The Hanging Saw tells the story of a traumatic experience in a girl’s life and the self-assertion of a young woman who is just as uninterested in marriage as she is in the job of a primary school teacher in her home village.

Nine-year-old Lilly describes her life in a village on Mount Napf in the late 1950s. She grows up surrounded by poverty and harsh peasant customs, desperately rebelling against injustice within the family, violence and the unreasonable demands of the adult world.