by Bernhard Schlink, 2021, Audiobook narrated by Nathalie Buscombe, Harper Via

I would classify this book as a swing and a miss. It’s about a woman in Pomerania before WWII who falls in love with an aristocrat. The parents of the boyfriend obviously don’t approve of their relationship and the boy’s sister interferes. The boyfriend has an obsession with achieving greatness and goes off on various adventures, the last of which is to the arctic from which he never returns. Olga thinks his vision is too grand and begins to despise anything she thinks is too grand, including Germany.

The problem I had with the book is that it just didn’t seem to be very interesting. Schlink writes beautifully, but the plot and the characters in this book are not very interesting. I kept waiting for something really exciting to happen but it never did. Olga had a secret and acted on it, but even that wasn’t very compelling.

This is the third book I’ve read or listened to this year that was written by highly respected authors that turned out to be much less than I expected. I’m not having a great year selecting books so far.