Annabella Morelli is twenty-three years old, dreams of becoming a poet and lives in Lyon, far from Congo-Brazzaville where she was born, the daughter of a Franco-Italian worker, and a Congolese girl who became a mother too young. Annabella remembers a happy childhood until one Christmas, when she was seven, her father's anger exploded, and her mother left the family home. When she learns of his death in Cameroon, her world collapses for the second time and in her desperate attempt to repa