Ylva Ekblad

Winter 1975 - author Jeanette Aspen arrives at Lapinlahti Mental Hospital to meet her only child, psychiatrist Karin Aspen, 36 years after sending her daughter to Sweden as herself traveled to Southern Europe, at the start of the Winter War. The encounter triggers a drama between the mother and daughter, who are now total strangers to each other.

16-year-old Eveliina accidentally sees her mother kissing another woman. Fearing her parents' divorce, she decides to intervene, by any means and without permission. In her opinion, the best way to destroy her mother's extramarital affair and bring her parents back together is a teenage daughter in trouble. Thus, Eveliina gets herself in trouble as many ways as she can. Along the way, the lives of a few others are at stake. Still, Eveliina guards her plan to the last, and the adults have their own secret ways of survival - until the bubble bursts.

In his youth, the author Frej has already found a deep connection and passion with an upper-class girl, Stella Rabell, that has lasted between them through the decades. When Stella's older brother Alex falls victim to a stabbing attack, Frej begins to reminisce about the events of decades past. Frej's memories from the bright 1970s to the present day are filled with love, jealousy, betrayal, life and death.

The stories of the aristocratic Lilliehjelm family, the middle-class Widing family and the poor Kajander family from the Finland's independence through the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties ending during the Second World War.

Puck and Einar decide to spend the last weeks of their vacation in Einar's idyllic childhood town Skoga. Pucks father Johannes Ekstedt, professor in Egyptology, has a household cat called Thotmes III that joins the couple. They get to borrow both Einar's sisters beautiful old wooden house as well as her highly competent housekeeper. But after the first night, the idyll crumbles. Einar finds a dead body on the lawn, a young man stabbed to death by a dagger. Christer Wijk enters the stage and with the help of Pucks observations the mystery approaches its tragic solution.

Marja tries to make ends meet by taking night shifts in a newspaper delivery service, apparently mostly carried out by foreigners. During the day, she sleeps and strives to raise her little daughter as best as she can. As a single parent and lacking a solid income, life is a constant struggle. Things are about to go from bad to worse when she meets her ex-boyfriend whose obsessive demeanour about whether he is the father of Marja´s child will drive her to the edge of sanity.

When 12-year-old Elsi Björkman and her mother Paula return from a week's holiday abroad, Elsi immediately notices that someone has been in her room. She tells her mother about it, but she does not believe her. At the local supermarket Elsi meets Henry, who seems to spend his time returning shopping trolleys. Elsi does not know anything about the boy, who has an irritating habit of appearing from out of nowhere, only to disappear again, as if into thin air. Nevertheless, the children become friends.

A young man arrives at a hotel on a small island. He contacts an elderly woman who works at the hotel as a chambermaid. It proves that they have a common past, and that they handle this knowledge in different ways.

In the early 1900s, emigrant Hanna returns from Colorado to Finland. In America she was known as Dollar-Hanna, but in Finland she has to endure the Civil War and live through the prohibition. Hanna's independent spirit will guide her.