It is 1942 and Denmark is occupied by German troops. A young woman is invited to spend the summer with people she barely knows in a cottage on the North Sea coast. There she meets two people who will affect her entire life: a fourteen-year-old boy who is the nephew of her hosts, and an English airman who is shot down over the marshlands nearby. Timid friendships develop into a dangerous triangle, and many years later an elderly man looks back on it all asking himself whether his youthful desire gave way to an unforgivable betrayal. Virginia is a sensitive, deeply moving love story about the intricacies of relationships in the troubled twentieth century, written with Grondahl's incomparable, perceptive sympathy.