Summer Lies : Stories

From Bernhard Schlink, the internationally best-selling author of The Reader, come seven provocative and masterfully calibrated stories. A keen dissection of the ways in which we play with truth and less-than-truth in our lives. Summer Lies brims with the delusions, the passions, the outbursts, and the sometimes irrational justifications people make within a melange of beautifully rendered relationships. In 'After the Season,' a man falls quickly in love with a woman he meets on the beach but wrestles with his incongruous feelings of betrayal after he learns she's rich. In ';Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen,' a son tries to put his resentment toward his emotionally distant father behind him by proposing a trip to a Back festival but soon realizes, during his efforts to reconnect, that it wasn't his father who was the distant one. A philandering playwright is accused to infidelity by his wife in ';The Night in Baden-Baden,' but he sees her accusations as nothing more than a means to exculpate himself of his guilt as he carries on with his ways. And in ';Stranger in the Night,' an obliging professor becomes an accomplicenot entirely unwittinglyto the temporary escape of a charismatic fugitive on a delayed flight from New York to Frankfurt.The truth, as once character puts it, is ';passionate, beautiful sometimes, and sometimes hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it always sets you free.' Tantalizingly, so is the act of telling a lieto others and to ourselves.