From
Bernhard Schlink, the internationally bestselling 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 mélange 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 accomplice, not entirely unwittingly, to 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 lie, to others and to
ourselves.
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“In each affecting story in this hot, blurry haze of summer, the valley between truth and deception is neither straight nor wide.”
—
Booklist