Sometimes when you are looking for the dead, you find the living.
In 1990, Irene joins the The International Tracing Service. Meticulous and conscientious, she quickly becomes obsessed with her work - at the cost of her personal life. Years later, she is entrusted with returning thousands of confiscated objects, recovered from the liberated camps.
Irene pieces together the identity of each object's rightful owner, in order to give the descendants of the victims something by which to remember their lost relatives. A faded cloth doll, a medallion, an embroidered handkerchief . . . every object contains its secrets. Over the course of her investigations, Irene reconstructs what happened to the deceased from the traces they left behind, and in so doing she glimpses humanity - at its worst, but also, its best.
Weaving together the trajectories of these individual lives with the collective memory of Europe, this devastatingly beautiful novel is suffused with wisdom and compassion.
