Product Description
A schoolboy in post-war Germany, Michael collapses one day in the street and is helped home by a woman in her thirties. Later he visits the woman, at his mother's insistence, taking flowers to thank her. A week later he returns again. He is fascinated by this older woman, and he and Hanna begin a secretive affair.
Limited to seeing Hanna a few hours a week, he learns little of her. She is sometimes harsh and domineering, and his questions about her life and her family are ignored or rebuffed. Gradually, he begins to be frustrated by their relationship, but then is shocked and obscurely guilty when Hanna simply disappears, leaving job, potential promotion, her apartment and the city in which they both have lived. His life goes on, but the memories and questions remain with him.
Some years later, as a law student, Michael is in court to follow a case. To his amazement he recognises Hanna as one of the defendants in this major trial. The object of his adolescent passion is a criminal. Her attitude during the trial is bizarre, as she allows herself to be presented as the ringleader of her co-defendants and seems to be almost wilfully mishandling her defence. But suddenly Michael understands that her behaviour, both now and in the past, conceals a secret buried deeper even than her terrible crimes.
The past erupts into the present - the past of their relationship and Germany's past. Both are to trap Michael for the rest of his life, haunted by the memories of a relationship that he cannot move beyond - and by the dilemma of an entire generation.
Powerful, haunting and unforgettable, The Reader is both an extraordinary story of memory and desire and profound exploration of modern Germany's relationship with its past
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