A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from north Africa to find
her son, taken from her when he was just days old by his father and
stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid's uniform and a knife
stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers--some generous, some
exploiting--to guide her passage north.
These strangers tell of their encounters with a quiet, mysterious woman
in a blue coat--each account a different view of the truth, a different
truth. And slowly these fragments of a life piece together to create a
spellbinding story of the courage of a mother and the versions of truth
we create to accommodate our lives.