Summer Lies

Description

A conversation between strangers on a long-haul flight will change lives forever; one night in Baden-Baden will threaten to tear a couple apart; a meeting with an ex-lover will give a divorcee a second chance; holiday lovers will struggle in the harsh reality of daily routine. . . As Schlink's characters navigate their lives, we discover the many faces of love: the small betrayals, hidden truths and abiding affections. In Schlink's trademark spare prose, we come face to face with the desires and jealousies that define our daily lives, with the fragility of happiness and with the abiding possibility of hope. Tender yet unsentimental, achingly personal yet utterly universal, SUMMER LIES asks what it means to love, to deceive and, ultimately, to be human.

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany is 1944. A professor of law at Humboldt University, Berlin and Cardozo Law School, New York, he is the author of the major international bestselling novel and movie THE READER, short story collection Flights of Love and several prize-winning crime novels. He lives in Berlin and New York.

Summer Lies is pleasingly dark in its reflections on disappointment and sorrow in adult life ... Admirers of The Reader will not be dissappointed * Financial Times * Unlike many novelists who use short fiction as a rest stop on the highway to longer works, Schlink seems to have lingered with these stories. Each story in Summer Lies has heft, solidty * Scotsman * With his mournful, meditative new collection of stories, translated, like The Reader, by Carol Brown Janeway, Mr Schlink comes closer than ever to putting the war behind him * International Herald Tribune * The Reader is a fine novel ... A sensitive, daring, deeply moving book about the tragic results of fear and the redemptive power of understanding -- Ruth Rendall on The Reader Crammed with incident and analysis, and yet Schlink finds room for virtuoso passages of evocation ... compelling * London Review of Books on The Reader * Extraordinary depth and worldwide critical acclaim * Guardian on The Weekend * A succinct fascinating insight into Germany's ongoing examination of its troubled past * Daily Express on The Reader * Told with an elegant realism. * SUNDAY HERALD * As in his previous books - most notably, The Reader (1995) - Schlink meditates on guilt and conscience. But the focus of his reflections has shifted from Germany's Nazi past to his characters' private lives. Love and family are the things at stake here, and each story turns on the pursuit and unmasking of a deception... This is the book's notion of summer: a season as precarious and fleeting as the moments of love around which Bernhard Schlink's characters build edifices of deceit -- Jane Yager * TLS *