A touching novel about memory and regret between Rome and Instanbul.

On a Sunday morning like many others, Sergio and Giovanna have invited their best friends over for lunch. While waiting for their guests , a stranger shows up at their door asking to see the house. She explains that she used to live there many years ago and that she came all the way from Istanbul. Elsa (that’s the name of the stranger) carries in her bag a bundle of old letters to her sister Adele, that no one has ever opened.

Who is Elsa, that strange woman? And why Adele did not even open her letters? What mystery is hidden beyond the kitchen window that Elsa keeps staring at?

The narrative has a double point of view of sisters Adele and Elsa, flashing back to the rift that estranged them decades before. The majority of the book consists of Elsa’s letters from the late 1960, alternating with Adele’s recollection from the present, and the interplay between the two is poignant indeed, revealing only in the end how the two sisters had experienced the traumatic love to the same person in very different ways.