Haru, a successful Japanese art dealer, loves beauty, harmony, art, balance, intriguing women, sophisticated conversation and elegance. Months after a brief affair in Japan with a French woman, Maud, he discovers she is pregnant with his child. However, she warns him that if he ever tries to see her or the child, she will kill herself. Quietly devastated at the thought of never knowing his daughter, who will become a dark presence in an otherwise elegantly orchestrated life, Haru decides he will respect Maud’s wishes. His daughter grows to adulthood without ever knowing him. Is it too late to change things?

Rose is called to Kyoto for the reading of her estranged father’s will. Once there, she encounters acquaintances of her father --- including a potter and poet, an old lady friend, his housekeeper and chauffeur, and Paul, her guide through Kyoto. As the reading of the will gets closer, through her encounters and peregrinations in Kyoto, Rose reaches a poignant understanding of her father’s love and an acceptance of loss.

Maria lives in a remote village in Burgundy, where she learns that she has a gift for communicating with nature. Hundreds of miles away in Italy, Clara discovers that she possesses a stunning musical genius and is sent from the countryside to Rome to develop her preternatural abilities. THE LIVES OF THE ELVES tells the story of two children whose extraordinary talents will bring them into contact with magical worlds and malevolent forces. If, against all odds, they can be brought together, their meeting may shape the course of history.

Renee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society's expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Renee: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives.