Synopsis

His wife, after a lifetime spent at her husband's side, has left home and disappeared. After a year, he decides to leave everything behind, saying goodbye to Stromboli, the island where they lived, their familiar objects and daily habits, and setting out in search of her. Anna and old Severino, hoping to find her and bring her back to him, begin a journey across Sicily, to the places that have marked their lives. It is not only an investigation into the past, a dive into memory, an examination of their own actions and choices, from which truths that had until then eluded them, devastating and merciless, will emerge. It is also a confrontation with ghosts, with the men and women who could have been but were not, because they were betrayed or violated by those around them. In this tale of voices, points of view, and ambiguities that gradually emerge, Anna lives unseen. It surfaces in Severino's gaze, as he arranges and rewrites the past while trying to understand it, along with the story of a woman who reluctantly obeyed orders, the first being her mother's peremptory one: a female is born to become a man's wife and a son's mother. This was her destiny, but near the end, having completed the journey everyone expected of her, Anna looked ahead, examined herself, and disappeared into thin air. Trying to be free as her father wanted, who abandoned the family when she was still a young girl, breaking order and creating chaos. Because, the novel seems to be saying through its characters and in the writing of an author who himself takes a risky path, every freedom contains violence, every renunciation a wound that cannot heal, every choice that makes us happy causes someone else's pain. But understanding and accepting this brutal truth requires a lifetime of experience.