Orphaned and raised by an unaffectionate grandmother in late nineteenth-century Prussia, Olga refuses the diminished life allotted to her.

She educates herself, becomes a teacher and falls in love with Herbert, the privileged son of a local landowner. But Herbert is possessed by the imperial dreams of his era: distant territories, heroic conquest and the imagined glory of disappearing beyond the known world.

Spanning two world wars and told through shifting perspectives, Olga is both an intimate history of one woman and a quiet reckoning with twentieth-century Germany. Schlink sets Olga’s endurance against Herbert’s restless appetite for greatness, tracing how national fantasies enter private lives and how history is shaped by those who remain behind. A restrained, cleverly layered novel about class, colonial ambition, memory and love sustained through absence.

First English-language edition, first printing. Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins. Export trade paperback, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020. Good condition, with light creasing, rubbing and shelf wear to the cover.