4 ideas
In 1950s Sardinia, the widow Anna Teresa Listru gives her unwanted fourth daughter, Maria, to the childless seamstress Bonaria Urrai as a 'fill'e anima', a soul-child. As she grows up, Maria learns that Bonaria also leaves the house at night to end the lives of dying villagers when their families ask. Maria recoils and flees to Turin, but Bonaria's final illness brings her back to face the same choice from inside it.
A 'fill'e anima' is a child passed from a poor family to a childless adult by open, communal agreement, with no legal paperwork. The village treats the child as belonging to both households. Motherhood is defined as a chosen, ongoing obligation, not a fact of birth.
Bonaria calls herself a last mother, likening her work to midwifery at the other end of life: she helps the dying out of the world as a midwife helps the newborn in. The novel sets this framing against the moral conflict around Nicola's death rather than letting it settle whether her acts are care or violence. The same woman who clothes the living also prepares the dying.
Maria condemns Bonaria from a distance, but Bonaria's final illness brings her to the bedside of the woman who raised her. Because Bonaria cannot speak after her stroke, Maria has no clear request to answer and must interpret her suffering herself. The novel shows how a firm verdict held from outside becomes harder to hold once the question falls to her.