As the fierce lovemaking and fights of Nathan, a paranoiac Jewish intellectual, and Sophie, a Polish-Catholic concentration-camp survivor, intensify, Stingo, a writer who lives below them in a cheap rooming house, becomes more and more involved in their lives
Three friends, Stingo, a twenty-two-year-old writer; Sophie, a survivor of the Nazi camps; and Nathan, her mercurial lover, share magical, heart-warming times until doom overtakes them as Sophie's and Nathan's darkest secrets are revealed.