Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.

Bored with day-to-day life in New York City and neglected by her husband, a young wife and mother slips into increasingly outrageous fantasies: her mother breaking into the apartment, an explorer's demonstration of tribal fertility music at a party causing strange transformations, and joining terrorists to plant explosives in the Statue of Liberty.

A ghostwriter finds himself romantically involved with his current wife, a married woman and his long-vanished wife.