As the result of a series of fortuitous encounters and circumstances, the Italian writer Giacomo Longhi falls victim to an obsessive curiosity about the famous English artist Julian Sax. He would like to meet Sax, but the great painter is surrounded by an almost impenetrable protective screen. The writer’s wife, the charming and sensuous Rossa, eventually takes him to a tea room in London, where Sax spends a few hours of each day accompanied by his children, models and friends. The narrator begins to fear that his wife Rossa might succumb to the charms of this seductive man, who attracts women, paints them and then discards them. In an unpredictable sequence of events, Elkann weaves a fascinating web that blends reality and fiction, and draws the reader into the lives of characters who will prove hard to forget.

"An entertaining and openhearted tale of a naïf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society - at least a little. When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn't planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. This century, it has globalized, gentrified, and been shocked into realizing its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and then the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the "Grand Paris" project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir of the Paris of today, without the Parisian cliches"--

"Vitali Vitaliev is the Ukranian-born author, poet and journalist whose life has been spent exploring the curious, the unusual and the plain dotty manifestations of human life around the world." "In this honest memoir, Vitaliev describes how on many occasions in his life, words have provided him with the means of survival: the words of great writers from Mikhail Bulgakov to George Orwell; the words of writer friends such as Peter Ustinov and Joseph Heller; the words of his mother, of his children. He references his own writing too, with memories of creative assignments all over the globe, recalling the voices of people he as met and the impressions they made on him." --Book Jacket.