The Reader

The phenomenal success of the novel “The Reader” (1995) by the modern German writer Bernhard Schlink is comparable perhaps only to the popularity of Patrick Süskind’s novel “Perfume,” published twenty years earlier. “The Reader” has been translated into thirty-nine languages, became an international bestseller, and won a bouquet of prestigious literary awards in Europe and America.

A romance that flared up suddenly between a fifteen-year-old teenager— a boy from a professor’s family—and a mature woman, abruptly ended when she disappeared from the city without warning. Eight years later, he—now a final-year law student—sees her again, among the former female overseers of a women’s concentration camp, at a trial against Nazi criminals. But this is not the only secret that opens up to the hero of Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader.”