In Paris, with his last hundred euros in his pocket, a thirty-year-old man buys a one-way ticket to Rome. He has read a small news item at the bottom of a newspaper page: B.S. is dead. That was all it took for him to decide to return. That name takes him back to a distant summer in Liguria in the early 2000s. A summer of sea, waiting, and afternoons spent alongside a man met by chance—a man who smoked cigarettes and told a young boy about his exceptional, messy life. 

B.S. is everything the protagonist's parents are not. He isn't interested in "grand ideas"; he is interested in understanding where the world is headed and getting there first. Despite being an elusive, shadowy figure, he played a prominent role in national history. From Italy’s great mysteries to the fall of Communism, through the Genoa G8 and the collapse of the Twin Towers—between the end of the American Dream and Scrooge McDuck—B.S. becomes a mirror of Italy’s recent history. He is a magnificent "bad teacher”. 

Giulio Silvano delivers a reversed coming-of-age novel in which growing up means losing the very words one used to learn how to exist in the world. A secular requiem for a man, an era, and a country that has never truly come to terms with itself.