John Wellfleet is an elderly man living in Metro (formerly Montreal), Canada in 2039. As transformed in the aftermath of nuclear war, society is now a totalitarian dystopia. Facing his waning years in a depressed state, John lives in a community for elderly residents. John’s life is completely altered when a young historian, André Gervais, unearths a trove of family documents from the Wellfleets and the Dehmels, to whom he is connected by marriage. This takes him back six decades and across the ocean to World War II Germany, into the thick of Nazi intrigue and a plot on Hitler’s life. From the papers, John learns his cousin Timothy, a journalist, played a key role in bringing these war issues to light, but a fundamental flaw in Timothy's investigative method—and perhaps in his motivations—turned what was supposed to be an exposé into a tragedy.

John learns that a man named Conrad Dehmel and his father had been involved in a plan to assassinate Hitler, though his brother had remained a committed Nazi. Cousin Timothy had been an activist journalist in the 1960s–1970s, even hosting a current events television show. In his zeal to expose wartime atrocities, he erroneously concluded that Conrad Dehmel had remained a Nazi. His false accusations destroyed not only the reputation of Conrad, who had since become a respected scholar of Egyptology, but ultimately cost him his life (Conrad was assassinated by a man who lost his family in a concentration camp).

As John sorts through the pieces of these two historical eras, he is disturbed to learn of such behavior within his own family. Trying to find meaning in such misfortunes, he is surprised to gain strength from the examples of the sacrifices others made before him and to find optimism in the possibility of future changes in his own society. He grows closer to André, who has written a book about the events. John decides to leave his grim elderly residence compound and live in the younger man’s community, where he finds that his music recordings and other treasures from the past, including his own memories, are welcomed by its members.