The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

A teenage boy has an affair with a woman twice his age. She mysteriously disappears, and the next time the boy sees her, he is a young man in law school and she is on trial. While the man observes a Nazi trial for one of his classes, he is shocked to find out that Hannah, his first love, was a Nazi. Hannah kept a secret that she found even more agonizing, and it is that secret that is supposed to shock the reader. Hannah is illiterate; she can neither read nor write. In an effort to toot my own horn, I must write that I figured this out very early on in the book.

I cannot figure out if the following idea was meant to be Schlink's main point or if it was just a bi-product of his story: Illiteracy is one of society's great crimes, capable of leading people to even greater crimes. There are questions of shame, love and reparation in this novel, which approaches the aftermath of possibly the most written about atrocity in human history from an entirely fresh angle.

Carefully chosen wordings and images pulled from the man's memory are showcased throughout the novel. Schlink writes cleanly and beautifully, allowing his story to tell itself without any unnecessary verbosity.