The Reader

More about the book

Oprah Book Club® Selection, February 1999: Originally published in Switzerland and translated by Carol Brown Janeway, this brief tale explores themes of sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. At 15, Michael Berg embarks on an obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. When she suddenly disappears, he believes he will never see her again, but fate intervenes. Hanna becomes a defendant in a trial linked to Germany's Nazi past, revealing her guilt in an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the proceedings, he grapples with a profound question: How should his generation confront the Holocaust? He contemplates whether silence in revulsion, shame, and guilt is the only response. This narrative, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, delves into the complexities of loving those—parents, grandparents, lovers—who have committed horrific acts. It questions whether literature can offer any form of atonement. Schlink's prose is clean and stripped of excess, creating an austerely beautiful exploration of the chasm between Germany's pre- and postwar generations, the guilty and the innocent, and the relationship between words and silence.