Jacqueline Rose writes:

The ending of the Odyssey provides Homecoming’s starting point, its narrative core. The novel opens with a young boy, Peter Debauer, the narrator, shunted – as Schlink was – between his home in Germany and his Swiss grandparents, alighting on an unfinished novel that tells the story of a soldier who returns from the war, only to find his wife living with another man. His grandparents publish novels – ‘Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment’ – which they forbid him to read. He reads this one on the back of sheafs of paper he is using for his schoolwork. Once again, reading has the thrill of transgression (it is where the action is). He shouldn’t be reading the novels at all, let alone a story of sexual treachery. The narrator’s most passionate desire is to know how the story ends: did the husband challenge the lover and/or kill him, was the lover the true villain for having told the wife that her husband was dead, did the wife fall into her first husband’s arms, did the husband quietly disappear not wanting to blight his wife’s happiness, did the two men – this one stretches credulity – become fast friends?

(LRB 31 July 2008)

Weidenfeld | hardback 260 pp. |ISBN: 9780297844686