Teresa lives with her parents in Turin, but every summer she spends her holidays at her grandmother's in Apulia, with the neighbor boys Bern, Tommaso, and Nicola. The four friends swim and hike together and share everything. They are inseparable until something new develops between Bern and Teresa: first love. But the following year, Bern is no longer there. Deeply disappointed, Teresa banishes Apulia from her memory. It is not until her grandmother's funeral that she returns. At the edge of the cemetery stands a man in a long coat: Bern. They approach each other. But Bern disappears from Teresa's life a second time. Over twenty years - from the nineties to today - Paolo Giordano tells the story of a woman and a man who keep finding and losing each other. With an emotional precision like no other, the PhD physicist writes.