Who can summarise his or her own life in three hundred words? Marcos, the scientist who is the main character of Andrés Barba's fantastic novel, constantly comes up against this impossibility over Christmas, while his wife and brother-in-law, a famous now retired comic with a crazed and complicated political past, meet for the first time the year their mother has died. With his customary talent for intimate spaces, Barba gives us a novel about identity but also about family, humour, desire and the surprise that always comes with the true discovery of the other.