It is 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to east London from Denmark with their two sons. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing her diary. When the diaries are published over seventy years later, they reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal, for they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder, to the quest for a missing child and to the enimga surrounding Asta's daughter, Swanny. It falls to Asta's grandaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.