Nineteen-year-old Roe Seymour is traveling by train to a hotel in the mountain town of Ronda in Andalusia, where she hopes to recover from an illness. At the same time, she is on a pilgrimage, following in the footsteps of her favorite poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who stayed in the same hotel 40 years earlier. It is a highly personal journey for her, a search for spiritual values and identity as she crosses over into womanhood.

In Ronda, Rose meets an elderly art historian who is searching for Goya's bullfighting etchings. He introduces her to a bullfighting milieu, and there she falls passionately in love with a chain-smoking, macho matador with whom she has nothing in common, except their youth and their flirtatiousness. We follow Rose as she is pulled between two worlds, that of the dead poet and that of the matador, who is very much alive.

The story is about the awakening of a young woman who experiences passion and love, but it is also about reading and writing that ultimately leads her to become an author. It highlights Rilke as a mentor through his poetry, dwells on the mysterious relationship between man and animal, touches on the conflict between Gibraltar and Spain and the subject of bullfighting, all set within the spectacular location of Gibraltar and Ronda.