For readers of The Hare with Amber Eyes and The Monuments Men, the story of the Nazis’ systematic pillaging of Europe’s libraries, and the heroic efforts of the few librarians now working to return the stolen books to their owners.

When we think of the Nazis’ aggression toward litarature and the arts, book burnings are often the first images that come to mind. But as the world condemned them for burning books, the Nazis were busy laying the groundwork for an even greater crime. Most of the millions of books the Nazis looted from Jewish institutions, members of the political opposition, leftists and countless other public and private libraries were not destroyed. The Nazis were amassing a library that would serve the purposes of an army of teachers, writers and researchers who would re-write history and the literary canon that would serve as the foundation of the Third Reich. But after the war ended, the books were never returned, and their origins were hidden for many of the decades that followed.

As he recounts this dark history, Anders Rydell takes readers of a journey across present day Europe, where the stolen volumes are finally being recovered. And at the state library in Berlin, he meets Detlef Brockmann, the first public librarian to look into the books’ origins, who leads the small team of librarians tasked with combing through the public collections to identify and return looted books. There, Rydell is entrusted with one of the precious volumes, and charged with returning it to the family of its orignial owner. In the wake of one of history’s most expansive cultural crimes, Rydell shows just how much a single book can mean to those who own it.