A best-selling and controversial novel which explores issues of guilt and complicity in post-war Germany.

After a chance meeting in the street, 15-year-old Michael Berg begins a love affair with an older woman, Hanna. He visits her apartment after school, where they fall into a ritual of bathing together, making love and reading books (which Hanna asks Michael to read aloud to her during their hours together). As time goes on, Michael grapples with his guilt over keeping the relationship secret from his friends and family. And then one day, without warning, Hanna disappears from the city, leaving no forwarding address.

Years later, Michael will see Hanna again - in a courtroom. He is now a law student and Hanna is one of the defendants in a Nazi war crimes trial - one of a group of former concentration camp guards. As he watches the trial, he realises Hanna has been hiding a secret her whole life. A secret of which only he is aware.

The novel has provoked widely different reactions to its highly emotive and extremely nuanced portrayal of the post-WWII generation in Germany grappling with questions of guilt, revulsion and shame; and of personal and collective responsibility.

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. A professor emeritus of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Cardozo Law School, New York, he was also a practicing judge. He is the author of several prize-winning books including Olga, The Woman on the Stairs and Flights of Love. The Reader was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. He lives in New York and Berlin.

Read by Rupert Wickham
Abridged by Sara Davies
Produced in Bristol by Mair Bosworth and Mary Ward-Lowery for BBC Audio Show less