Early 80’s. A group of criminal’s spreads terror across the Algarve with more than 20 bank robberies. The gang is led by a man they call "The Doctor" and a carpenter who earns the nickname of "The Cowboy". Captured and sentenced to 18 years in prison he becomes the protagonist of the bloodiest escape in Portuguese prison history.
At the age of 71, a highly regarded writer, José Cardoso Pires, suffers a major stroke and loses his memory and the ability to relate to the rest of the world. Everybody seems to defy the famous author to write another novel that recounts this adventure telling his "last story", the most conclusive of his career, the one of his accidental journey to the clear shadows territory.
Catarina embarks on a dangerous journey to find who made her mother vanish. The Torres family seems to be the obvious suspect, but within them there's Vasco, the love of Catarina's life. Two opposed sides connected by love.
The character of a novel gains life to torment the author, revisiting and reliving the story of a crime.
Mário and Cláudia are going through a divorce process. When Cláudia accepts job in another country, situation will lead parents to reassess many of their certainties and question the effects on the happiness of their children.
Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest writers in Portuguese, created an immense parallel world and several heteronyms so as to endure the loneliness of genius. José Saramago, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Literature, has a heteronym, Ricardo Reis, return to Portugal after a 16-year exile in Brazil. 1936 is a perilous year with Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s Nazism, Spain’s Civil War and Salazar’s New State in Portugal. And Fernando Pessoa meets his creation, Reis. Two women, Lídia and Marcenda, are Reis’ carnal and impossible passions. “Life and Death as one” allows for literature and cinema.
In 1918, Maria Adelaide Coelho da Cunha, heiress and owner of the Diário de Notícias, leaves the social, cultural and family luxury in which she lives to escape with a petty chauffeur, 26 years younger.