A burnt-out author, who can no longer mine material from his own life for his novels, "buys" the life of an elderly woman he meets at a book fair. In exchange for his last few thousand euros, the woman, Salme Malmikunnas, a retired yarn and button saleswoman, relates her life story over the course of two interviews held in a secluded highway café. The author is instantly reinvigorated, but the two soon come into conflict over the degree to which he may embellish Salme's reminiscences. His imagination begins to run wild with the lives of her three children, and as they all lurch from crisis to crisis, Salme founders in the shifting sands of the little white lies they have told her, and the fabrications of her new friend.

The Human Part is at once an absurdist meditation on the relationship between truth and falsehood in fiction and a panoramic state-of-the-nation novel. Racism, communism, the global financial crisis and the literary legacies of Finland's finest writers are all dissected. There are shades of George's Pennac's masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual, in the subtly oblique angle of Hotakainen's approach.