This cottage of ours stood away from Didoli town for that's the way Ammu had wanted it. Up here in the mountains the only buildings you saw were oaks, pines and chestnut ... the only noise you heard was of the wind, the birds and the stream in the gorge far below.

In the hill town of Didoli, each of the five visitors to the house on the gorge has a story. The avuncular mongrel called Vurf, a spirit bearing a message for a stepdaughter, the urchin with her golden hair and a vagabond past, a fading child star too wise for his years and an autistic infant who can smell tomorrow. Their lives are entwined over a span of thirty years in a thinking world that seems to say: you grow up to become your childhood.