This is a moving story about the artist and the woman Karitas, about her unquenchable thirst for her art and about her doubt, her family and love life. This is the sequel to Karitas – við ongum heiti published by Sprotin in 2015.

It is now 1945 and Karitas, who is middle-aged, has gone into exile in Eyrabakki, a remote and small Icelandic village. By the end of the previous volume, she had become an artist who had to follow her calling. The children are grown-up, and for the first time she feels free and able to paint full-time. But she is still caged. One who has always esteemed her highly comes back into her life, giving her the courage to move out into the world, to Paris, to New York, to Rome—to paint and to live. But just as she is to be free, something unexpected happens.

We follow Karitas’ fate in a linear narrative, told in the first person, from 1945 to 1999, only broken by catalogue descriptions of her works—in that sense, the book can also be read as an art catalogue with analytic comments on her works.