Surreal Lovers recounts the lives of the artists and writers - Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim and Luise Straus; the art collector Peggy Guggenheim; Marie-Berthe Aurenche and Gala, the muse of Salvador Dali - during the most exhilarating and treacherous of times, when all loved and were loved by the strikingly seductive and enigmatic painter Max Ernst. In describing the work and achievements of these women, and of Max Ernst, Surreal Lovers emphasizes the human element in their entwined lives - what is usually omitted from official art histories. Interweaving their interactions with each other and their circle, which included Lee Miller, Nusch Eluard, Man Ray, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Marcel Duchamp and Chaim Soutine, Surreal Lovers spans the volatile days of Dada in the 1920s and the heyday of Surrealism, when they oscillated between Cologne, London and Paris, to its demise in New York in the 1940s. Their saga contains episodes of searing passion, madness and betrayal when they made great art and lost, found and abandoned one another in the process.