Empty Hearts is set in a near future where the European Union is breaking apart and a vapid populist party is in the German government.

The business woman Britta is the founder and CEO of The Bridge, a Braunschweig-based company that finds desperate people through algorithms and online data harvesting and matches them with terrorist groups in need of suicide bombers.

When Britta and her business partner Babak hear of a suicide attack they had nothing to do with, they act in response to their competition and become entangled with another entrepreneur, Guido Hatz.

[1] Jacqueline Thör of Die Zeit wrote that Zeh cleverly portrayed the contradictions of the society she lives in and called Empty Hearts the German equivalent of Submission by Michel Houellebecq.

She wrote that the novel's structure is "experimental" but criticised the language and narrative style for relying too much on rhetorical devices and rapid, direct speech.