'The Reader' has been translated into thirty-nine languages, becoming an international bestseller and winning a host of prestigious literary awards in Europe and America. Contemporary German literature, represented by the brilliant names of Heinrich Böll, Hermann Hesse, and Günter Grass, has been enriched by another celebrated name: Bernhard Schlink.

The sudden romance between a fifteen-year-old boy from a professorial family and a mature woman ended just as abruptly when she disappeared from the city without warning. Eight years later, he, now a final-year law student, saw her again—among the former guards of a women's concentration camp at a trial of Nazi war criminals. But that's not the only secret revealed to the hero of Bernhard Schlink's novel 'The Reader.'