This is a story about a man and two women: Edoardo, a lecturer in Italian who works in the United States, his wife Edith and her friend Anna, for whom Edoardo also falls — a classic love triangle. If Edith represents the tenacity and wholeness of sacred love, of a meaningful relationship based on mutual affection, then Anna is the irresistible siren of profane love, of inescapable carnality. The plot unravels along a trail of suspicions, lies and mutual psychological contortions against the backdrop of America, a country for which Soldati has a deep regard. For him the American Dream is very real, understood as two great constituent parts, freedom and space.

Soldati’s clarity and agility as a writer rescue the novel from being predictable. It has a style that Pasolini praised as ‘Lightness incarnate’, a lack of authorial overbearingness that induces a magically fraternal relationship with the reader.

‘Edith’s hands were, perhaps, the part of her I had remembered with the most searing desire in those eleven long months of separation and waiting. They were fraternal hands, loyal, hard-working. Like a living symbol of the one woman who could be my companion for ever.’ pp69-70