On 28 October 1998, aged eleven, Camerini drew the five winning numbers for the Rome wheel of the Italian state lottery. For one night he was the one who decided somebody's fortune. The book starts from that and gathers a range of documents to look at luck from several sides at once: as something invented, something sold, something promised, something believed in. It sits between faith and superstition, between philosophical enquiry and the private, endless search, and asks how much of our behaviour, alone and together, is shaped by what we take luck to be.