A compelling family saga covers the lives of 3 generations as Sweden emerges from it's rural past into the modern world. Anna, Hanna and Johanna, which sets her thinking about her Grandmother Hanna, born in 1871 in the bad old days in Sweden's far north where rural poverty was widespread and women were regarded as 2nd class. We then follow Hanna's life aftre an appalling chldhood: raped at 13 by a cousin, she gives birth to a son and later marries a kindly widowed miller who adopts the boy. Hanna bears 3 more sons, followed by Johanna. After the miller dies, Hanna and Johanna move south to Gothenburg where Hanna, a born survivor lives to be 90. The novel's middle section returns to the present day and Anna, a professional woman with daughters of her own, separated from her husband. Anna looks back on her own life and that of her mother and long since dead Grandmother and begins to understand more of their lives, their menfolk, their joys and disasters the thread throughout a striving for some kind of freedom in women's lives. The novel's final section is Johanna's story, the bridge between the old and the new, the 1 who is able to look both forward and back. Johanna becomes politically aware and enters into a strong but violent marriage. At the novels end, Anna and her husband are reunited and move house, with the old sofa that the miller 1st brought to Varmland when he married Hanna.