The Solitude of Prime Numbers

As Giordano notes in his book, prime numbers can only divided by one or themselves, and the two principle characters in his story reflect a similar singularity in the loneliness. As a child, Alice was forced by her father to join him for a skiing trip where she broke her leg, causing her to walk with a limp for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, Mattia had to attend a birthday party with his developmentally disabled sister, Michela, and when he turned his back on her for a moment, she disappeared. The physical and emotional scars of these events haunt Alice and Mattia through much of their lives; while she is clearly attracted to him and their lives cross paths on a regular basis, various circumstances prevent them from coming together as a couple, as Alice becomes an assistant to a successful photographer and Mattia goes on to a distinguished career as a mathematician.