Kabul 1998. Colette teaches French to Afghan men, including Abdul Hannan, a Taliban Commander's son. Despite the Islamist regime, they fall in love, which ends in drama.

Bedfordshire 1999. Colette starts a new life but she cannot forget… nor will the Taliban let her. When Gilbert, the lodger, publishes her Kabul story, she learns that one should not provoke the Taliban.

An artistic housewife
A self-made Madison Avenue Mogul
Filming and romance in the Amazon
How could Vivien not be swept off her feet?

The aristocratic Brodskys fled the Russian revolution and ended up in rural Oxfordshire. By the 1960s, they are running out of money. Baroness Olga asks the Soviet Union for compensation, and the Kremlin dispatches Comrade Voronov to investigate.

Unsolved crimes emerge, and Russian blood runs deep and hot. Love and murder ensue.

Hotel Belvedere in Montreux is owned by the Krugers. The pampered guests are unaware of the dramas behind the Belle Epoque décor. Odile, fresh from tending goats in the mountains, becomes a chambermaid. The Millennium approaches, a storm rages, mysteries surface, but Odile's alpine good sense sees her through to love.

24 stories, each in a different style, a different place, showing the frailty that humans are capable of. Our vanity, jealousy, sexuality, insecurity and guilt are exposed; our demons are challenged.

9 stories. From the refuse dump sweet music rises, a hungry mountain cavern roars, secrets hide in furniture in a hotel corridor, a monk lets himself go.

9 stories. A dove falls from the Sicilian sky, the green pullover is a problem, a big-nosed statue is abused, while rats pile up in the bedside table.