In the early years of the reign of Manuel I Komnenos, on a deserted coast of Propontis, Stavrakios Kladás reminisces about his long life. A notary and scribe himself all his life, having copied hundreds of manuscripts of saints and reputable men, he decides, now free, to compose his own chronicle.

His pen narrates his life, a story of adolescent loneliness and manuscripts, a wandering through intellectual dilemmas, persecutions, loves, and anxieties at the dawn of the Komnenos dynasty in the late 11th century. The life of ordinary people during the Roman Empire, the culture of language and image, but above all the imprint of memory. All the anguish of man in a book that not only tells the search for the heavenly kingdom but also commemorates earthly life and the humble soul.

Within its pages, the Byzantine Empire is reflected at a time when threatening shadows from the East and the West multiply. In the novel, the first word is not given to court conspiracies and bloody battles, but to the light from the lamps of the scribes, who bend over the synaxaria of the saints and the treatises of letters. Within its pages emerge the high philosopher Michael Psellos, the holy Niketas Stethatos, renowned teachers, scholars, monks, iconographers... But 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 garment that replaces the tormenting robe.

About the Soul is an internal chronicle of how a scribe becomes an author, a novel of family, adventure, and freedom in the other Byzantium. A treatise on the power of writing and memory, a book about the impulse that demands we depict dreams with our breath, name things in the world from the beginning with our own soul as the adoptive parent.