The narrator of the book, Immaculée Ilibagiza is 22 years old when the Rwandan genocide (where the majority population of Rwanda, the Hutus, kill the minority population, the Tutsi, en masse) begins. As Immaculée is from a Tutsi family, her life is decimated by the civil war: Her entire immediate family is killed, aside from her brother Aimable, who is in Senegal studying when the war breaks out. Before the war, Immaculée is a bright student, and she succeeds in every academic endeavor that she undertakes. She is home from college on a break to visit her family, to whom she is very close, when the killings start.

The main thing that carries Immaculée through the genocide—and especially her confinement in a bathroom with seven other women for three months, while unspeakable violence happens all around her—is her faith in God. Immaculée is Roman Catholic, and by the end of the war, her faith is strengthened. Her mission, after losing her entire family, is a spiritual one: Being the only one able to tell her family’s story after the genocide (a nod to the book’s title), Immaculée sees it as her mission to spread the word of God and tell the stories of those Tutsis who died in the conflict.