Hester Among the Ruins: A Novel

A darkly comic novel with the moral power of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader about love in the shadows of history.

Born in New York in 1963, historian Hester Rosenfeld-very American and marginally Jewish-goes to Munich to research the life of Heinrich Falk and becomes his mistress. Born in Berlin in 1943, raised in the ruins of defeat by a generation of "murderers and cowards," Professor Falk is neither infamous nor famous-he is simply the German Everyman. Hester believes his life story could ...