The Reader - Bernhard Schlink

The Reader (Der Vorleser) is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink. It deals with the difficulties which subsequent generations have in comprehending the Holocaust; specifically, whether a sense of its origins and magnitude can be adequately conveyed solely through written and oral media. This question is increasingly at the center of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses of the Holocaust die and its living memory begins to fade.
Schlink's book was well received in his native country, and also in the United States, winning several awards. The novel was a departure from Schlink's usual detective novels. It became the first German novel to top The New York Times bestseller list. It has been translated into 37 languages and has been included in the curricula of college-level courses in Holocaust literature and German language and German literature. A 2008 film adaptation directed by Stephen Daldry was received with mixed reviews.

The novel's take on the Holocaust is doubly unusual among Holocaust fiction in that not only does it put historical distance between its narrative and the wartime period, it has as its main contact with those events a perpetrator instead of a victim.
Schlink's main theme is how his generation, and indeed all generations after the Third Reich, have struggled to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis ("the past which brands us and with which we must live"). For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation - GENERATION ZERO

The New York Times: Arresting, philosophically elegant, morally complex. . . . Mr. Schlink tells his story with marvelous directness and simplicity.

Los Angeles Times: A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel.

The New York Times Book Review: Moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful. . . . [The Reader] leaps national boundaries and speaks straight to the heart.

Elle - Francine Prose, Haunting. . . . What Schlink does best, what makes this novel most memorable, are the small moments of highly charged eroticism.