The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Teller, Janne. Nothing. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2000.

Teller's novel is divided into 26 chapters set in Tæring, a small Danish town. Agnes, a 13-year-old girl who lives in the fictional town, is the novel's first-person narrator.

The novel starts with a narrator claiming that nothing matters, so nothing is worth doing. Pierre Anthon is the speaker, a peer of Agnes's, and he says this before walking out of the classroom on their first day of school in protest. He goes to sit in a plum tree outside his house instead, talking about his nihilistic philosophy whenever any of his peers walk by. The students are perturbed by this, partially because they know he might be right; they throw stones at him to try to get him to stop, knocking him down and injuring him so that he disappears for a few times, but soon he comes back and begins saying the same things again. They decide they need to prove to Pierre that things do matter, so they set out to gather up things that matter to each of them personally.

The students give up certain things that others decide mean most to them; for instance, Agnes gives up her new sandals. Agnes gets close to another student, Gerda, to decide what she loves most, and she decides to force her to give up her hamster to the heap of meaningful things. Students give up their Danish flag; their adoption papers; their crutches; and a snake in formaldehyde purchased by one's father for the science classroom. One student, Elise, is forced to give up her baby brother, meaning she and a handful of other students need to go and dig up the two-year-old's coffin. They have to bury a couple of other headstones in order to make the hole look the same as it did before they dug it back up, and Cinderella, a dog that lives in the churchyard, follows them home, but other than that they do it undetected.

The digging up of the coffin becomes town-wide news. Meanwhile, the students continue to give things up at the behest of the others. One gives up his prayer mat and is severely beaten by his father as a result. Another one, nicknamed Huge Hans, commands a girl named Sofie to give up her innocence, and he rapes her with four other boys that night. The next day, Sofie seems cold and emotionless. She demands that another student named Holy Karl break into the town's church and steal the crucifix to add to the heap of meaning. A group of students goes with Karl to do this, and when they take it back, Cinderella continually barks at it and does not let it go with the rest of the items, urinating on it when they get it on there.

Holy Karl commands that Pretty Rosa, a student who hates blood, needs to cut off Cinderella's head to go on the heap of meaning. She does so, and then commands that Jon-Johan, a student proficient in guitar, cut off his right index finger. He was there the night of Sofie's rape, and she volunteers to cut the finger off herself. Jon-Johan threatens to tell his parents about their project if they do this, and when Sofie eventually does cut his finger off, Jon-Johan lets the secret out. The students are punished at home and at school. Agnes is still set on showing Pierre that there are things that have meaning, so she poses as a concerned adult anonymously calling the town's newspaper and successfully goads them into writing a story about it so Pierre can see. As a result, international press descends on the heap of meaning. Pierre remains convinced that nothing matters including the heap and refuses to go see it.

Questions begin to gain traction as to whether the heap is a work of art or not. The students are invited to appear on a TV show in Atlanta, but the adults prevent them from going. Agnes begins to lose faith herself in the meaning of what they gathered up. A big museum in New York offers three and a half million dollars to buy and exhibit the heap, and they accept. Pierre rubs it in their faces that they did not find meaning, since the sale kills some of the press's interest in it.

Sofie continues to fight back against Pierre's insistence that the heap has no meaning. She then goes back to the heap and tries to take it all apart, but is stopped. She eventually becomes despondent when she starts to believe that the sale of the heap of meaning has stripped it of any meaning it may have once had. The students all begin to fight, and Agnes rushes to tell Pierre about the fight, leading to him finally going over. He chastises them for getting angry at all since nothing matters anyway, then systematically goes through each item on the heap and says why they have no meaning. Then, the students beat him unconscious and burn down the sawmill with his lifeless body still in it, killing him.

The official line is that Pierre set fire to the heap because he did not want to believe these things had meaning, and got caught in the fire and died. The students are scattered to different schools the next year and rarely see each other. Agnes keeps the sawmill's ashes with her years later as a reminder that some things do have meaning, and it is unwise to insist otherwise.