The Reader (pocket edition)

Paperback edition of the novel adapted for the screen, starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes In the devastated Germany of the end of World War II, teenager Michael Berg meets Hanna, a woman twenty years his senior, with whom he begins a romance marked by the discovery of sex and literature. When Hanna suddenly disappears, the young man believes he will never see her again. Years later, the two meet again. He, as a law student involved in a war crimes case; she, in the dock, accused of atrocities in a Nazi concentration camp. As he relives memories of the woman he loved and his desire for justice, Michael discovers that Hanna harbors a secret she considers more serious than murder. A dazzling novel about love, shame, and pity; about the open wounds of history; about a generation of Germans forced to live under the shadow of a past they never witnessed.