She’s called Alice. She’s 27 years old. They’ve put her in a clinic that has the reassuring name of a Home, but she doesn’t know how long she’s been there. She desperately longs for Luca. Luca who smells good, Luca who holds her by her hips, Luca who laughs. But all she can see is her mother’s glacial glaze. Along with the searching looks of her therapist, who never stops asking her questions. Because diabetes, the doctors say over and over again, is not a disease , it’s a condition. You have to learn to recognize the tremors, the tingling sensation on the tongue and legs, be ready to inject yourself , load the small black glycemia pen, as if it were a gun, and shoot. Alice can’t fathom how, at her age, she can get used to the idea that she doesn’t produce enough insulin, because first of all she has to deal with Luca’s absence. Luca who was driving, Luca who isn’t here - to understand how to live with an absence that, inevitably, is an addiction.

In a many-voiced episodic novel, which portrays the listless frenzy of a generation that has put away its dreams, without ever givin in, Alice Torriani invents a poetic and extremely original style to tell her story, her illness and the malaise of our time, emotionally and entertainingly.