A first-person account in pictures by a woman of about fifty, in the form of a family album. Two letters, short captions and a few supporting documents lead the reader through ninety intimate photographs from the nineteen twenties to the end of the seventies.

In Lisbon in 1979 Fernanda put together, for the eldest son who had cut her off, an album meant to make him an overwhelming revelation about where they came from. Addressing him throughout, she goes back over the family's own pictures beside others received a year earlier from another woman, Catarina, who claims in a shocking letter to be his sister from Africa. Fernanda looks at her own people afresh and discovers a whole world she knew nothing of.

The scattered family can also be read as the history of a country: Portugal, its fallen colonial empire, its dictatorship and the violence that came with it. And the reader is left facing the illusion of the medium itself, in a volume where the true and the false do not contradict each other.