Theodor Fontane

Fifteen-year-old Andy Lockwood is special.Others notice the way he blurts out anything that comes into his mind, how he cannot foresee consequences, that he's more child than teenager. But his mother sees a boy with a heart as open and wide as the ocean.Laurel Lockwood lost her son once through neglect. She's spent the rest of her life determined to make up for her mistakes, and she's succeeded in becoming a committed, protective parent--maybe even overprotective. Still, she loosens her grip just enough to let Andy attend a local church social--a decision that terrifies her when the church is consumed by fire. But Andy survives...and remarkably, saves other children from the flames. Laurel watches as Andy basks in the role of unlikely hero and the world finally sees her Andy, the sweet boy she knows as well as her own heart. But when the suspicion of arson is cast upon Andy, Laurel must ask herself how well she really knows her son...and how far she'll go to keep her promise to protect him forever.

In 1870s Berlin, an aristocratic officer in a glamorous cavalry regiment and a seamstress supporting herself and her invalid foster-mother with piecework, defy convention by falling in love. What might have been a simple tale of conflict between love and duty becomes, in Fontane's hands, something more sophisticated. The contrast between the lovers' whole-hearted view of each other and the world's trivializing view of their relationship underlies a tautly sprung narrative which is tenderly moving without being sentimental; gently ironic and full of social comedy. Fontane's brilliant use of dialogue creates a vigorous and loving portrait of the new German capital and its inhabitants. ""The immense pleasures of the novel lie in the author's cool-headed approach to what, in other hands, could have been a forgettable melodrama. . . . The book is filled with comparable moments of small facts transfigured into something magical.""-The New Yorker March 7, 2011 As much a psychological as a social realist, the author is interested in the emotional conflicts that arise between individual desire and social conditioning, class expectations and personality.

Nick Ribbeck finds a method of sharing the produce of his pear trees even after his death.

Sir Ribbeck finds a method of sharing the produce of his pear tree even after his death.

Fontane's novella The Woman Taken in Adultery (1882) is remarkable not least for its portrayal, in wealthy, stultifying Berlin society in the 1880s, of an adultery with a happy ending. The story was inspired by a celebrated contemporary scandal and tells of Melanie van der Straaten and her affair with Rubehn, the young protege of Melanie's eccentric and good-humoured husband Ezel. By contrast The Poggenpuhl Family (1896), a late masterpiece, centres on a birthday party given for Frau von Poggenpuhl and brilliantly evokes the lives of an aristocratic Berlin family struggling in genteel poverty. Theodor Fontane is one of nineteenth-century Germany's foremost stylists, and in these two short fictions his vivid portraiture and unforced dialogue, his mastery of understatement and emotional nuance are found to perfection.

Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfort and distraction in a brief liaison with Major Crampas, a married man with a dangerous reputation. But years later, when Effi has almost forgotten her affair, the secret returns to haunt her - with fatal consequences. In taut, ironic prose Fontane depicts a world where sexuality and the will to enjoy life are stifled by vain pretences of civilization, and the obligations of circumstance. Considered to be his greatest novel, this is a humane, unsentimental portrait of a young woman torn between her duties as a wife and mother and the instincts of her heart.