The novel opens on a cloistered world about to be destroyed. Suor Giovanna, an elderly nun, has spent decades within these walls, her secular self Luisa Bevilacqua faded into memory like a dream. Then comes the priest's visit, delivering the news that will unravel everything: new government laws have decreed the dissolution of her convent. The sisters must leave. The sanctuary that has defined them for lifetimes will cease to exist. What follows is a quiet devastation. Serao renders the sisters' grief with precision - not through melodrama, but through the small annihilations of identity. Suor Giovanna must reckon with what she has lost: not merely her home, but the only self she has known for decades. Outside those walls awaits a world she abandoned as a young woman, one that has continued without her. Her past as Luisa Bevilacqua - her desires, her dreams, the life she might have lived - surfaces like a ghost. A meditation on displacement and the fragility of belonging, Serao captures the particular anguish of women whose entire existence has been shaped by a single place, only to be cast into an uncertain future.
