Woman on the stairs

In Frankfurt am Main, at the turn of the 1960s and 70s, three men cross paths – a businessman, a painter, and a lawyer. All three desire the same woman, and at the centre of their rivalry is a portrait of her, which unexpectedly vanishes along with her. More than forty years later, the painting is exhibited in a Sydney gallery, prompting two of the men to travel from Germany to Australia, where their battle for the artwork resumes. The third man is not interested in the painting, but in the woman herself, who now lives in Australia. Why does this German woman live there, under what circumstances, and what really happened to the protagonists over the past decades? As in all of Bernhard Schlink's prose, the present is tightly interwoven with the past, leading to an unexpected resolution.