A fast read. Germany post-WWII when they are just coming to terms with their Nazi past, "the reader", a teenage boy of 15 is awakened sexually by a woman twice his age with a secret past. Besides sex, a large part of their time together is spent with him reading literature to her. After an intense affair she vanishes, leaving him devastated and emotionally numb as he moves through the next few years. In college, he encounters her again as a law student at her trial for war crimes as a Nazi guard at a concentration camp.
"The reader" himself, and I as the reader, were faced with conflicting emotions; is she good or bad? Is she victim of circumstances or heartless criminal? It's a very interesting look at the little people who were part of the machine that carried out the Nazi holocaust. The ordinary people who were part of the Nazi regime, the rest of the population who turned a blind eye to it in their midst, and the next generation who had to try to create an identity out of the rubble of their defeat and shame after the war.