An 18-year-old girl from Argentina is betrothed to the son of a wealthy Italian family, but when she travels to marry him, she finds he's been sent to England. As she waits for him, she learns the strange ways of his family and becomes intimate with his invalid father, sexually magnetic mother and narcoleptic uncle. Baricco's novel has a dream-like quality that is, by turns, intriguing and irritatingly pretentious.
