Ange, the mayor of a distant mountain village in Corsica becoming depopulated has launched a drama workshop supposed to give new life to the region. To this end he is to sign a contract with a cabinet minister for whom the villagers are rehearsing a play. It is the very day of the coming of the minister that Ange chooses to pass away, which infuriates his cantankerous wife Lellè. The contract must be signed anyway but how to go about it, mainly with such a family as Ange's: Rinatu, the nationalist, traditionalist son; Sauveur, the former local policeman turned politician; Marcia, Rinatu's daughter, determined to perform the play at any cost; Ange's two wives, the official one: the bad-tempered Lellè, and the unofficial one, the Indian domestic worker of Indian origin? To say nothing of Pantaleone, the deputy mayor, whose wife has been one of Ange's (numerous) mistresses.

After more than 40 years of absence, Socrates spends some days in Corsica, accompanied by his son Antoine, to see his cousins. But Antoine discovers his father's secret before his birthday party.

When the Big war started, the 2nd of August 1914, Louis is one of those first mobilized. He has to leave Marie and his village in Corsica for the plains of the Marne where the fights rage. On the front, he is a stretcher-bearer and crosses the battlefield, at night, in search of the wounded. One day, while the trench is sorely lacking water, he is chosen to go to a well situated halfway between the French and German territories in what they called "no-man's-land". There, he finds himself in front of a German soldier who has also come too stock up.

Toussaint and Madeleine have loved each other from the cradle. They are now sixty. They have reached retirement age and have decided to return to Corsica. Toussaint has spent thirty years underground in the maintenance workshops of the Paris metro system. he is happy, but Madeleine misses Paris with its excitement and, above all, their son, who is a doctor in one of the French capital's major hospitals. Madeleine has such love for her son that Toussaint teases her by saying she should ask the Pope for dispensation in order to marry him. Toussaint and Madeleine return to Balba at the beginning of the winter when the days are short, the village bar is closed and the men too scarce for even a game of cards. The silence is occasionally broken by the village idiot, Napolean, as he ambles about shouting the coming death of Corsica while on patrol of the locked-up houses he's been set to guard...

Jack Palmer is a Paris-based detective with a huge ego. Ange Leoni is a rebel native of Corsica whose location can't be pinned down by even the most dogged of detectives. Approached by an obscure, small-time attorney and charged with the seemingly simple task of locating the missing Leoni, gifted gumshoe Palmer accepts the job under the assumption that it will be the easiest money of his professional career. But this superstar sleuth is about to find out just how mistaken he was...