A woman washes up on a beach in Sicily. She has come from Tunisia to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid's uniform and a homemade knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers — some generous, some malevolent — to guide her passage north. These strangers tell of their encounters with her, building her story in fragments of memory, prejudice and sentiment into a moving work of sacrifice and love.