After liberation from Gross-Rosen concentration camp and months in a hospital following the end of World War II, Jewish Zofia Lederman, 18, goes in search of her younger brother, Abek. When a Russian officer tells her that Abek may be at a refugee camp in Germany with other survivors of Dachau, she makes her way there. At the camp, Zofia forms bonds with other refugees, including Josef. The two are drawn to each other and a romance slowly develops. Meanwhile, she continues her search for Abek. It feels like a miracle when her brother shows up at the camp. He was only 12 the last time she saw him; now he is a young man, one who remembers little about their lives and family years before. Many ways that Holocaust survivors and others coped and struggled after the war plays out in the lives and experiences of Zofia and other characters in this arresting novel. Zofia's own struggle to reconcile her memories and desires with reality, and to ground herself in the present while being haunted by the past, is at the heart of this moving story. (Age 12 and older)

In the rubble of a broken continent, a girl must solve a mystery whose answers could rebuild her family—or break her completely, in this New York Times bestselling, critically acclaimed tour de force historical novel from Monica Hesse, author of Girl in the Blue Coat.   Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp said the war was over, but nothing feels over to eighteen-year-old Zofia Lederman. Her body has barely begun to heal, her mind feels broken. And her life is completely shattered: Three years ago, she and her younger brother, Abek, were the only members of their family to be sent to the right, away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone else—her parents, her grandmother, radiant Aunt Maja—they went left.   Zofia's last words to her brother were a promise: Abek to Zofia, A to Z. When I find you again, we will fill our alphabet. Now her journey to fulfill that vow takes her through Poland and Germany, into a displaced persons camp where everyone she meets is trying to piece together a future from a painful past: Miriam, desperately searching for the twin she was separated from after they survived medical experimentation. Breine, a former heiress, who now longs only for a simple wedding with her new fiancé. And Josef, who guards his past behind a wall of secrets, and is beautiful and strange and magnetic all at once.

But the deeper Zofia digs, the more impossible her search seems. How can she find one boy in a sea of the missing?