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From the bestselling author of The Reader, a striking exploration of the wounds of the past, told through the story of a German bookseller's attempt to connect with his radicalized granddaughter.
It is only after the sudden death of his wife, Birgit, that Kaspar discovers the price she paid years earlier when she fled East Germany to join him: she had to abandon her baby. Shattered by grief, yet animated by a new hope, Kaspar closes up his bookshop in present day Berlin and sets off to find her lost child in the east.
His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, intent on reclaiming and settling ancestral lands to the East. Among them, Kaspar encounters Svenja, a woman whose eyes, hair, and even voice remind him of Birgit. Beside her is a red-haired, slouching, fifteen-year-old girl. His granddaughter? Their worlds could not be more different— an ideological gulf of mistrust yawns between them— but he is determined to accept her as his own.
More than twenty-five years after The Reader, Bernhard Schlink once again offers a masterfully gripping novel that powerfully probes the past's role in contemporary life, transporting us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to modern day Australia, and asking what unites or separates us.
"Schlink offers an unflinching look at the neo-Nazi movement and the compromises people make out of love. It's a powerful story of loss and the desire to move forward." —Publishers Weekly
"The Granddaughter is the great novel of German reunification ... a perfect blend of sadness and tenderness." —Le Figaro
"Some great novels manage to encapsulate an entire era, showing how history makes its way into the innermost recesses of families and individuals. Such is the case with War and Peace, in its epic style, and such is the case, for a very different subject, with Bernhard Schlink's new book, The Granddaughter." —Le Monde
"Bernhard Schlink is one of the greatest talents in contemporary German literature. He is a sensitive, keenly observant and extremely intelligent storyteller. His prose is clear, precise and beautifully elegant." —Frankfurter Neue Presse
This information about The Granddaughter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bernhard Schlink was born July 6, 1944 in Bethel, Germany, the youngest of four children. He studied law at West Berlin’s Free University, graduating in 1968. He served as a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia beginning in 1988, and became a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany in 1992, a position he held until his retirement in 2006.
Schlink began his career as a writer with several detective novels, one of which one the Glauser Prize in 1989. The Reader was published in 1995 and became a bestseller in both Germany and the United States. It was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list. In 1997 it won the Hans Fallada Prize, an ...
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