Leda loses consciousness while driving and wakes in a hospital with an unexplained wound on her side.

Leda's adult daughters move to Canada, and she feels joyfully and guiltily free from the obligations of motherhood.

Leda arrives at a beach resort on the Ionian coast and establishes a routine of reading and swimming alone.

Leda becomes captivated watching Nina and her daughter Elena play together on the beach.

The Neapolitan family demands Leda move her umbrella, and she refuses to yield her space.

Elena goes missing on the beach, and the entire Neapolitan family searches in a panic.

Leda finds Elena crying under her straw hat, distressed over her lost doll, and returns the child to Nina.

Leda realizes as she leaves the beach that Elena's doll Nani is inside her own bag.

Leda encounters Nina and the Neapolitan family at a toy store, where they are buying a replacement doll.

Leda shocks the Neapolitans by calmly admitting she abandoned her daughters with their father for three years.

Leda calls the missing doll reward hotline and simultaneously spots Nina kissing Gino in the trees.

At a street fair, Leda buys Nina a hatpin and the two discuss why Leda left and returned to her daughters.

Leda uses tweezers to pull a worm from Nani's mouth, removing the baby Elena believed was inside the doll.

Nina arrives at Leda's apartment to collect the keys needed for a secret meeting with Gino.

Leda presents Nina with the stolen doll, and an enraged Nina stabs Leda with the hatpin before fleeing.

The novel opens with Leda waking in a hospital after a mysterious accident, then moves back to the solo beach vacation that caused it. Leda becomes fixated on a young mother named Nina and her daughter Elena, whose bond on the beach seems to represent a perfect motherhood Leda never achieved. When Elena briefly vanishes, Leda finds the child safe but secretly takes her beloved doll Nani, setting off days of mounting tension as the family searches desperately. Despite growing pressure, Leda keeps the doll, confessing to the Neapolitans along the way that she once abandoned her own daughters entirely. The confrontation ends violently when Leda reveals the theft to Nina, who stabs her with a hatpin and flees, leaving Leda to receive a call from her daughters as she quietly packs to leave.

The core story of obsession, theft, and confrontation at the beach.

Arriving at her rented apartment, Leda discovers a beautiful display of fruit is rotten and decayed underneath.

Leda finds a cicada on her pillow and tosses it out the window, noting that female cicadas cannot sing.

Leda meets the handsome young beach attendant Gino and realizes she can only see him through her daughters' eyes.

Leda helps a Dutch family understand the Neapolitans' request to move their beach umbrellas.

Rosaria shares birthday cake with Leda and the two briefly discuss Rosaria's first pregnancy at age 42.

Walking back to her car through the pinewood, Leda is struck in the back by a large pinecone.

Leda phones her daughters and ends the call feeling more agitated after Marta talks only about herself.

Leda sees the elderly caretaker Giovanni flirting with her at a bar in order to impress his card-playing friends.

Leda watches Elena play contentedly alone with Nani and reflects on the social pressures that led her to have children.

Over dinner, Gino tells Leda he searched the beach for the missing doll and despises Nina's husband's family.

Neapolitan children hand out reward flyers around the beach bathhouse for whoever returns Elena's missing doll.

Rowdy Neapolitan youths disrupt a film Leda is watching and mock her when she threatens to call the police.

Giovanni brings Leda a freshly caught fish and the two share wine and tender conversation about their families.

Giovanni spots the doll on Leda's terrace and asks whether she has heard about Elena's missing toy.

Leda's daughters both call her after the stabbing, and she tells them she is dead but fine.

These events trace the quieter texture of Leda's beach holiday, from her arrival at a rented apartment with rotting fruit to her daily encounters with the people around her. Leda forms tentative connections with the young beach attendant Gino and the elderly caretaker Giovanni, while her emotional distance from her own daughters is exposed by a single hollow phone call. Friction with the Neapolitan family builds through small confrontations and embarrassments, and the spreading search for Elena's missing doll — reward flyers, disrupted evenings, and loaded conversations — tightens the pressure on Leda to confess. Giovanni's visit to Leda's apartment brings a moment of warmth but also dangerous proximity to the hidden doll on her terrace. The pool closes on the novel's final emotional note, as Leda's daughters call after the stabbing and she delivers her quiet, resigned last line.

The background moments and encounters that shape Leda's vacation.

Leda initially ignores the loud Neapolitan family on the beach because they remind her too much of her Naples childhood.

Hearing Nina speak in Neapolitan dialect triggers Leda's painful memories of her mother threatening to abandon her daughters.

Up close at her umbrella, Nina appears far less beautiful and refined than she seemed from a distance.

Nina's husband and more relatives arrive by boat, reminding Leda of her own family's domineering and volatile nature.

After Nina walks off alone down the beach, Leda notices Elena's doll sitting abandoned in the sand.

Examining Nani at home, Leda remembers giving her daughter Bianca her beloved childhood doll Mina as a gift.

Leda recalls throwing her cherished childhood doll off the balcony after Bianca defaced it with a marker.

Leda holds Nani close and kisses the doll, deciding she does not want to return it to Elena.

Leda recalls how a woman named Lucilla easily played the good mother to her daughters on holiday, displacing Leda entirely.

The English backpacker Brenda asks to read something Leda has written, making Leda feel valued beyond her role as mother.

A prominent academic named Hardy publicly quotes Leda's paper at a London conference, launching her career.

Emboldened by academic success, Leda leaves her daughters and husband behind to pursue her career and a new affair.

Leda sees her daughters for the last time before three years apart, performing their requested orange-peel snake trick.

Nina asks Leda whether the turmoil of motherhood will ever end, and Leda refuses to promise it will.

Leda decides she is playing the same liberating role for Nina that the backpacker Brenda once played for her.

This pool traces the internal revelations and key memories that explain Leda's complicated relationship with motherhood and her own identity. Beginning with the moment Leda recognizes her own Neapolitan roots in the family on the beach, it moves through her memories of a fearful childhood, her struggles as a young mother, and her possessive attachment to a childhood doll she ultimately destroyed. The arrival of the English backpacker Brenda, who treated Leda as an intellectual rather than a mother, and the public recognition of her academic work at a London conference together explain why Leda ultimately chose to abandon her daughters for three years. These memories surface alongside the present-day drama of the stolen doll, as Leda's decision to keep Nani is revealed as both a childish act and a search for an identity beyond motherhood. The pool closes on Leda's quiet realisation that she can offer Nina the same glimpse of freedom that Brenda once offered her.