A female linguist specializing in small, endangered languages decides to transform a barren landscape into a garden of Eden. A curiosity for linguistics is sparked in the villagers in the area. The protagonist is handed a manuscript for a poetry collection by her former student. The poems convey a young man's love for an older woman.

The linguist knows that many small languages on the planet, Icelandic among them, are in danger. She sees how cultural diversity is giving way to homogeneity, how a monocultural culture is taking over. Just as people pause to observe rare plants and rocks in the mountains, she pauses and is lost in individual words that she reads or hears, contemplating them for a long time.

She considers her flights to conferences on small, endangered languages, and she constructs stone walls to protect against the wind, and plants more than a thousand seeds from various places in the hard soil.

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir has received the Icelandic Literary Prize, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and the Prix Médicis in France.