Set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, the story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

After his ex-wife is killed in a bombing at Heathrow airport, David Markham infiltrates the shadowy protest group responsible and finds himself becoming brainwashed by the group's charismatic leader.