In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida's letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the town is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity assume for A'ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them.

Exiled in London, the Hungarian artist Janos Lavin disappears one day, into thin air. His journal offers his friend John the only clues to where he has gone and why.

In the course of a day, the ageing owner of an employment agency is propelled into a fantasy world through his romantic yearnings and inarticulate dreams, seeking an illusory freedom from the bonds of responsibility.