The bookseller Karl Kolhoff delivers books to the homes of some of his customers in the evening hours, after the bookstore closes, traversing the picturesque streets of the town. He has a special bond with these customers - they are almost friends - and in some way, he serves as their connection to the outside world. But when Karl suddenly loses his job, it will take the power of books and a nine-year-old girl to help them all, including Karl, find the courage to reach out to one another…

Light, tender, moving, and bibliophilic, Carsten Henn's novel reminds us that we only have each other and books. Karl Kolhoff is not an ordinary 75-year-old. A lover of books and a former bookseller, he lives, one might say, attached to an earlier era, with an unprecedented romanticism. Thus, he works at his mentor Gustav's bookstore and stays there despite noticing the dislike of the new manager and Gustav's daughter towards him. Because Kolhoff, alone in life, has not learned to live any other way.

He is lonely, and his friends are books. Books and his peculiar customers: lonely people themselves, each trapped in their own greater or lesser drama, who have established a unique habit: they wait every week for their beloved bookseller to bring them the right book to their home. Karl's visits and his choices prove beneficial for these people. Especially when a strange nine-year-old, the whirlwind girl with mature thinking and courage, enters the scene, who, also finding an outlet for her own loneliness (orphaned from her mother, with a present-absent father, and being teased at school), follows Karl everywhere and changes, with her carefree childishness, the lives of his customers.