Within the walls of Grave, the orphanage in which Nica has grown up, stories and legends have always been told by candlelight. The most famous one is about the tear maker, a mysterious craftsman with eyes as clear as glass, guilty of having manufactured all the fears and anxieties that dwell in people’s hearts.

But, at the age of seventeen, the moment has come for Nica to leave all these dark childhood stories behind. Her greatest dream is about to come true. Mr and Mrs Milligan have begun the adoption procedures and are ready to give her the family she’s always wanted. However, Nica is not alone in the new house. Rigel, a restless, mysterious orphan, is also taken out of Grave, and he’s the last person Nica would wish for an adoptive brother. Rigel is intelligent, astute, plays the piano like a bewitching demon and is mesmerisingly handsome, but his angelic appearance conceals a dark temperament. Even though Nica and Rigel share a past filled with grief and deprivation, living together seems impossible; especially when the legend comes back to haunt their lives and the maker of tears suddenly grows increasingly real and draws nearer. Even so, gentle and brave, Nica is ready to do anything in order to protect her dream, because only by facing the nightmares that torment her will she finally be able to soar freely like the butterfly after which she was named.

Salento, June 1934. A coach stops in the main square of Lizzanello, a village with only a few souls. A couple get off: the man, Carlo, a child of the South, is happy to be back home; the woman, Anna – his wife – is from the North. She is as beautiful as a Greek statue, but sad and worried: what kind of life awaits her in this unfamiliar land?

In the eyes of the villagers, Anna never ceases to be “the foreigner” who doesn’t attend church, doesn’t wander around the village and doesn’t gossip. Proud and prickly, Anna never yields to the customs of Southern women: not only does she take the postal services public exam, but actually passes it and becomes the first postwoman in the village, or rather the first “letter carrier”, as she wants to be called.

For over twenty years, Anna is the invisible thread that brings the village residents and their stories together. First on foot, then by bicycle, proud in her navy blue cap and uniform, Anna delivers letters from the young men at the front, postcards from emigrants and missives from secret lovers. Without meaning to – and above all without the villagers wanting it – the letter carrier changes many things in Lizzanello.

Come vento cucito alla terra is the story of the first British women surgeons, a handful of pioneers, often militant suffragettes, forced to operate only in the London slums, in charitable establishments for women and children because they were not allowed to practise on men or to pursue a career. At the start of the First World War, in order to create a space for themselves in the male world and build up medical experience, they decided to leave for the battle fields of the Western Front and set up a hospital managed entirely by them in France. But this is also the story of the soldiers who were wounded and left invalids, who entered that female world thinking they were being sent there because there was no more hope for them, but who found there an opportunity for healing and redemption – partly through embroidery.

Come vento cucito alla terra is the story of the meeting between this apparently opposite worlds through two different points of view: that of Caterina – a surgeon, single mother of Italian origin – and that of Alexander, a British soldier – first a brave captain, then a patient made prisoner of his own body, but still a leader of men he must guide through a process of rebirth. And so he does, partly by picking up a sewing needle.

Elia Legasov was born in a town surrounded by whiteness and has never left.

His job is to shovel snow and clear streets along which nobody walks until the snow reveals something from its depths. Something connected to Elia’s family and all that was supposed to remain buried. From that moment on, Elia’s mind becomes crowded with memories he had suppressed: memories of a father who died many years ago and a mother who left for ever.

This makes Elia believe what people say about his family: that the snow does not protect them but, on the contrary, puts them to the test to see if they are capable of forgetting, because everybody forgets. But the Legasovs remember, always.

It is now Elia’s turn to remember, whatever the cost. Because grief creates the winter, only every winter is different from the one before and the one before that.