A black mole in the shape of a star, just above her wrist: Lady Brown cannot help but notice it as she conducts a job interview with Irina Nikolaevna, who responding to his advertisement has applied to be his lady-in-waiting. So Irina explains to her that she is the illegitimate daughter of a gentleman-in-waiting of Tsarina Maria Aleksandrovna and has long lived "in the orbit of the court": now she is seeking employment, but in her veins runs the noble blood of the boyars. Lady Brown has no hesitation, and Irina Nikolaevna moves into her large house in San Remo, next to a compassionate butler and two silent but capable characters who observe everything with sly intelligence: the cats Lady Rowena and Sir Galahad. For more than two decades, the two women will experience together the seasons of the Ligurian Riviera, winter mundanity, summer languor, calamities, and surprising encounters: like the one with a former anarchist teacher who seems to recognize Irina, or with Baron von Tronka, who would like to ask for her hand, or with Alfred Nobel, tormented by omens about his own inventions... 

In the golden light of the fin de siècle Ligurian Riviera, with the roar of the twentieth century approaching - in an atmosphere so similar to our recent "belle époque," suddenly broken by pandemic and war - the two protagonists of this novel live and love: or perhaps dream, because this is the best way to live and love. Paola Capriolo builds a most elegant and profound literary game, on the ridge between the disappointing light of reality and the fascinating shadow of great hopes. And she celebrates the power of literature, a place more real than we think, where we can choose a third way: that of the imagination that transfigures everything.