Ocean State Libraries

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER •  Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.
"A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel." —Los Angeles Times
When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old

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Post-WWII, Germany. Michael Berg is a teenager who becomes ill and is helped home by Hanna, a stranger twice his age. Michael recovers from scarlet fever and seeks out Hanna to thank her. The two are quickly drawn into a passionate but secretive affair. Michael discovers that Hanna loves being read to and their physical relationship deepens. Hanna is enthralled as Michael reads to her from different works of literature. Despite their intense bond,...

"Set against the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963 ... [this] is a harrowing yet ultimately uplifting coming-of-age story about a young female translator--caught between societal and familial expectations and her unique ability to speak truth to power--as she fights to expose the dark truths of her nation's past. For twenty-four-year-old Eva Bruhns, World War II is a foggy childhood memory. At the war's end, Frankfurt was a smoldering ruin, severely...

As the 1987 trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie unfolds on television, Victor Bastien reviews old family documents and finds a distressing "Aryan declaration" authored by his late father. This new discovery throws Victor's conception of his family's history into darkness. His mother, Rivka, keeps a stubborn silence about the past, while Tania, his sister, defends their father's declaration. At the same time, Victor's wife and children grow concerned...

"Germany 1958. In those years, "Auschwitz" was a word that some people had never heard of, and others wanted to forget as quickly as possible. Against the will of his immediate superior, young prosecutor Johann Radmann begins to examine the case of recently identified teacher who was a former Auschwitz guard. Radmann soon lands in a web of repression and denial, but also of idealization. He devotes himself with utmost commitment to his new task and...

The Nuremberg trials demonstrated the resolve of the Allied victors of the Second World War to uphold the principles of dispassionate justice and the rule of law even when cries of vengeance threatened to carry the day. Thomas J. Dodd served as a staff lawyer in this unprecedented trial for crimes against humanity. Thanks to his agile legal mind and especially to his skills at interrogating the defendants, he quickly rose to become the number two...

From his jail cell in Israel, an American playwright on trial for war crimes looks back on his life. Living in pre-World War II Berlin he becomes an allied spy within the Nazi Party. After the war, when he goes back to America, he is confronted by both Nazi haters and sympathizers.

"American judge Daniel Haywood presides over the trial of four German jurists accused of "legalizing" Nazi atrocities. But as graphic accounts of sterilization and murder unfold in the courtroom, mounting political pressure for leniency forces Haywood into making the most harrowing and difficult decision of his career." --