Benedetta Palmieri returns to fiction by signing a hymn that is a descent into pain, and love, to re-emerge in rebirth. A novel that is a declaration: now enough of resisting, it is time to begin to exist again.

It is a song of farewell and, at the same time, of welcome back: it is a woman's voice breaking the silence to say, to whisper, to shout her love to the man she has lost twice. Together, she and he have experienced endless moments of beauty, but the feeling has never evolved into an everyday couplehood, and now she receives the most tragic news: he has sought death, finding it. It is an absolute loss but, in its irreversibility, it is a crack that finally widens. The first time she had lost him, she had closed doors and windows, holed up in guilt and depression, eventually losing her desires, motivations, every reason to exist. But now this woman opens wide to dare to look at memories, from the most candid to the most painful, moved by the most irreducible and precious instinct: to understand and comprehend herself. Was I not enough for him? Or was he not enough for me? But what if the fault lies not with one or the other, but with an incompatibility between mutual expectations? After all, should we not prove ourselves equal only to life?