Anton Stratis is groomed to be one thing only: the #1 tennis player in the world. Trained relentlessly by his obsessive father, a former athlete who plans every minute of his son’s life, Anton both aspires to greatness and resents its all-consuming demands. Lonely and isolated, Anton explodes from nowhere onto the professional scene and soon becomes one of the top-ranked players in the world. But as Anton struggles to find a balance between stardom and family, he begins to make compromises --- first with himself, then with his health, and finally with the rules of tennis, a mix that will threaten to destroy everything he has worked for.

As an unnamed Tokyo taxi driver works a night shift, picking up fares that offer him glimpses into the lives of ordinary people, he can’t escape his own nihilistic thoughts. Almost without meaning to, he puts himself in harm’s way; he can’t stop daydreaming of suicide, envisioning himself returning to the earth in obsessive fantasies that soon become terrifying blackout episodes. The truth is, his long-estranged father has tried to reach out to him, triggering a cascade of traumatic memories. As the cab driver wrestles with the truth about his past and the history of violence in his childhood, he also must confront his present, which is no less complicated or grim.

Both his family and his city are crumbling when 13-year-old Griffin Watts stumbles headlong into his estranged father’s illicit architectural salvage business in 1970s Manhattan. Griffin clambers up the façades of tenements and skyscrapers to steal their 19th-century architectural sculptures. Desperate for money to help his artist mother keep their home, and yearning to connect with his father, Griffin fails to see that his father’s deepening obsession with preserving the treasures of Gilded Age New York endangers them all. As he struggles to hold his family together and build a first love with his girlfriend, Griffin must learn to develop himself into the man he wants to become, and discern which parts of his life may be salvaged --- and which parts must be let go.