A game designer on the run from assassins must play her latest virtual reality creation with a marketing trainee to determine if the game has been damaged.

When two college students, Sam and Thea, meet Coles at a party, their mutual attraction is immediate, leading to a passionate and awkward night together, and the onset of an intensely charged bond. As they continue to push the sexual boundaries of their friendship, however, they are tested by Sam and Coles' incipient romance and Thea's increasing recklessness, until the relationship dissolves amid a cloud of fear, resentment and mistrust. Eight years later they reunite. An animator for a high-profile ad agency, Coles now lives with Claire, his girlfriend of five years. Thea is happily married to Miles, with whom she owns a flourishing restaurant. And Sam has just returned to Manhattan after working in London where she recently broke off her engagement. Yet upon reconnecting, the three are drawn back into the complicated dynamic that defined their relationship from the start and are forced to confront the true meaning of commitment and love.

Dan Mahowny was a rising star at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. At twenty-four he was assistant manager of a major branch in the heart of Toronto's financial district. To his colleagues he was a workaholic. To his customers, he was astute, decisive and helpful. To his friends, he was a quiet, but humorous man who enjoyed watching sports on television. To his girlfriend, he was shy but engaging. None of them knew the other side of Dan Mahowny--the side that executed the largest single-handed bank fraud in Canadian history, grossing over $10 million in eighteen months to feed his gambling obsession.

In 1904, in Dublin, James Joyce chats up Nora Barnacle, a hotel maid recently come from Galway. She enchants him with her frank, direct and uninhibited manner, and before long, he's convinced her to come with him to Trieste, where he has a job with Berlitz. Over time, Nora pulls him through phobias, tolerates his drinking, takes in his brother Stan, and bests Joyce at 'the writin' game' to bring him back to Italy from Dublin where he's gone to open a cinema. But his sexual jealousy threatens the relationship and sends her back to Galway with the children. Is there any way to tame Jim's green-eyed monster? And, will the lad ever get his stories published?

A recounting of the relationship between General Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, as they try to cope with the consequences of deposing King Charles I.