Hester Among the Ruins A Novel [Paperback]

Born in New York in 1963, historian Hester Rosenfeldvery American and marginally Jewishgoes to Munich to research the life of Heinrich Falk and becomes his mistress. Born in Berlin in 1943, raised in the ruins of defeat by a generation of murderers and cowards, Professor Falk is neither infamous nor famoushe is simply the German Everyman. Hester believes his life story could make for an important contemporary historical documentkitchen table history. Heinrich is married (four times, twice to his current wife) and has four daughters. But madly in love with Hester, adultery is nothing new to him. As he assists her in her note-takingabout him and his family, about German historyshe often suspects Heinrich is covering up something. Was his brother really a Werewolf, a Nazi militiaman who vowed to continue fighting after the war's end? What kind of gas company did his mother work for? And what exactly did his father do during those years?The younger sister of Philip Roth, the lost doppelganger of Erica Jong.Not many female novelists can deal with sex, the appetite for it, and the loss of such appetite with as much candor, lack of self-protection, and humor as Binnie Kirshenbaum.A darkly comic novel with the moral power of Bernhard Schlink's