Emotion prevails over reason and common sense, in the years of the Nazi occupation of Italy as well as in our own day. Stefano Manca, a writer and a soldier; Brando Malaspina, a British historian of Italian origin: two lives so far away from each other and so yet similar as to the individual choices that have a tragic bearing upon them. This is the theme of a love-and-war novel that in the time span of a smoke shows itself to be a story of human contradictions. A story, narrated from two separate points of view, where in 1944 the lust for Febe, the intellectual wife of an officer of the...

Rudy, a British lawyer of Italo-Somali origin and a writer manque, will soon discover that nothing is what it seems. His wife has dumped him for a fat cat. Then it is a coup de foudre with Paola, the Tuscan girl with a touch of Renaissance glamour who showed up at his office for legal advice as a victim of brutal harassment: but he cannot tell if she too feels for him, or is still bewitched by her psychopathic persecutor, or has had a fling with his own father. He cherishes the memory of his mother, who killed herself, but Rudy wants to know why: because his father walked out on her, or...