The phenomenal success of the novel “The Reader” (1995) by the modern German writer Bernhard Schlink is comparable only to the popularity of Patrick Suskind’s novel “Perfume”, published twenty years earlier. “The Reader” has been translated into thirty-nine languages of the world, the book has become an international bestseller and has collected a whole bunch of prestigious literary awards in Europe and America. A sudden romance between a fifteen-year-old teenager, a boy from a professor’s family, and a mature woman ended just as suddenly when she, without warning, disappeared from the city. Eight years later, he, now a final year law student, saw her again - among the former guards of a women's concentration camp at the trial against Nazi criminals. But this is not the only secret that was revealed to the hero of Bernhard Schlink’s novel “The Reader.”

Translation, afterword and notes by Boris Khlebnikov.