Sometimes when you are looking for the dead, you find the living. When Irene joins the International Tracing Service, she becomes consumed by a singular obsession: returning the belongings confiscated from concentration camp prisoners to their families. A faded cloth doll.

A medallion. An embroidered handkerchief. Each object holds a story - and behind each one, a life waiting to be pieced back together.

As Irene traces the owners through fragments of evidence, she reconstructs their final days and discovers that even in the darkest chapter of history, humanity endured. The Bureau of Unknown Fates is a devastating and beautiful novel about history, memory and survival as one woman helps connect families across generations to the ones they have lost.