Summer Lies

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)