Hiernamaals tells the story of Sam, a hyperintelligent and hardworking 14-year-old girl who leads a happy life with her father and her two brothers in the south of the Netherlands. She is a good student, very strict with herself and she is always on time. She also takes care of her two younger brothers; since her mother Vera died, she’s felt responsible for the family and now she takes care of the household with her father. One morning — rushing to school to help her math teacher print exams — she is struck by a large truck and she dies. In the hereafter she finds her mother waiting for her. It's a strange feeling of both happiness and sadness. She discovers that there is a way back to life, but will she succeed in taking her mother with her?
Fidgety Bram (seven years old) thinks a lot about the world around him. He is very much looking forward to enter the first grade. But then he ends up in the class of the strict teacher Mr. Fish. The straightfoward Mr. Fish doesn’t care about the inside world of the constantly moving around and unconcentrated little boy and does whatever it takes to make Bram do things the ‘right’ way.
Every morning six people who live in the same street are taking the bus into town. Thanks to their own routine they survive each day, until one of them meets death.
Olivier calls himself a 'statistical miracle'. He is almost 27 years old but the doctors had predicted that, because of the heart disease he was born with, he would not get much older than 25 years. He doesn't seem to be suffering from the threat of death closing in on him. With unbridled energy, he parties, smokes, drinks and dances until deep into the night, and in the morning wakes up in bed next to girls he doesn't even know. His family and friends alienate from him because of this life style, and the fact that he doesn't have long lasting relationships, doesn't bother him. Olivier lives, day by day. Until new medical technologies make it possible to cure him, and a new future opens up to him. Everybody is happy, but Olivier doesn't know how to deal with the expectations and responsibilities of his new life.
