Nicole Krauss
The History of Love

And yet.

This novel - beautiful and uniquely written - features a book as its protagonist ("The History of Love"), but of this book, we only know small excerpts such as this:
The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely. During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less.

Leo Gursky wrote it when he was young, dedicating it to Alma Mereminski, his lost love: Three times he asked her. She shook her head. I can't, she said. She looked down at the floor. Please, she said. And so he did the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.

Zev Litvinoff published it under his name: He learnt to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom.

Charlotte Singer reads it, loves it, and translates it, and gives her daughter the name of the protagonist, Alma.
...and when I said I was going up to my room she’d call after me, "What can I do for you, I love you so much," and I always wanted to say, but never said: Love me less.

Alma Singer (the daughter, indeed) reconstructs it all.
The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma.

This could be a synopsis of the plot. And yet.
There is much more, often encapsulated and hidden, in those and yet.
Because the book, in reality (but also the novel), speaks of this:

LAUGHING & CRYING & WRITING & WAITING

"The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life."
"Of course I am." "Why?" "Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you."