Theodor Fontane

Effi Briest is only seventeen when she is married off to Baron von Innstetten, travelling to live with him in a provincial town on the remote Baltic coast of Prussia. He is twenty years her senior, an ambitious bureaucrat who is uninterested in his young wife, and lively Effi becomes increasingly isolated, bored and anxious in her stifling surroundings. A...

On Tangled Paths tells the story of Lene, an orphaned seamstress, and Botho, a nobleman and officer in one of the Prussian army's most prestigious regiments. Despite their differences in class and education, they find their hearts are equal to each other. During a summer in 1870s Berlin, they embark on a clear-eyed, tender love affair, undeterred by the judgements...

As war between Prussia and Denmark brews over the territory of Schleswig-Holstein, a German nobleman is called to serve as a gentleman-in-waiting at the Danish court. Count Holk's life so far has been happy and simple - he married for love, and his pious wife and canny brother have managed his estate so well that he's even been able to...