It's been a week since the funeral, and Mali is at her mother's Manhattan apartment, ready to pack it up-at least that's what she thinks-until she discovers a manila envelope, propped up against the back of her mother's desk, and filled with a mass of unsent letters. Her mother's handwriting on the lined notepaper is so familiar, and the slight German accent Mali hears ticking through her words, so haunting.

Mali reads the memories of her mother's Jewish childhood in 1930s Berlin, then her life in war-torn London. But when she comes to her mother's account of her too-early marriage and the divorce that forced her to leave her young daughter in London and go to New York, Mali is thrust back into her own unhappy childhood, where that relentless ache for her absent mother, lodged like a stony pit inside her, must now be reconciled.