Barbara, an aspiring surgeon, decides to apply for a specialization in an avante-garde oncological facility. But from the first day she realizes that the place is different from all the other hospitals she has set foot in, and not just because of the advanced technology and preparation of the people working there. The institute, as everyone calls it, is a world of its own, a parallel universe where only the ultimate sense of things counts, and where the doctors are seen as almost supernatural beings able to defeat death. Because there, cancer, the sole centre and subject of everyone’s thoughts, overturns priorities and perspectives and filters reality through a warped lens. Every single moment one is forced to look pain in the face, instil courage and hope: that is what is expected from the doctors that work there, and now Barbara is one of them. But how can she stand that world? Looking into the eyes of Giulia, a lovely girl slowly dying at only twenty-seven? Or Rosa, abandoned by her husband immediately after the diagnosis and condemned to leave her three adopted children alone? But no one is safe: Dr van Reijen, up to a moment before the esteemed director of thoracic surgery, becomes a patient among the others who are battling to survive. Barbara is strong and determined; she has always known what she wanted out of life, but from the moment she passed the threshold of that building her certainties begin to waver. In this choral novel, MariaGiovanna Luini writes with delicacy and realism about the devastating experience of the disease of the century through the eyes of those suffering and those trying to curb this suffering, and she bares the fragility that all human beings have in common.