Bernhard Schlink's first play is a disturbing mind game about the presence of the past and about the price of trade: being left with dirty hands. 

The last day of school falls on the 20th of July, the anniversary of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. The previous day, the right-wing party ›Deutsche Aktion‹ with their charismatic young leader won 37 percent of the vote in the regional election. In history class, a heated discussion arises between the final year students and their teacher: shouldn't the assassination attempt have been carried out 13 years earlier, in 1931? What can be learned for the future? Is it better to keep one's hands clean, or to risk getting them dirty?

A lesson about morals, responsibility and making decisions.

At seventy-six, Martin is devoted to his family life with his young wife and six-year-old son when he suddenly learns that he has only a few months to live. Shocked, he searches for answers, wrestling with his feelings and existential questions about his legacy, the meaning of his love and what can be achieved in the short time he has left. Martin wants to do everything right, but later life is full of surprises and unforeseen challenges that he must face.

After twenty years in prison, he is unexpectedly pardoned. Christiane, his sister, wants to celebrate his first weekend of freedom with a dozen old friends in a run-down villa in the country, without reporters and cameras. Henner, a journalist, Ilse, a teacher, Ulrich, a businessman, accompanied by his wife and daughter, Karin, the bishop of a small country church, Andreas, an attorney – they all supported the revolution in one form or another at that time. Today, they have their established place in bourgeois society. They come out of loyalty, nostalgia, curiosity. They would like to advise and help and, at the same time, keep their distance. But they are not able to avoid a confrontation with their own biographies, life dreams and lies. The past comes to life. Accounts are settled in the atmospheric intensity of a drawing room theatre.

The questions Schlink examines are often provoked by current conflicts: the debate surrounding the Christian crucifix and Muslim headscarves in schools, stem cell and embryonic research, the threat to human dignity posed by the battle against crime and terrorism. Other questions find their roots in literary and Biblical texts: in the poetry of Heinrich Heine, the novels of Hans Fallada, Imre Kertész, Pat Barker and Jeffrey Eugenides, the story of Jacob's struggle on the Jabbok, the narrative of Pentecost. In his treatment of these questions, Schlink verifies his standpoint. Writing as both a novelist and a lawyer, his prose is never legally abstract in discussing the law and justice, all the while retaining its narrative force when dealing with politics, the economy, literature or the Church. His writing is refreshingly clear, accessible and vivid.

These essays examine the collective guilt of the war and post-war generation, its confrontation with National Socialism and its consequences, the role played by law in coming to terms with a guilt-ridden past and the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation. They are the result of the author's confrontation during the last two decades with the experiences and entanglements of his own generation and from encounters with friends, colleagues and students from the newly-formed German states, where the author began teaching at the Humboldt University of Berlin in the year the Wall fell. These essays represent a theoretical yet readily accessible exposé of the constant thematic thread of Bernhard Schlink's literary oeuvre.

The grand new novel by the author of New York Times #1 bestseller The Reader!

This is the story of a woman who fights and finds herself, and a man who dreams and loses himself. Their moving love is entwined with the twisting paths of German history, leading us from the late 19th to the early 21st century, from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to Southwest Germany.
An intelligent woman fights the prejudices of her time.
A hopeless man loses himself in African and Arctic escapades, driven by the power-hungry dreams of his time. He can only confront reality in failure – like so many of his generation. She remains tied to him throughout her life – in thought, letters and a great rebellion. This is the story of their love.

A novel full of history.

Stories about the kind of goodbyes that weigh heavy upon us, and the ones that set us free, about the success and failure of love, about trust and betrayal, about menacing and overpowering memories and how the right thing often comes into the wrong life, and the wrong thing into the right life.
Stories about people in different phases of life and about their hopes and entanglements.
»Love and do what thou wilt« is not a recipe for a happy ending, but an answer for when all other answers fail.

Stories that surprise, disturb, and delight.

On the way home, a fifteen-year-old boy called Michael Berg gets into difficulties. A woman in her mid-thirties helps him out. Some time later, the boy takes her a bunch of flowers as a way of saying thank you. He visits her again. Hanna is the first woman he has ever desired, and a secret love begins. But there is something dark and mysterious about Hanna, and she reacts irritably to his questions about who she is. One day she disappears. She vanishes from Michael's life, but not from his thoughts. As a student of law he encounters Hanna again in court. The young man gets a shock when he realises he has loved a criminal. He can see no rhyme nor reason in the way Hanna behaves during the trial. That is, until the scales fall from his eyes. For Hanna is not only guilty of a cruel crime, she also has a desperately well-protected secret. The past is unveiled – Michael's past love, and the past of Germany. Michael realises that he cannot escape from either of them. A woman who is difficult to understand or accept, either for Michael or the reader. And the dilemma of a generation.

Birgit fled to West Berlin to Kaspar, choosing love and freedom. It is only after Birgit’s death that he discovers the price she paid. He sets out to uncover her secret in the East, meeting those she cared about, witnessing their oppression and their stubbornness first-hand. His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis – and to a young girl who comes to think of him as a grandfather, and whom he considers a granddaughter. Their worlds could not be more different – but he is determined to fight for her.

A famous painting, missing for decades, suddenly turns up again. A surprise for the art world, and confusing for the man who, as a young lawyer, became entangled in the conflict between the painter and the owner. And who, in the process, fell in love with the woman depicted in the painting. He starts to search for her, and finds much more than the answers to her demeanour and mysterious disappearance. He also has to ask questions about himself that he has always suppressed. The scene: Frankfurt am Main, Sydney and an impassable bay on the Australian coast. A novel about being in the right, about sympathy, property and loss, true and false proximity. And about the happiness of a love that knows its own finite nature.

The forms of attractions and escape from love in seven stories: as suppressed longing and unwanted confusion, as desperate affairs and bold forms of escape, as the irreversible power of habit, as guilt and self-denial. All the protagonists here are entangled in their time: The past of Germany catches up with a young man where one least expects it – in the love of a picture. A successful old Sixty-Eighter juggles himself through the depths of his liberal marriage. A couple from East Berlin betrays each other – to save their marriage. A German student in New York goes to unusual lengths to save his love for an American Jewess. ›Flights of Love‹ are at the same time stories of the big city, stories about a baffled generation that always trips over the snares of its past.

The day she stopped loving her children … So begins the story of a woman who realises that what gave her life meaning no longer does. She goes in search of, and finds the man she loved as a student and who loved her in return. Did she make the wrong decision back then? A son wants to know at long last who his father is and go on a journey with him. A man with an incurable illness arranges a summer with his family to take leave of life while it is still beautiful. A man on a plane hears the confession of his fellow passenger's life – or is it all a pack of lies? Why does a young man and father try to keep his successful wife hidden from the world? What compels a lover to keep lying to the woman he loves only to lose her- and himself in his own lies? And how do you loosen the ropes that attach you to your old life when late-flowering love holds out the promise of a new life? A gentle revealing of the lies by which we live is at the crux of these unerringly clear, beautiful short stories laced with melancholy.

As a child, Peter Debauer, the narrator of the novel, spends his holidays at his grandparents' house in Switzerland. In the evening, he sits with them at the table and reads, while they edit and correct the magazine novels with which they earn their money. Since paper is very expensive in the 1950s, his grandparents let him use the back of the edited manuscripts to scribble on, but tell him never to turn them over and read the text. One day, he simply cannot resist and turns the page - and reads about the odyssey of a German soldier to Siberia, his eventual return and subsequent search for his wife. Finally the soldier locates the city and the house in which she lives, but when his wife opens the door, another man is standing beside her, while she is holding his child on her arm. Then the soldier… But Peter Debauer cannot find out what happens next. He has already thrown away the original manuscripts – on which he has scribbled and drawn – which contained the end of the novel. Years later he recalls the story and wants to know how it ends. The search for the end of the story turns into the search for its author – a man who has repeatedly been able to hide his tracks, who has assumed a number of different identities, pursued various careers and who has developed a rather peculiar relationship to the horrors of the twentieth century. During his search, Peter Debauer encounters himself. In his attempt to discover the end of the soldier's story, he embarks on his own odyssey: the search for his origins and his return, and for the woman he loves.

Mr. Selb - private detective and former prosecutor rolled into one - is hurtling toward a head-on collision with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is investigating machinations some people would rather conceal. Those involved in the coverups? In the ›Selbian‹ case, American military men and the German machinery of justice.

How do we live with history? What must we remember, what are we allowed to forget? Do we need a culture of remembering? How far does our responsibility go? To whom do we owe solidarity, and what do we owe out of solidarity? What is the bad thing about betrayal? What makes our identity? Can we remain Christians if we have lost our belief? What does it mean to be a lawyer? How does the law change, and what is jurisdiction developing into? Taking familiar definitions, everyday experiences and societal and political conflicts as a starting point, Bernhard Schlink explores complex topics which are both timeless and highly topical – in his typically descriptive narrative style.