In an unspecific Scandinavian setting, a woman called Marta is beginning to remember strange things. The book opens with her realising - with some surprise at herself - that she is a smoker. As the story progresses, she starts to be haunted by increasingly strong and bizarre visions of a young girl, who seems to be trying to tell her something. Marta is revealed to have a certain set of beliefs about her life: her parents died in an accident when she was a teenager, and she was found in a state of confusion and physical weakness by Hector, a teacher twenty years her senior. When she recovered, they married, and she has lived with Hector ever since - a restricted existence in which she never ventures beyond the limits of the local village, and lives according to the rules set out in How To Be a Good Wife, an old-fashioned book given to her by Hector's domineering mother. She has also spent most of her life unquestioningly taking pills which Hector gives her every day, and it is her decision to stop taking the medication that results in the visions - or memories - starting to appear.

The reader will have to decide by themselves the resolution: Is she imagining things? Is this the biggest conspiracy ever?