In this gripping coming-of-age novel, a group of young people's lives and passions collide in unexpected ways as World War II transforms Italy and England.

Central Italy, on the eve of the Second World War. A group of young Italians find themselves in the midst of what will soon become a civil war. Among them is Stefano Portelli, a hopeful lawyer with a head full of utopias, in love with Eleonora. And there is his sister-in-law Nina, secretly linked to Sergio, a partisan leader.

Other lives run parallel to theirs: that of Alastair Ormiston, an English Royal Air Force Pilot, who adores Virginia Woolf's books and dreams of the ideal companion. And that of Edna, his best friend who, in a London bombed by the Nazis, discovers herself and her happiness. If their paths intersect in a shocking way, shuffling the cards of history, it will be through the work of a destiny greater than them, burning them in a bonfire where everything is consumed—joy and pain together.