These tales weave around the idea of love—love to seek and love to flee; love as desire, as guilt, as confusion or self-betrayal; love as habit, as affair, and as life-changing rebellion. With remarkable deftness, intelligence and sensitivity, Schlink exposes the dark places of his characters' hearts and minds as he follows them from the Berlin Wall to the foggy Oregon coast, from Park Avenue to Central America. As his many fans know from The Reader, Schlink's power as a storyteller resides in his cool compassion and in the moral intelligence that he wields like a laser to penetrate human motives and behavior. Here his subject is not history but the heart itself, and in Flights of Love we find an assured and unforgettable view of love and its myriad difficulties.