Summer Lies
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novel, THE READER, a mesmerising collection of stories about about love in all its guises.
A conversation between strangers on a long-haul flight will change lives for ever; one night in Baden-Baden will threaten to tear a couple apart; a meeting with an ex-lover will give a divorcee a second chance; holiday lovers will struggle in the harsh reality of daily routine...
As Schlink's characters navigate their lives, we discover the many faces of love: the small betrayals, hidden truths and abiding affections. In Schlink's trademark spare prose, we come face to face with the desires and jealousies that define our daily lives, with the fragility of happiness and with the abiding possibility of hope.
Tender yet unsentimental, achingly personal yet utterly universal, SUMMER LIES asks what it means to love, to deceive and, ultimately, to be human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Most of the seven short stories in Schlink's eloquent and profound second collection are thematically bound by the protagonists' titular distortions. "The day she stopped loving her children was no different from other days," opens "The Journey to the South," which finds Nina, an elderly divorced woman, traveling to look up her old lover, Adalbert Paulsen, who confronts her about the lies behind their breakup years ago. In "The Last Summer," retired professor Thomas Wellmer assembles his family, his "components of happiness," one last time before a planned suicide due to the increasing pain of terminal cancer. His wife discovers the lethal cocktail bottle, and he's forced to reveal his plan to the whole family with surprising results. In the somewhat lighter "The Night in Baden-Baden," a playwright is falsely accused by his longtime girlfriend of having an affair. Bereft after this shocking, and violent, accusation, the playwright has a tryst with a waitress, fulfilling his girlfriend's fears, in what may be the gem in a generally top-notch collection from Schlink (The Reader).
