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.