In this literary thriller, a woman agonizes over her mother's suicide and is thrown into turmoil over her attraction to a German. Hannah Baran is 45, a successful Montreal real estate broker with a highly lucrative client who, like her parents, is a Holocaust survivor. One day, she arrives to take her mother to the doctor's but she is gone, leaving behind a mystifying note that reads: I am not her.

Throughout Hannah's life, Rokhl's notes have been all the guidance she received from a laconic, distant mother. When Hannah announces that she must travel to Germany on business, Rokhl threatens that should Hannah ‘go to that land of murderers,' it would be over her dead body. Three days later, Hannah locates her missing mother in the morgue.