Teenage Nan Davis is left paralyzed in a car accident and has a tough time accepting her new wheelchair-bound life. One day she hears about new research by Dr. Jerrold Petrofsky, about using external electric stimulations to enable paralyzed people to use their frozen muscles. She enters the research as a test subject and gets her reward when she walks up to receive her college diploma.

Cyril and Fiona, a free-wheeling married couple, travel to a tropical coastal town to follow their sexual fantasies. Cyril is a manipulator. There, they meet another couple, Catherine and Hugh, and their three children. Hugh is a one-armed photographer who specializes in nude photographs of peasant women. Soon, they decide to live together and an erotic atmosphere develops between them.

A gang of terrorists tries to hijack a truck carrying plutonium.

Broken Harvest is set in 1950's Ireland framed by modern-day New York. It deals with a bitter feud between two farmers who had taken opposite sides in the Irish Civil War many years before and who had also fought for the love of the same woman. When the feud is reawakened in the '50s it causes a major upheaval with tragic consequences for the lives of the two men, their families and the community. As the story unfolds it embraces many of the great, lingering issues affecting Ireland in this century - the War of Independence, the Civil War, emigration, the links with America, the clash between traditional, conservative values and those of a new technological age.