In The Book of Words, Jenny Erpenbeck captures the inner life of a young girl, who is surviving in the brutal, totalitarian regime of a curiously unnamed South American country (most likely Argentina during its "dirty war"). Raised by parents whose real identity ends up shocking her, the girl comes of age in a country where gunshots are mistaken for blown tires, innocent citizens are dragged off buses, and friends and family, tortured and disappeared, return to visit her from the dead.