In this sequel to Nobody's Children, Guido still longs for Luisa, who has become a nun. Then he meets Lina, a chorus dancer who is a dead ringer for his former lover.

In a country in Southern Italy, on the border between Campania and Lucania, a baron reduced to poverty tries to give order to events: what has happened in recent years? It all seems to have started with the double disappearance of a woman and her elderly husband during a magic show. Stories and memories stratify and interpenetrate each other, leading to the political and temporal collapse of that magical world, which fades into an indistinct memorial abyss and fades into an underground escape, in time.

Lora Hart manages to land a job in a hospital as a trainee nurse. Upon completion of her training she goes to work as a night nurse for two small children who seem to be very sick, though something much more sinister is going on.

In Victorian England, Florence Nightingale's heroic measures slowly change the attitude towards nurses when it was considered a disreputable profession.