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About the Book "Moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful....[The Reader] leaps national boundaries and speaks straight to the heart." --The New York Times Book Review When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover. She enthralls him with her passion but puzzles him with her odd silences. Then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and Hanna is on trial for a hideous crime. But as he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder. Masterfully evoking eroticism while addressing the moral dilemmas that continue to haunt postwar Germany, The Reader is an intimate coming-of-age story as well as a frank and sensitive exploration of the dark areas of a nation's uneasy and embattled conscience. "Arresting, philosophically elegant, morally complex....Mr. Schlink tells his story with marvelous directness and simplicity." --The New York Times "Haunting. . . . What Schlink does best, what makes this novel most memorable, are the small moments of highly charged eroticism." --Francine Prose, Elle |
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