What do we really know about the people closest to us? When Lea Ypi discovers an unknown photo on the Internet showing her grandparents doing après-ski in the Italian Alps in 1941, she wonders what she really knows about her family. Why did her beloved grandmother Leman, called Nini, speak French when she had grown up in Salonika, as the granddaughter of a dignitary? What had motivated her to leave Greece as a young woman and go to Tirana on her own? How had she come to be with Asyllan, her husband, who soon disappeared into a 'university' for many years? And why did she smile in the snow of Cortina and at a time when there was nothing to laugh about because a cruel war was raging in Europe? Lea travels to the places of Leman's life in order to reconstruct it piece by piece on the basis of archival materials, files and anecdotes. Spellbound, one follows her into the lost world of the Ottoman aristocracy, to the cradle of the new nation states in the Balkans and, of course, to Albania, first under fascist occupation, then under communist rule.