The Portuguese writer Alice Sampaio was born on 18 March 1927 in Mido, a small village near the city of Guarda in the north of Portugal, in a family of small farmers and merchants. She spent part of her childhood and teenage years in this village of Beira Alta, which suffered the deprivation and isolation that affected a large part of the country during the dictatorship (1926-74) and preceded mass emigration in the 1960s.

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This is indeed a remote land, but it is also a place of wild, beautiful nature with an ancient popular culture that to the fertile and eager eyes of the young Alice became almost magical. Alice Sampaio grows up and weaves her complex world while she immerses herself in the vast and rare library of her father, rides, hikes and plays in the magnificent granitic landscape, and listens to the stories told by her parents and the villagers.