Nino Castelnuovo

This simple romantic tragedy begins in 1957. Guy Foucher, a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Geneviève Emery, an employee in her widowed mother's chic but financially embattled umbrella shop. On the evening before Guy is to leave for a two-year tour of combat in Algeria, he and Geneviève make love. She becomes pregnant and must choose between waiting for Guy's return or accepting an offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant.

When a impoverished widow’s family moves to the big city, two of her five sons become romantic rivals with deadly results.

Gardener Napoleone takes a job in a southern-Italian villa and quickly finds himself embroiled in a menage-a-trois with Paola and her mother, which soon leads to sex, death and mayhem.

In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.