Oftentimes, when you absent-mindedly want something you end up getting it without knowing what to do with it. This is what Anna discovers, forty years old, a painful and unresolved near past, a present of work-passion and forced lightness, when Iride Bandini, a famous children's author she had met years earlier, bequeaths her a small house, the gatehouse of her property: a curious, excessive gesture of gratitude that invites Anna to change her life without giving it much thought. From the city to the countryside, past an initial lonely period new ties impose themselves, become necessary: a kind and devoted foreman, the writer's former secretary and rrequiet son, a sheikh who is not a sheikh, a peasant couple with little girls, all seem to want something from Anna, as if her presence there was almost not accidental but required. And then there is a collection of unpublished fairy tales found in a tin box, there are the stories of war and love that only certain houses can tell, and the reckoning to be made with one's own knots when they continue to tighten, to hurt. A novel about caring for others and things, about good mothers and bad children or vice versa, about wine, dogs and ghosts, about the weight to be given to what one does and the words one chooses to define it.