It's Rome in 1887, and Lafanu Brown is ready to tell her fiancé the story of her difficult life, how she came from a poor family and audaciously decided to become an artist. In the wake of the American Civil War, life was especially tough for black women, but she didn't let that stop her. The daughter of a Native American woman and an African-Haitian man, Lafanu has had the rare opportunity to study, travel, and follow her dream in Rome, and become an established painter, thanks to her indomitable spirit, but not without facing intolerance and violence.

In 2019, an Italian art curator of Somali origin, is putting together an art exhibition that will combine Brown's paintings with the artwork of modern migrants to Italy. She becomes more and more obsessed with the life and secrets of the nineteenth-century artist, whilst also struggling to get her own young cousin into the country.

Weaving together these two vibrant voices, Igiaba Scego has written a powerful exploration of what it means to be "other", to be a woman, and particularly a Black woman, in a foreign country, yesterday and today.