A plane lands one day at Nairobi Airport in Kenya, and among the passengers is a young Danish girl, Eva Axelson, who immediately takes a carriage to the famous Hotel Norfolk. Her arrival causes no stir, but an advertisement she placed in the East African Standard three or four days earlier does—an advertisement in which she asks for information about her father, Carl Gustav Axelson, who was last seen in Kenya, and asks him or anyone who knows him to contact her at the Norfolk Hotel.

A young woman returns to her birthplace after her father's death and unearths distant memories and long-buried secrets that change everything she thought she knew about her family, past and herself.