As war closes in on the capital, a mother brings her twin sons to a small town near the border and leaves them with their grandmother: an illiterate, foul-mouthed old woman whom the whole town calls the Witch, and whom rumor says poisoned her own husband. The town is a world in miniature. A foreign officer lodges in the house’s spare room. A priest has secrets of his own. A girl with a harelip lives next door with her deaf, half-blind mother. A cobbler hands out boots for winter. Strangers are herded along the road toward the station. Everyone is hungry, everyone is afraid, and no one can be trusted. In the middle of it all, the twins learn to read the adults around them better than the adults read themselves. They sell, steal, bargain, and blackmail. And they slowly build their own strict code of justice, which owes nothing to church, law, or pity. They help those who ask for help. They punish those who do wrong. And they decide for themselves, without hesitation, which is which. Everything they witness goes into a large notebook, as a record of a world where good and evil have lost their usual shapes. The Notebook is a stark modern fable about war, childhood, and morality stripped to the bone.