As a child raised by his mother in post-war Germany, Peter Debauer becomes fascinated by a story he discovers in the proof pages of a novel edited by his grandparents. It is the tale of a German prisoner of war who escapes from a Russian camp and braves countless dangers to return home to a wife who believes him to be dead.

But the novel is incomplete - Peter has inadvertently used the end pages of the proof for his homework - and he becomes obsessed by the question of what happened when the soldier and his wife met again.

Years later, the adult Peter remembers the novel and embarks on a search for the missing pages that soon becomes a search for his own father, a German soldier whom he always believed was killed in the war. Peter's quest leads him into a love story of his own, and as he begins to unravel the mystery of his father's disappearance, he is forced to question his own identity. He learns that reality is sometimes a reflection of the expectations of others, and that truth and fiction often intertwine.