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As a child in post-war Germany, Peter Debauer found a manuscript about a German POW who escaped the Russian camps and returned home. Now fully grown, he determines to find out if the story was true, and what happened to the man in the manuscript. 'Schlink has put together a clever package and skillfully guides the reader through modern German history' "Sunday Telegraph"
Synopsis
A mesmerising tale of discovery, of the search for identity and of the need for understanding and forgiveness.
Book Details
Publisher:
PHOENIX HOUSE
Publication Date:
05-Feb-2009
ISBN:
9780753823286
Observer review
Review: Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink
Robert Collins the observer Sun 29 March 2009
Modelled on The Odyssey, this latest novel by the author of The Reader returns - with a homing instinct all of its own - to the themes of Schlink's bestseller: German national guilt, wartime secrets and the unravelling of right and wrong through the medium of literature. Peter Debauer is a German legal publisher who always believed his Swiss father was killed while working for the Red Cross in the war. In middle age, Debauer comes upon a proof of a novel published by his grandparents at the end of the war and realises that it holds clues to his father's true identity. Was he a Nazi polemicist who escaped to the US? It might lack the killer punch of The Reader, but Schlink's book of longing remains both stylish and intelligent.
