Jilted by her lover, Doretta Osram flees Germany and finds a position with a publishing house in Zürich, Switzerland. She meets Fernando Lopez serendipitously while doing research at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich (Zurich Central Library). Finding happiness at last in the arms of her handsome Chilean lover, she marries Fernando on Valentine's Day of 1963 and gives birth to their first child, Mario, on the Ides of March a month later. However, when Fernando moves his family back to his ancestral home in the Maipo Valley, the wine country near Santiago, Chile, everything changes. Here, Doretta encounters hate and classism by the person she most wants to accept her --Fernando's mother. Well known in Santiago society for her fame and fortune, Señora Esmeralda rejects her only son's choice for a wife because Doretta was born to a Protestant mother and a Jewish father and has nothing to bring to the union except herself -- an unacceptable arrangement that must be rectified. Señora Esmeralda puts all her energy into making her daughter-in-law's life a living hell, while Doretta seeks comfort in isolation and sleep, only to be plagued by nightmares of her father's arrest by the Nazis in 1943. Consumed in their own battles of bigotry, hate, terror, and insecurity, neither woman can predict how the tides are about to change, transforming their lives and their relationships forever.