On August 1, 1937, a parade full of red flags passes through Paris. It is the funeral procession for Gerda Taro, the first photographer to fall on a battlefield. On that very day she would have turned twenty-seven. Robert Capa, in the front row, is devastated: they had been happy together, he had taught her how to use the Leica, and then they had both left for the Spanish War. In the crowd follow others who had been linked to Gerda long before she became Capa's girlfriend: Ruth Cerf, the friend from Leipzig, with whom she lived through the toughest times in Paris after fleeing Germany; Willy Chardack, who has been content with the role of cavalier servant since the irresistible girl preferred him to Georg Kuritzkes, who was busy fighting in the International Brigades. For all, Gerda will remain a stronger and more living presence than the celebrated anti-fascist heroine: Gerda has often disappointed and hurt them, but her joie de vivre, her thirst for freedom are sparks capable of rekindling even decades later. All it takes is an intercontinental phone call between Willy and Georg, who are in touch for an entirely different reason, to set in motion a kaleidoscopic novel, built on the original sources, of which Gerda is the beating heart. It is her pulse that holds together a flow that laces distant eras and places, bringing to life the snapshots of these 1930s boys grappling with the economic crisis, the rise of Nazism, and the hostility toward refugees that in France affected especially those who were Jewish and leftist, like them. But for those who loved her, that youth remains the time when, as long as Gerda lived, anything still seemed possible.