Three voices, a search for love and a manuscript that can't seem to find its home. Ellinor is from a small village in the very south of Sweden. She advertises in the personals: I'm thirty-six years old and looking for a tender, but not too tender, man. But the men she meets are not quite what she hoped they would be. Pleasure is an elusive thing and love even more so. Max Lamas is dreaming of a polyglot lover, a lover that will understand him in every tongue. The search takes him all the way from Stockholm to Italy, where he befriends a Marchioness teetering at the edge of ruin. And Lucrezia, in Italy, witnesses her grandmother's utter, final downfall in a deserted palace, their whole world a mere shadow of what used to be. A manuscript wanders in and out of their lives, binding them together, cared for by some, hated by others, but leaving no one unaffected.