'Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's 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 doesn't know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives. . .

'Wonderfully affecting...brilliant, touching and remarkably poised' Sunday Telegraph'A tender tribute to human valiance. Who could be unmoved by a cast of characters whose daily battles are etched on out mind in such diamond-cut prose?' Independent on Sunday

'Devastating...one of the most passionate vindications of the written word in recent fiction. It takes one's breath away' Spectator