Books like The Reader
In a West German city in the late 1950s, Michael Berg, fifteen, begins an affair with Hanna, a tram conductor more than twice his age, who one day disappears. Years later, as a law student, he sees her again, on trial.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Reader
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
On the day of his eightieth birthday in 1958, the architect Heinrich Faehmel and his son and grandson, three generations of a Cologne family, look back on fifty years of Germany.
Sophie's Choice
In 1947 Brooklyn, Stingo, a young Southern writer, befriends his neighbours Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz, and her brilliant, unstable lover Nathan, and slowly learns the story Sophie has not been able to tell.
And Where Were You, Adam?
Linked episodes of the German retreat from Romania and Hungary in 1944, following a soldier, Feinhals, among men who no longer believe in anything.
Enemies, A Love Story
In New York in 1949, Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor married to the Polish servant who hid him, keeps a mistress in the Bronx, and then his first wife, believed dead, turns up alive.
Beware of Pity
A young Austro-Hungarian lieutenant's thoughtless kindness to a paralysed girl entangles him in an impossible engagement on the eve of the First World War.
Fatelessness
György Köves, a fourteen-year-old Budapest Jew, is taken off a bus in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, and tells it all in a flat, almost uncomprehending voice.
The Post-Office Girl
A poor Austrian post-office clerk is briefly swept into a luxury Swiss resort by a rich aunt and returns to her village unable to bear the life she had.
Austerlitz
A narrator meets Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, in the waiting room of Antwerp's railway station, and over chance meetings across thirty years hears him piece together a childhood he was cut off from.
A Map of the World
Alice Goodwin, a school nurse who lives with her husband and daughters on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin, is minding her best friend's two little girls when one of them wanders down to the pond.
Kaddish for an Unborn Child
A Hungarian writer who survived Auschwitz explains, in one long monologue, why he refused to have a child.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
A nine-year-old boy moves with his SS-officer father to a house next to a camp whose fence he does not understand, and makes a friend on the other side of it.
The Book Thief
Liesel Meminger, a foster girl in a small town in Nazi Germany, steals books and shares them with her neighbours in bomb shelters, while her family hides a Jewish man in the basement, in a story narrated by Death.