The humorous portrait, drawn with subtle irony, of a young Icelandic woman at the beginning of the 1960s who has set her sights high - in a society where artists are male, but women only succeed if they wear their beauty to market in order to be crowned Miss Iceland.

The world is in turmoil. While John F. Kennedy is shot in America and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" can be heard, the Beatles launch their world career in England. Only in Iceland does the world stand still. This is what Hekla has to experience when she - 22 years old with her Remington typewriter, a novel manuscript, James Joyce's Ulysses and an English encyclopaedia - boards a smoky intercity bus that takes her from her parents' farm to Reykjavík. There, in the city of poets, she wants to realise her dream and become famous with books.
But she soon discovers that in the conservative, male-dominated society the interest in a Miss Iceland is greater than that in a woman writer ...