And in Schlink’s macro look at Germany’s past, it’s the small acts – of kindness and humility – that linger.

Schlink pursues this theme perhaps a little relentlessly, but there’s a sophisticated precision to his writing, which is superbly translated by Charlotte Collins. As a teenager, he decides to become an Übermensch, 'that he would make Germany great and become great with Germany, even if it required him to be cruel to himself and to others'. 'Ever since he had seated Germany on a horse too big for it to ride, the Germans had wanted everything too grand.' She sees it in the men whose lives she touches: her student Eik, who fantasises about the open steppes and joins the SS Ferdinand’s student-y moral smugness in the 60s and most of all, in Herbert. Olga diagnoses Germany’s problem as one of grandness, which, she grumbles, is thanks to Bismarck. The final part is a collection of Olga’s unopened letters to Herbert, found years after her death by Ferdinand in Tromsø, full of feeling – and more than one Schlinkian twist. The second is taken over by a narrator called Ferdinand, whose family the by now deaf Olga works for as a seamstress. The first part, written in unadorned, unemotional prose, charts Olga’s earlier life. He ships out to Prussia’s colony German South-West Africa, then to the Arctic, where he gets lost just before the First World War. His true love is not for her but for the 'great expanse' – which sounds a lot like Lebensraum. From childhood, they are opposites: Olga is grounded, Herbert restless.

A lopsided love story is at its heart: Olga, an orphan and later teacher, falls in love with the local aristocrat’s son Herbert. Split into three parts, the novel spans more than a century, beginning in Prussia and ending in the present day. Like that excellent novel, Schlink’s latest, Olga, is a searching examination of modern Germany and its scarred soul.

Bernhard Schlink, one of Germany’s best-loved authors, is famous beyond its borders for the international bestseller The Reader (thanks, partly to the Kate Winslet-fronted film adaptation).

Olga by bernhard schlink