In Kreshev, a peaceful and tiny shtetl located on the banks of the San River in the Ukraine, and bordered by thick forests, life always passed without major shocks. Its inhabitants, under the heavy load of their humble trades, "lacked strength and inclination to commit great sins." But the arrival in that remote place of a rich wood merchant, accompanied by his sick wife and very young daughter, will unleash, before the astonished gaze of the reader, a chain of unusual events, relentlessly guided by the hand of Satan (whose voice we hear from the first to the last line of the book). Temptation and sin, faith and superstition, fantasy and reality, innocence and perversion, repentance and punishment intermingle in an unstoppable crescendo that leads to a tragic ending.
