Dr Kate Kennedy, biographer, cellist, and Oxford lecturer in Music and English, traces a journey across Europe following six cellos and the people who played them. She covers the Cristiani Stradivarius and its first female soloist, the Mendelssohn cello, and the Mara Stradivarius surviving the Nazi occupation of Trieste, including a story of a player leaping from a burning ship with the instrument. The most striking section follows Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and the Auschwitz orchestra under Alma Rosé, where playing literally kept musicians alive. Kennedy also visits a Stradivarius repurposed as a beehive and a cello built from the inside out for children with disabilities. Throughout, she asks what an instrument can preserve of a person once their voice is gone, closing on the idea that a cello cannot keep someone intact but can carry something of them forward.