This fantastical novel opens with Pina, a young Sicilian woman, being seduced by the son of her father's archenemy under a heavily-laden olive tree in her family's orchard. Fate plays a cruel trick on Pina when her lover is killed and she gives birth to a half-human, half-olive son. Named Olivo Oliva, her bastard son grows up and moves to America where he becomes a prodigious killer, an obsessive artist, and eventually, keen to discover more about his ancestry.