Emotion prevails over reason and common sense, in the years of the Nazi occupation of Italy as well as in our own day. Stefano Manca, a writer and a soldier; Brando Malaspina, a British historian of Italian origin: two lives so far away from each other and so yet similar as to the individual choices that have a tragic bearing upon them. This is the theme of a love-and-war novel that in the time span of a smoke shows itself to be a story of human contradictions. A story, narrated from two separate points of view, where in 1944 the lust for Febe, the intellectual wife of an officer of the Fascist army, and now the lust for Buba, the cosmopolitan Milanese who cannot free herself from a relationship rooted in sympathy and compassion, make the protagonists incapable of coping with the challenges of reality.