On Tangled Paths

Full of tender irony and vivid evocations of a quickly expanding Berlin and its bucolic surroundings, this small masterpiece gives us a love story poised between the strict social codes of the 19th century and the sometimes bewildering freedoms of the 20th.

PERFECT FOR FANS OF JANE AUSTEN: A seamstress and cavalry officer fall in love across class divides in this “sparkling, tender, delicately ironic” portrait of 19th-century Berlin (New York Review of Books).

“A joy for its humanity, subtlety and visual immediacy.”— Independent

From Germany’s greatest 19th-century novelist, this realist masterpiece interrogates the strict social codes of a rapidly changing era through a wistful struggle between love and obligation.

Lene is an orphaned seamstress; Botho is a nobleman and an officer in one of the Prussian army''s most glittering regiments. But despite their differences of class and education, they fall quickly in love, spending a summer together in a clear-eyed, tender love affair before society’s demands force them cruelly apart. Now married to a wealthy cousin, Botho learns years later that Lene too has an opportunity to marry. Her ex-lover must choose between holding on to regret or letting go of the past - along with the possibility of getting Lene herself back.

Unusually progressive for literature of the period, this masterwork of Fontane’s portrays a love story that defies class boundaries, full of tender irony and vivid evocations of a quickly expanding Berlin and its bucolic surroundings. Fontane bring sharp psychological insight to his achingly sympathetic portrayal of two lovers torn between their hearts and the obligations of social circumstance.