In a small Russian provincial town, 1951. A girl named Yekaterina Sorokina, age fourteen, vanishes from her family's home on a Wednesday evening in March 1950. She is gone for thirteen months. When she is found - standing at the edge of the Belov forest, in the same dress she disappeared in, undamaged by weather - she is alive and physically unharmed. She does not speak for eleven days. When she does speak, she remembers nothing. The town, over the course of the following year, tries to explain her.