"Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning...

Fifteen-year-old Aviva travels to Istanbul to vacation with her mother, but when she arrives to find her mother missing, Vivi must trust an Arab girl, as well as her own knowledge of Torah, to unravel the mystery.