Simon is an ordinary boy growing up in rural Sweden. Ordinary that is, until the Second World War is declared; until he makes friends with Isak, a psychologically damaged Jewish boy who has fled with his father from Nazi Germany; and until he is told that he is adopted - that the working class couple he had always assumed to be his parents are, in reality, distant relations. His biological parents had met and, with no common language, loved each other in an enchanted spot under a waterfall nine years previously.
So begins Simon's quest for selfhood - a quest which takes him through the bitter privations of the Second World War, through his military service, and through a destructive relationship with Isak's cousin recently liberated from a concentration camp. And, always in the background, his beloved step-mother watches over him, as constant as the oak trees on the cliff top that whispered their secrets to him when he was a child.
