Louis de Bernières, author of the bestseller Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the Latin American magical trilogy and the epic novel The Wingless Birds, tells a poignant love story. He is forty, an Englishman, a reluctant traveling salesman. His life passes under the news on the radio and the snoring of his wife and has imperceptibly turned into a swamp. She's nineteen, Serbian, and a retired prostitute. Her life is full of events, but she is so tired of them that she wants to fall asleep and never wake up. She tells him stories - who knows how true they are? He saves money, hoping to buy it one day. Shehryar and his Scheherazade. They seem to be in love with each other. They are for each other a rare chance to start over. But what is love? “I fell in love quite often,” he says, “but now I’m completely exhausted and I don’t understand what it means anymore... Every time you fall in love a little differently. And then, the very word “love” became common. But it should be holy and hidden... Just now the thought came that love is something unnatural, which is known through films, novels and songs. How to distinguish love from lust? Well, lust is still understandable. So, maybe love is a savage torture invented by lust?” Perhaps the answer lies in the pages of a new book by Louis de Bernières, a writer who has an invaluable property: he is not like anyone else, and all his works are not alike.< /p>