In the early years of the reign of Manuel I Komnenos, on a desolate shore of Propontis, Stavrakios Kladas reminisces about his long life. As a notary and copyist, throughout his years, having transcribed hundreds of writings of saints and learned men, he decides, now free, to compose his own chronicle.

His pen narrates his life, a story of adolescent solitude and manuscripts, a whirlpool of intellectual dilemmas, persecutions, loves, and anxieties at the dawn of the Komnenos dynasty, in the late 11th century. The lives of ordinary people during the Roman reign, the culture of words and images, but above all, the touch of memory.

All the anguish of humanity in a book that not only recounts the quest for the heavenly kingdom, but also remembers earthly life and the corporeal soul. Through its pages, the Byzantine Empire is reflected at a time when threatening shadows arise from the East and West.

In the novel, the focus is not on court conspiracies and bloody battles, but on the light from the lamps of the copyists, who lean over the lives of the saints and the treatises of letters. Through its pages, emerge the great philosopher Michael Psellos, the venerable Niketas Stethatos, scholars, monks, icon painters…

However, at the center of it all lies the verse of an enigmatic poem and a woman, the inner garment of the hero's soul, the attire that replaces the torturous habit. "On the Soul Itself" is an internal chronicle of how a copyist becomes a writer, a novel of family, adventure, and freedom, about the other Byzantium.

A book about the power of writing and memory, about this drive that demands we name the things of the world from the very beginning with our own soul as the sponsor.