A son's quest to avenge his mother's murder. In 1948, in a Greek mountain village, Eleni Gatzoyiannis was arrested, tortured and shot. She was one of the 158,000 victims of the Greek Civil War.

Her crime had been to help her children escape from the Communist guerrillas who occupied their village. Her son, Nicholas Gage, was then eight years old. Eleni is the story of his obsessive and harrowing reconstruction of his mother's life and death and his pursuit of his mother's killer.