When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Twenty-five years later, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with...

An unemployed and unmotivated grad student, looking for a job as a professor, is driven to distraction by a yapping dog somewhere on the block of his apartment complex. In a fit of anger he takes extreme action to deal with his tormentor, an action that will come to haunt him.