on the edge, and an intense theater director who casts her in a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” As opening night approaches, the emotional extremes of Nina’s love life fuel her art.

Summer is a carefree teenage girl whose world is turned upside down when her mother abruptly converts to Islam and becomes a different person. At first resistant to the faith, she begins to reevaluate her identity after becoming attracted to a Muslim classmate, crossing the thin line between physical desire and piety.

Four sisters come of age in America in the aftermath of the Civil War.

A mysterious new shop opens in a small town which always seems to stock the deepest desires of each shopper, with a price far heavier than expected.