Jep Gambardella, a 65-year-old journalist and once promising novelist, spends his easy life among Romes high society in a swirl of rooftop parties and late-night soirees. But when he learns of the death of his friends wife - a woman he loved as an 18-year-old - his life is thrown into perspective and he begins to see the world through new eyes. A dazzling, dizzying, mesmerising and hypnotic