In the old-fashioned little world of Val Germanasca, in Piedmont, Lisse, Lumière, Frillo and Tedesc are four miner friends who have nothing except the courage to live despite their poverty. That is until a young woman with a guitar arrives from Argentina and turns their lives upside down.

Val Germanasca. Lisse had five mothers, but he doesn’t exist as far as the Registry of Births is concerned because the woman who gave birth to him abandoned him in a field soon after he was born, on the summer solstice 1940.
Ever since he was struck by lightning, Lumière has had premonitions no one believes, even though they’re charming to listen to.
Like the other two, Frillo is a miner. He spends his days at the heart of the mountain and when he emerges he carves small statues from the same stone he quarries: talc.
Tedesc, on the other hand, is a luthier and, after spending a few years abroad, has returned to his village to make his dream come true and create the perfect hurdy-gurdy.
They fuel their incomplete lives with stories, in particular those they read in the books Lisse brings them. One day, these stories take on the voice of Alma, a young woman who arrives from South America like a mirage of freedom, and her guitar.

A woman in search of herself in the small mountain village where she grew up. She returns to an archaic world, its traditions and its dark stories.

A novel that tastes of bygone times, an archaic language that strikes a deep chord and gives voice to a world that no longer exists.

After a love affair goes wrong, Adelaide decides to return to the village where she was born: a cluster of stone houses in the rugged, snow-capped mountains. Home, or meizoun in the language of this land on the French border. She leaves – runs away – to seek shelter in a place where time stands still, in small things, in the smell of the forests, of burning wood and the breath of animals. The only person waiting for her there is Nanà, a brisk ninety-year-old, and a closet full of boxes, dozens of small and large containers stored according to an unfathomable order, in which the old woman has crammed the recollections of many lives amid men, flowers, trees, water and time. Photographs, letters and objects that tell stories of wars, of sweethearts expected for forty years… a polyphonic testament. For Adelaide, diving into the memory of her people means finding an echo to her own story, redescovering the various forms of love, and uncovering a part of herself she had kept hidden even from herself. And it is also a good way to change her skin and recover – once and for all – from pain.