For fifteen-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair. He never learns very much about her and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime.

As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: what should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust?

The Reader is an international bestseller and a true modern classic, examining the gap between Germany's pre- and post-war generations, between the guilty and the innocent, and between words and silence.