A story of complicated families and a wartime secret that ripples down through the generations from a writer of exceptional talent. Tommaso is just about making it work: travelling abroad for his job, helping his girlfriend with her two unruly sons, and keeping up with the eccentricities of his Italian grandmother, Alma. But as Alma grows increasingly troubled by strange and unsettling memories, Tommaso realises that there is much in her past that he doesn't know. And the more he discovers, the more it seems that the secrets she has guarded for so long might not only overwhelm her, but upend his own precariously balanced life too. Reaching back to the tumultuous days of the Italian resistance during the Second World War and into the domestic chaos of modern life, this is a story of the past's long shadow, and the families we have and those we make.