Chiara lives on an Atlantic island, where her husband Antoine grew up. They are a happy and loving couple. She has been taught Antoine's hard fishing job and has been working with him for twenty years. The arrival of Maxence, a young apprentice is going to rock their balance and alter Chiara beliefs. Soon her and Maxence begin a passionate romance but their age-gap, Maxence is far younger than Chiara arises the rumors and hostility of their neighbors.
When song-and-dance man Harry Van returns from World War I, he finds work hard to come by. His greatest success comes as straight man in a phony vaudeville mind-reading act with the tipsy Madame Zulieka. While on tour in Omaha he meets acrobat Irene Fellara, and they have a brief romance. Twenty years later while Harry is on tour in Europe with a troupe of leggy blonde dancers, his train is stopped at the Swiss border and he finds himself stranded in the Alps in anticipation of World War II hostilities. Harry and his chorines take refuge in an Alpine hotel with a group of disparate travelers who are also marooned there. Among them are an American pacifist, British newlyweds, a cancer researcher, a German munitions manufacturer, and a beautiful blonde expatriate Russian aristocrat who looks suspiciously like the Irene of two decades earlier.
The plot involves a woman who sets out a well-intentioned plan of bringing together her dysfunctional family in the wake of the family’s matriarch, her mother-in-law. She deceives her husband and others in to believe their mother left rules for the family to follow in the lead up to Christmas. Wanting to believe their mother left some guidance to help heal the wounds of her absence, the family comes together and follows the rules to the letter.
August centers on two brothers fighting to keep their start-up company afloat on Wall Street during August 2001, a month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.