The novel traces the relationship between a German lawyer, Michael and an older woman, Hanna. Beginning with their brief affair when he is fifteen in post-war Germany, going on to narrate his discovery as a law student that Hanna had been a guard at a satellite camp attatched to Aushwitz - for which she is imprisoned. Schlink explores questions of guilt, deciet, betrayal and memory, against the backdrop of Germany's complex and equivocal response to the Holocaust. It is an immensely subtle and morally sophisticated novel, constantly playing with thereader's sympathies in a way that is profoundly thought-provoking and disturbing