Vita Woods produces a popular podcast and lives with her successful doctor boyfriend, Max. But as much as things are going right, the days are dark. Vita is not leaving the house. In fact, she can barely make it out of bed. Instead, she spends long, blurred hours falling in and out of The Pit, dead to the world and to herself. For months, Vita has been sick with an illness that no doctor can diagnose. And recently, Luigi, a Renaissance poet nursing a 500-year-old heartbreak, has started showing up at her bedside. He says he’s come to release her. But he may be a ghost, an apparition of her sickly mind. Then, when an unexpected mix-up pushes her into the path of her upstairs neighbors, Vita finds friendship --- and perhaps more --- in the apartment above. But something about her "condition" keeps nagging at her. What if the problem is Vita herself?

Jess Walker has come to a concrete campus under the flat gray skies of East Anglia for one reason: to be taught by the mesmerizing and rebellious Dr. Lorna Clay, whose seminars soon transform Jess' thinking on life, love and Agatha Christie. Swept up in Lorna's thrall, Jess falls in with a tightly knit group of rule-breakers --- until the dynamic among the friends begins to darken. When a tragedy shatters their friendships and love affairs and reveals a terrible secret, Jess must face the question she fears most: What is the true cost of an extraordinary life?