The novel is about an ordinary rural family in a small mountain village in Northeast China in the late 1960s. The protagonist Wu Shulan originally had a happy family, but her husband Li Zhiguo's brother committed a crime and was imprisoned. He abandoned his seven-month-old child. On the third day after the child was brought back, the village flooded and her husband died trying to save his neighbors. Wu Shulan took her three children and took a difficult and tortuous road to survive. The novel shows the kindness and noble qualities of mothers of that era.