An exciting investigation into the ambiguous relationships between those who publish books and those who would like, more or less metaphorically, burn them.

There is a mysterious book, indeed a manuscript. Luigi Bassetti, antifascist and editorial director of a large publishing house, never leaves it, always carries it with him in a shoulder bag, does not show it to anyone, does not talk about it with anyone. Except, but only in vague signs, with Donatella Modiano, his right hand woman and his lover, head of the editorial secretariat. Bassetto doesn't know that Donatella was blackmailed and enlisted as an informant by a high official of the secret political police, the commissioner. Who also wants to know, at all costs, what is written in that famous book. He fears that what is hidden there is something explosive, even lethal for the fascist regime. Which at the moment, after the conquest of the empire, is triumphant. And perhaps also for the same figure of Mussolini, the almighty Duce. In the Milan of 1936, city of intrigue and suspicion, where many have a double face and all are surrounded by a web of silences, a double investigation unfolds. That of the commissioner, who stops at nothing, and that of Donatella, who after the death in an accident apparently random of Bassetti, of Luigi, of his love, feels growing inside a fierce anger, a will increasingly determined to go to the bottom, to know the truth and to close the accounts. Gian Arturo Ferrari, who has been a publisher all his life and who on publishing reflects and tells about publishing - we remember the success of his Confidential History of Italian publishing -, begins in yellow with a story that reconstructs one of the less explored areas of Italian fascism: publishing.