Senhor José is a lonely clerk in the Central Registry, where the records of the living and the dead are kept in a vast, orderly archive. One day he comes across the file of a woman he does not know and becomes obsessed with finding out who she is. His quiet life begins to change as he bends the rules and follows her trail. The novel is a gentle, darkly comic meditation on bureaucracy, loneliness, identity and the desire to connect with another human being.