Synopsis
The first novel by Bernhard Schlink since his international bestseller THE READER, HOMECOMING is the story of one man's odyssey and another man's pursuit.
A child of World War II, Peter Debauer grew up with his mother and scant memories of his father, a victim of war. Now an adult, Peter embarks upon a search for the truth surrounding his mother's unwavering but shaky history and the possibility of finding his missing father after all these years. The search takes him across Europe, to the United States, and back: finding witnesses, falling in and out of love, chasing fragments of a story and a person who may or may not exist. Within a maze of reinvented identities, Peter pieces together a portrait of a man who uses words as one might use a change of clothing, as he assumes a new guise in any given situation simply to stay alive.The chase leads Peter to New York City, where he hopes to find the real person behind the disguises. Operating under an assumed identity of his own...
The Barnes & Noble Review
Bernhard Schlink's Homecoming is a rare creation: an allegory that is subtly written enough to function equally well as a straightforward novel, so that many an entranced reader will hardly be aware of its finely wrought metaphoric structure. Schlink, who is a law professor and judge in his native Germany, has brought his professional interest in justice and responsibility to bear on all his fiction, which includes a series of detective books and the bestselling 1995 novel The Reader. Inevitably for an intellectual of his generation (he was born in 1944), Schlink is also fascinated by his country's recent history, and his fiction can be seen as an attempt to make sense of and come to terms with the infinitely strange story of modern Germany.