Tailor Ågren in Ebberöd lives with his dominant wife Karolina and their two children. His everyday life would have been problem free if it weren't for his debts.
Baron Brusenhielm at castle Tröstehult in Skåne dislikes how his young son Karl Oscar is playing “mother and father” with the tenant’s daughter Ann-Marie, as he anticipates the beginning of a future misalliance. Years pass, and Karl Oscar is about to graduate high school. He pretends to study church history but reads in fact “The Seducer’s Diary” and thinks of Ann-Marie, who is now grown up into a woman.
A young man with a messy background stands trial for car theft. He gets away with a suspended sentence. With the help of a social worker, he gets on the right side of life — until a criminal friend shows up.
The innkeeper Schultze and his wife are broke and don't know how to pay their rent when a shipwrecked sailor shows up with a chest full of money. In despair the Schultze couple murders the sailor.
Ninni is a girl who is paralyzed from the waist down. Her mother dies and she is taken care of by a friend of the family. She is trapped in the heart of Stockholm and can't get out of the city because the lack of money.