Robert Ross (Brent Carver) lives a protected adolescence in a well-off Toronto suburb. Secretive and withdrawn, he shares his thoughts only with his sister Rowena (Anne-Marie MacDonald) who is mentally disabled. He feels compassion for his weak and conventional father. He avoids any confrontation with his mother (Martha Henry), a dominating woman whose despondency at having given birth to a handicapped child has turned to bitterness. Rowena occupies a central position in Robert's existence of daydreams and make-believe. When she dies, Robert clashes openly with his family, and decides to take himself in hand. It's 1914. He enrolls in the Canadian army, and, after training in Alberta and Montreal, he finds himself in England and France. The war becomes another way for him to resolve his conflicts, his dramas, his passions--his wars.

In a foreign port two boys come to a fisherman saying they are refugees from a country where a military take-over has organised a gigantic League of Youth.

A shy Portuguese poet and an exuberant English occultist meet up in Lisbon in 1930. When the last one disappears, an English detective begins a thorough investigation: was it a suicide, as reported. Or a homicide? This is the real story of the brief meeting between Fernando Pessoa, Aleister Crowley, and Hanni Larissa Jaeger.

Mary traces the lives of a woman caught in a scandal of adultery, another rejected and ignored because of her promiscuity, a third shunned because of a shameful condition, and a widow cast out from society, mourning the loss of her only son.