A group of friends meet in a house in the Lower Pyrenees where, between drinks, they dust off old ghosts; among them, an experimental short film entitled El animal más triste, which they shot during their university years.

After watching the film and a fleeting visit to the ruins of an abandoned village in the area, Paula, the youngest of the group, writes a story which, from that moment on, will impregnate the whole novel with the viscous consistency of desire like a kind of fateful fairy tale. A novel plagued with literary and cinematographic resonances in which sexual infidelity becomes a correlate of that other infidelity that the passing of the years forces us to exercise against ourselves. A dark and enveloping novel that underlies a subtle reflection on the hidden springs of desire and the need to explain the world through art.