Better

There is no rose without a thorn. There is no passion without torment.

Vanessa Clark, a second-year college student, has a visceral love of books and rain and an unbreakable bond with her best friends. Marked by her parents' difficult divorce, she found comfort in Travis, apparently the good guy that all mothers—including hers—would like next to their daughter. With him she hopes to be able to build a happiness that she has been missing for too long now. After two years, however, even that love seems to have cracked and only rubble remains in Vanessa's heart. At least until, in class, she meets new classmate Thomas Collins for the first time.

With a body covered in tattoos, green eyes in which it is all too easy to get lost, and a troubled past, Thomas is an explosive mix of charm and arrogance. He and Vanessa, so different from each other yet deep down so similar, fit together like pieces of a puzzle, giving life to a tormented relationship, made up of moments of passion and glimpses of tenderness, furious quarrels and reconciliations.

But Vanessa wants more, she dreams of true, romantic and all-encompassing love, the kind of love story told in the novels that she never gets tired of reading. Thomas, on the other hand, shuns every bond, feeling as though a perennial tangle of thorns is agitated in his chest. And yet, if understanding each other is difficult, parting is impossible.

This Work has been translated with a grant from the Centre for Books and Reading of the Italian Ministry of Culture.