Tibo has a serious condition: boredom. He works as a nurse on a palliative care floor, and all he can think of lately is money. Once and a while, he tries to break the routine by placing bets with his co-workers on the last breath of dying patients. All in vain. One day, his colleague Anouk asks him for a favor. Whether Tibo would like to spend the day with Frans Claeskens, the only patient without any friends or family, because today Frans will undergo euthanasia. A big ask for everyone who knows the racist and perverted Frans Claeskens.
In the years before the First World War, three Britons are drawn into fraught and ultimately tragic relations: Anglican Christopher Tietjens, second son of the lord of the manor of Groby, Yorkshire, who is a disconsolate, Tory statistician in London; Catholic Sylvia Satterthwaite, his promiscuous and self-centered socialite wife who has married him only to hide the fact that their son is not really his; and freethinking Valentine Wannop, a young suffragette and daughter of a lady novelist, who is torn between her idealism and her attraction to "Chrissy". As the war works a profound change on Europe, and Chrissy is badly wounded in France, the conflict shatters and rearranges the lives of all three principals, as well as virtually everyone else in their elite circle.
