The central thread of the plot is the story of Boris, an ambitious youth of poor origins who renounces his first love Irina to marry Maria, the heiress of the tobacco business.

His wife's descent into insanity and death in the loveless marriage subsequently allows him to marry Irina, who has studied to become a doctor, but is seduced by the promise of the luxurious life as a mistress and eventually spouse of an affluent factory owner.

Other characters, including a brother of Boris and a friend of Irina who works at the factory, are devoted to the Communist movement and its struggle; these and various other plot threads make the book into a broader picture of capitalist Bulgaria in the years leading up to the Communist seizure of power.

The novel criticises the egoism, careerism, greed and exploitation characteristic of the class society that it depicts from a socialist perspective.

Other novels authored by Dimov are Lieutenant Benz (1938), a story of fatal love between flawed characters during World War I; and Damned Souls (1945), a tragic tale of a dissolute young Englishwoman's passionate obsession with a fanatical and reactionary Jesuit set in Spain during the civil war.