The narrator frames her account as her mother's life and its consequences for her own, tracing a journey from the mother's impoverished gypsy origins in Granada through encounters with love, betrayal, lost memory, and social dislocation. Told in episodic, memoir-like chapters, the narrative moves between exotic landscapes, domestic revelations, romantic entanglements, and legal or familial claims on inheritance, culminating in recoveries of identity and return to ancestral home. Recurring themes include maternal influence, dispossession, concealment and revelation, and the tension between wildness and respectability as characters negotiate belonging, loyalty, and social status.