Peter Schneider's new novel tells the story of a dramatic love triangle set against a backdrop of political awakening and aberration, love and betrayal, idealism and libertinism. A gripping book about German and personal guilt. About who we were back then – where we wanted to go and where we never arrived.
The Woman at the Bus Stop tells of two lovers who cannot live with each other, but also cannot leave each other. The story is complicated by the fact that it is told by a close friend of the couple, who has been in love with Isabel, "the most beautiful woman in the city," from the beginning. In his research into long-past events, he uncovers a kind of betrayal of his friend by Isabel, which he cannot get out of his head. Thus, in the mid-sixties, an odyssey of love, friendship, jealousy, and political unrest unfolds.
Schneider calmly looks back at these early years, when every heartache was the greatest, every happy experience final, and every betrayal the most unforgivable. What he finds is a time marked by humanity's most monstrous crimes and three representatives of a generation searching for rebellion, but above all for love and belonging.
