In an alternate England of 1851, spirited fourteen-year-old Sophronia is enrolled in a finishing school where, she is surprised to learn, lessons include not only the fine arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but also diversion, deceit, and espionage.

A black comedy in which a young man's sexual impulses go haywire when he discovers that the woman he has just slept with happens to be his mother's lesbian lover. Set against Reykjavik's swinging nightlife, Hlynur soon finds that he can't continue resisting adulthood