A young Calabrian woman just back from Gorizia tells a friend about her trip: what prompted her to go to Friuli-Venezia Giulia was her discovery of the poems and novels by one Carlo Michelstaedter, an author and philosopher who had died young, in 1910. What was the reason for his tragic death? And that odd yet familiar figure glimpsed on the beach, at the end of the trip, as the woman told it: who did it belong to?

Achille, a successful, solitary broker, buys Kelly, the first woman android with a perfectly human body. After a period of cohabitation that is anything but simple, Kelly mysteriously disappears. This is only the beginning of a whirlwind of events that will upend his life.