Ten year old Svanhild thinks she lives in the safest place in the world: the porter residence by the city hospital, where her father Johan has a post as a porter. She idolizes her brother Einar, almost ten years her elder, even though the adults say that his imagination has run wild.

Svanhild is going to Girl Scout camp, but she misses her brother, who's been admitted to the psychiatric hospital. The day Svanhild comes home from camp, tragedy strikes. The Porter Residence is a poignant and poetic novel about a family that falls victim to the post-war healthcare system and treatment methods of that time.