The Reader (W&N Essentials) - Softcover

Originally published in Switzerland and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading and shame in post-war Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: what should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?"

The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. What does it mean to love those people--parents, grandparents, even lovers--who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known? And is any atonement possible through literature? Schlink's prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue and excess in any form. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germany's pre and post-war generations, between the guilty and the innocent and between words and silence. --R Ellis, Amazon.com

Deeply moving, sensitive enough to make me wince, a Holocaust novel, but light years away from the common run (Ruth Rendell Sunday Telegraph)

Schlink's extraordinary novel The Reader is a compelling meditation on the connections between Germany's past and its present, dramatised with extreme emotional intelligence as the story of a relationship between the narrator and an older woman. It has won deserved praise across Europe for the tact and power with which it handles its material, both erotic and philosophical (Independent)

Leaps national boundaries and speaks straight to the heart . . . a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work (New York Times)

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink is the German novel I have been waiting for: it objectifies the Holocaust and legitimately makes all mankind responsible (Sir Peter Hall Observer)

For generations to come, people will be reading and marvelling over Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (Evening Standard)

Haunting and unforgettable (Literary Review)

[Schlink] explores the conflict between generations, wrestling with collective guilt and individual motivation. He examines the nature if understanding and tests the limits of forgiveness. He does these things with honesty, restraint and a moral precision both unsettling and rare. The result is as compelling as any thriller (The Times)

Schlink's novel has a wondeful clarity of style that serves to emphasise the moral complexity of its subject matter (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

The Reader cannot be ignored. It challenges core definitions of good and evil...The Reader brings us face to face with how little we know about the people around us (Norman Lebrecht EVENING STANDARD)

A powerful book, it lingers in the mind (OXFORD TIMES)