Daisy Fellows, a young Spanish-British researcher, is not going through the best of times. Her father has just died and her boyfriend has left her. Sinking in her sadness, a fortuitous discovery will lead her to change her course. Sorting through her father's archive in Oxford, she discovers some letters written one hundred and fifty years ago.

Daisy reads them without being able to stop. She quickly connects the dots and finds out that the author is Maria Manuela Kirkpatrick de Grevignée, Countess of Teba, one of the most famous women of her time, related to the highest echelons of society and a friend of artists and writers. Most of the letters found are addressed to her adored daughters: Eugénie, Empress of the French, and Paca, Duchess of Alba and, like a game of Russian dolls, contain lives intertwined over generations.

This novel takes us from England to Madrid, from Malaga to Granada and Paris, from the Duchy of Alba to the French empire, in a dizzying 19th century in which María Manuela and her daughters were the most famous women in Europe.

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