In this, the post-WWII era, Karin, a Lithuanian national married during and widowed a result of the war, is being housed in a displacement camp in Farfa, Italy. Failing to earn her release to her desired destination of Argentina on her own merits, she decides to accept the marriage proposal of Mario, another camp resident, he a former Italian POW who intends to return to his home of the island of Stromboli in the Mediterranean. Karin views Mario solely as a sweet boy who can get her out of the camp. However, Karin eventually finds that Stromboli is not the beautiful island she envisioned or that Mario made it out to be, but an arid, desolate environment where the active volcano that produced the island is always threatening life there. In addition to the island being a pseudo prison in there only being a handful of ways on and off, Karin finds that marriage to controlling Mario is another type of prison in she not having the same vision of that life as him, where, while he earns a living as a fisherman, he expects her solely to tend to the house and farm the black soil. Her problems are exacerbated by she not knowing the language, with Mario's English - their only common language - broken at best, and she viewed as an outsider by the majority of the residents, the men who see her solely as an object akin to a prostitute, while the women view her as immoral for not adhering to their traditions. What she considers her only true friendships on the island, with the local priest and a lighthouse employee, are also fraught with problems. The questions then become whether Karin will accept her life on the island, or if she will find a way to escape her new physical and emotional prisons. The volcano may factor into what happens with her.—Huggo