Set in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century-- a land of short, blazing, idyllic summers and dark, frost-rimmed winters, of mountains, bear-hunts, and hazardous sea voyages-- Dina's Book centres around a beautiful, eccentric and unpredictable woman who bewitches everyone she meets. At the age of five Dina unwittingly causes her mother's death. Blamed by her father and banished to a farm, she grows up untamed and untaught. Her guilt becomes her obsession: her unforgiving mother haunts her every day. When she finally returns home she is like a wolf cub, tamed only by her tutor, Lorch, who is able to reach her through music. Married off at sixteen to a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, Jacob, she becomes sexually obsessive and wild. Jacob dies under odd circumstances and Dina becomes mute. When she finally emerges from her trauma, she runs his estate with an iron hand. But still Dina wrestles with her two unappeased ghosts: Jacob and her mother. Until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer, Leo, enters her life and changes it forever...