Many years ago, Carlo Malaguti committed a homicide. Since then, the hardest sentence is not the one he is serving in Trieste prison, but the stubborn silence within which he has decided to bury his truth about the crime, even giving up defending himself in court. Within the walls of his cell he seems to have found what he was looking for: a refuge where he can atone for his pain and lock up the darkness he feels vibrating inside him with every breath. Now, however, Malaguti is more than 80 years old, and the court has ruled that he must go free. But free to do what? To confess? To kill again? He asks himself and Luca Rainer, an esteemed translator on the critical threshold of forty, wonders. The two did not know each other but someone wanted to bring them together, knowing that there may be more to bind them than a fervent passion for literature. But entering the fortified labyrinth that is Malaguti's mind is an arduous task for Rainer: it will be necessary to prove himself worthy of the secrets the other guards, face the immensity of his loneliness, and experience the acrid taste of fear. Andrea Molesini has written a novel of extraordinary emotional and stylistic richness about the courage of one's choices, about the spite of chance, about the friendship that must be put to the test every day, and about our irrepressible need to make sense of things, to make things add up even when accounts cannot really be made.