Summer Lies: Stories

In seven masterfully controlled, emotionally veracious stories, Bernhard Schlink—best-selling author of The Reader—brings his trademark light touch to the emergence of truth, love, and lies.

The truth is, as a character in Bernhard Schlink's provocative new collection puts it, "passionate, beautiful, and hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it's always liberating." So, too, is the act of telling a lie—to others and to ourselves. In "After the Season," a man of humble means falls quickly in love with a woman belonging to a much elevated financial status and wrestles with his feelings and his beliefs about the rich. A son takes his distant father to a Bach festival in "Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen" only to learn that perhaps he was the one who was never really present in their relationship. And in "The Night in Baden-Baden" a man who's caught in a lie changes his ways—by sleeping with another woman only after being accused of it. With Summer Lies, Bernhard Schlink brings his subtle skill to the emergence of truth and deception.