Clelia, a successful couturier, arrives in Turin after the end of the Second World War to supervise the opening of a salon in the city where she spent her youth in poverty. Drawn into a circle of young people who try to escape the futility and boredom of their lives in a mindless search for pleasure, she encounters Rosetta, whose suicide tragically foreshadows that of the author just a few months after completing this highly acclaimed contemporary classic.