Woman on the stairs

At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, three men meet in Frankfurt am Main – a businessman, a painter, and a lawyer. All three desire one woman, and a portrait of her is also in play, which unexpectedly disappears along with her. More than forty years later, the painting is exhibited in a Sydney gallery, which prompts two of them to travel from Germany to Australia, and the conflict over the painting continues. The third man is not interested in the painting, but in the woman in question, who 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 firmly intertwined with the past and contains an unexpected resolution.