The story is set in 20th century Iceland. Karitas Jónsdóttir is one of many siblings. They have lost their father to the sea. Against all custom, their mother has decided that all her children are to be educated – girls as well as boys. Each in their own way, they strive towards reaching this goal.

Karitas meets a woman who paints. She recognises Karitas’ talents, and sees to it, that Karitas is admitted to an art school in Copenhagen around the year 1920.

Having returned to Iceland five years later with hopes of commencing the artistic work of a lifetime, she becomes pregnant, winds up in a poverty-stricken settlement, and life takes a very different course. It is an emotional struggle for the cultivation of art and love in a place of loneliness and poverty – in a small town with a husband at sea, many children, homed in a cottage.

It is an account of the conditions women endured, of the charity that helped them survive, and of their unfathomable fortitude.