The most important work in Kirchhoff's oeuvre. 'Süddeutsche Zeitung' Vila and Renz, both working in television, are a couple with an adult daughter, living in Frankfurt and having a summer house in Italy. They are fully engaged in life, outwardly successful and inwardly a couple that knows a lot about each other. It seems like a balanced state—until Vila unexpectedly begins to love another with intense passion, the loner Brühl, a biographer of a couple from a bygone era. After his two major novels 'Infanta' and 'Parlando', Bodo Kirchhoff tells in his new, outstanding novel about a marriage as an eternal quest for happiness and the insatiable longing for love.