Henning Mankell

In 1904, Hanna Renstrom boards a ship bound for Australia hoping to escape the cold and poverty that have dominated her life in Sweden. Her harrowing journey lands her in Portuguese East Africa, a world where colonialism and white colonists rule, where she becomes a peculiar outsider: she is on the outskirts of white society, because of her gender and profession as the owner of a bordello, and separated from the African prostitutes with whom she lives...