Jiang Qing is best known as Mao's widow. Before she met Mao she was an actress, and played, among other roles, Nora in A Doll's House. In this novel, her experience with Ibsen forms the basis for an alternative history:
What if, in 1972, she began to feel regret?
What if, in Peking, she reread A Doll’s House and The Wild Duck, and in light of these works, began to question the choices she had made?
What if she started to doubt her role as Mao’s right hand—her part in the policing of China’s cultural life, in the persecution, torture, and execution of dissidents?
What if she decided to travel incognito to Norway to visit Ibsen’s grave?

In Norway, Jiang enters the working class and takes a job at a café. She becomes entangled in the life of an elderly man—Candidate Rygh—a priest with psychic abilities who claims he has been waiting for her. In Rygh, Jiang sees her final chance to start over, to reclaim something human within herself.

At the heart of the novel is Jiang Qing’s longing for reconciliation—and forgiveness—for her actions in China. At the same time, she encounters Norwegian cultural currents in 1972 that are moving in the opposite direction: toward an enthusiastic Maoist cult of personality.