The Nightingale and the Rose is an allegorical fable that delves into themes of love, sacrifice, and selfishness. As with all of Oscar Wilde's short stories, it embodies strong moral values and is told with an effervescence akin to that of The 1001 Nights.

It is the tale of a lovestruck student who must provide his lover with a red rose in order to win her heart. A nightingale, overhearing his lament from a solitary oak tree, is filled with sorrow and admiration all at once, and decides to help the poor young man.

She journeys through the night seeking the perfect red rose and finally comes across a rambling rose bush. Alas, the bush has no roses to offer her. However, there is a way to make a red rose, but it comes with grave consequences.

The nightingale must sing the sweetest song for the rose all night and sacrifice her life to produce the crimson rose. Seeing the student in tears, she carries out the ritual, impales herself on the rose-tree's thorn, and her heart's blood stains the rose.

The student takes the rose to the professor's daughter, but she rejects him, for another man has sent her jewels, and "everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers." The student angrily throws the rose into the gutter, returns to his study of metaphysics, and decides not to believe in true love anymore.

Nineteen-year-old Emma Bau has been married only three weeks when Nazi tanks thunder into her native Poland. Within days, Emma's husband, Jacob, is forced to disappear underground, leaving her imprisoned within the city's decrepit, moldering Jewish ghetto.

But then, in the dead of night, the resistance smuggles her out. Taken to Krakow to live with Jacob's Catholic aunt, Krysia, Emma takes on a new identity as Anna Lipowski, a gentile. Emma's already precarious situation is complicated by her introduction to Kommandant Richwalder, a high-ranking Nazi official who hires her to work as his assistant.

Urged by the resistance to use her position to access details of the Nazi occupation, Emma must compromise her safety—and her marriage vows—in order to help Jacob's cause. As the atrocities of war intensify, so does Emma's relationship with the Kommandant, building to a climax that will risk not only her double life, but also the lives of those she loves.