During the Quiet Revolution of the Sixties, in Nun's Island, a suburb of Montreal, Bérénice Einberg and her brother Christian have been since childhood at the heart of the acrimonious marital conflict of their parents. Bérénice, a precocious child, given to fantasy and word games, is surprisingly articulate. It's agreed that she will be educated in the Jewish faith, and Christian in the Catholic religion. But each parent uses the children to hurt the other. As a kind of counter-attack, Bérénice decides to love Christian unconditionally. To punish her, her father sends her to live in New York with her uncle, an authoritarian Orthodox Jew., then to Israel, where she finds herself in the middle of an armed conflict.