Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mothers loneliness. Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author.

Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the love lost that sixty years ago in Poland inspired him to write a book. And although he doesnt know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives.