Maeve and Danny Conroy grow up in the Dutch House, an impressive mansion on the outskirts of Philadelphia. One day their mother unexpectedly leaves and shortly after their father brings home a new woman, Andrea. Her arrival will mark the end of their childhood.

But is there something that you try your whole life to find again? Maeve and Danny are exiled from the Dutch House, but for decades they struggle to return to it. They knock in vain on the door of the past, waiting for someone to open it for them - and somehow they let life pass by.

Our fate is our childhood, says Ann Patchett, one of the most distinguished voices in contemporary American literature. In the Dutch House, the author delivers the story of three generations of a family, offering an unforgettable hymn to sibling love and the power of forgiveness.

The beautiful face of Giovanna has been distorted, gradually transforming into an ugly, aggressive teenager. Is this really how things are? And in which mirror should she look to find herself again and be saved? After the happy appearance of her childhood years, Giovanna seeks a new face, balancing between two neighborhoods in Naples that share the same blood but fear and despise each other: the high Naples on the hill, wearing its refined facade, and the low Naples, pretending to be wild and vulgar. Giovanna moves from high to low, sometimes falling impulsively and other times climbing slowly, astonished by the fact that, whether above or below, Naples seems like a city without answers, without escape.

"Could the meaning of life on earth be not the constant progress towards an indefinite goal - the design and production of increasingly powerful technologies, the development of increasingly complex and incomprehensible forms of culture? Could all these emerge and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same: to live and coexist with other people?"

Alice is a young writer who grew up in Dublin. She has been living in New York for a few years and then, as part of her recovery from a nervous breakdown, she decides to move to a beautiful house in the Irish countryside, a place where most people seek to leave. There, she meets her peer Felix, who is struggling working in a warehouse, and soon she proposes to accompany her to Rome, where she will travel to promote the Italian translation of her book. Meanwhile, in Dublin, her best friend Aileen works for a literary magazine, makes little money, tries to overcome her breakup, and flirts with her childhood friend Simon.

Alice, Felix, Aileen, and Simon are all around thirty - but they feel that life is passing them by slowly. They fall in love, demythologize one myth of their lives after another, find and separate again. They wonder about love, sex, friendship, about the definition and meaning of success, but also about how one can hope for the best in a usually desperate and despairing world. Are they perhaps in the last bright room of the world before eternal darkness falls? Are they witnesses of a great change? Will they find a way to believe that there really is a beautiful world?"