Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany's greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife's deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years -- only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve.

How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane's great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters' own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. Irretrievable is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.

• We started tracking this book on July 27, 2019.
• This book was £9.49 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 69 times in the past 2,112 days.
• The current price of this book is £11.98 last checked 12 hours ago.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is £5.49.
• The lowest price to date was £5.44 last reached on November 29, 2019.
• This book has been £5.44 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was £12.81 last reached on July 6, 2020.
• This book has been £12.81 one time since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionClassicsBritish & Irish
• Literature & FictionClassicsComing of Age
• Literature & FictionClassicsHumour
• Literature & FictionLiterary FictionSatire

• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 290 Pages
• File Size: 751 KB