Anita is one of the two top dancers at the prestigious Karen Holmes Dance Academy. The other is Miriam: coordinated, expressive, toned and charismatic. In Anita’s eyes, she is perfect. The two girls share not only their apartment, but also the hours spent within the white, sterile walls of the Academy. Under constant scrutiny, each girl has adopted her own methods to restrain herself from eating; for them, dancing comes first. Everything else is secondary.

The rest of Anita’s life is made up of her mother, her older brother Toni – a man in his forties with an obsessive disorder and a newfound passion for iguanas – and her childhood best friend, Nina.
Summer has just begun, and with it, the rehearsals for Holmes’ latest production: Ondine. The Academy’s director distorts and experiments with the show, her approach even more cryptic than usual; as always, Anita follows her instructions without question. But everything is about to change. On a day like any other, Miriam collapses, never to regain consciousness. Anita’s life grinds to a halt, incapable of facing the event that has brought her perfectly-organised world crashing down around her.

It is thanks to the oddities of her brother, a nameless young girl, Bruno (the mysterious nighttime visitor), and, mainly, to a strength she never knew she possessed, that Anita is able to start again; but it throws into question everything she has ever known.

With a writing style capable of capturing even the most minute nuances, and filling the silences surrounding them, Francesca Marzia Esposito’s novel is an emotional and challenging insight into the world of dance. Her story reveals not only the intricacies of its darker sides, but also the obsession in its search for perfection: a perfection which almost never leads to happiness.