From Bernhard Schlink, the internationally best-selling 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.
