On New Year's Eve 1990 in Rome, a sixteen-year-old prepares for her first New Year's Eve party. She wears a Caritas sweater and has applied her dark skin with clumsy makeup, but she is proud and full of hope for the new year. Without realizing it, her destiny will be fulfilled that evening, the same destiny that also befalls her family. As the television reports the outbreak of civil war in Somalia, "Jirro" takes root in her soul, never to leave her again. Jirro is one of many Somali words in this book; it represents the illness of trauma and uprooting, an evil that lives within all who experience diaspora. Born in Italy to exiles during the Siad Barre dictatorship, Igiaba Scego interweaves Italian with Somali sounds to create these pages that are at once a letter to a young cousin, a historical account, a family tree, and an alchemical laboratory where suffering becomes hope through the power of words. Words that tenaciously unite what history tries to divide, in a story that shows us how deeply distant events touch us. The story of her grandfather, interpreter for General Graziani during the Italian occupation; her father, a prominent diplomat; her mother, raised by a nomadic clan and swallowed up by the civil war; the humiliations of immigrants in Rome in the 1990s; the lack of a common language for a family scattered across continents; a disease that day after day drains the light from her eyes. Like a modern-day Cassandra, Igiaba Scego transforms her bitterness into a forgiving view of the world. She writes a magnificent book about our past and present, one that celebrates brotherhood, forgiveness, care, and peace.