The silence of the countryside is perfect for a writer. But for Carlo Maria Ortani that silence has become a sentence: it has been months since he has written even a line. Before, he was an author of some success, even with the reviewers. So he decides to move to Milan. He has to find voices that will help him to fill that unreal emptiness. And the city is teeming with voices. At a party he eavesdrops on the voice of a woman as she announces that from night on she will be off on her way. And that’s enough for Carlo to start searching for the woman, whom he believes in danger, on the streets of a metropolis that jealousy guards its mysteries. There’s the voice of Dr Mauri who asks his son Alberto to pardon him. A monologue, because Alberto, who survived the accident that took away his mother, is reduced to being a vegetable, and who knows if he hears his father’s prayers. There’s the voice of Marco Aurelio, called Merio, who says he’s ready to leave his wife and begin a new life with Francesca, but it seems he doesn’t have the strength to do it. His words lose energy every day as if soon he will be speechless. There’s the voice of Milan and its creatures of the day and night suffused with a dazzling white light, like a piece of paper destined to stay empty. Then there’s Chiara’s voice that he hears less and less, even though she is his partner in life, the one who should best understand him. In this tough, sharp novel where the protagonist flounders about between the ordinary and the surreal, page after page the writing acquires velocity in a wild race towards a shattering finale.