Lola lives a life filled with books and café conversations, languid siestas and projects for constructing a better Spain, but in 1936 the day comes when life is pure resistance. Now, fifteen years later, all that is left of that life is a small, old-style bookstore, hidden away in a Madrid neighbourhood, to which Lola and her husband Matías go every morning to sell romantic novelas, splendid classics and crayons. In this modest establishment, one afternoon in 1951, Lola meets Alice, a woman who has found aherreason to live in books. Together, they begin to read a book that takes the reader back in time to England, at the beginning of the 20th century, to meet a child who grew up wondering who her parents were.