In Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, Baba gives birth to Elena. It’s April 1, and everyone thinks it’s a joke at first: Baba is so fat that no one had even realized she was pregnant with her sixth child, who showed up 20 years after the others.

The little girl grows up surrounded by women: her mother, aunts and sisters. They have nothing to look forward to but marriage. When Magda, one of her sisters, emigrates to France, Elena cries so hard she nearly makes herself sick. She grows up like a weed, daydreams at school and doesn’t care about anything except the month of August, when Magda comes home with her daughter, Anna. An intense bond of friendship connects the two girls.?But Czechia is changing: war, Communism, Chernobyl, the fall of the USSR... Elena’s future is bleak. A distance grows up insidiously between the two friends, one that is all the harder to overcome in that there is a secret, as dry and sharp as summer grass, between them.