The Cleaner

In 1985, five-year-old Judith Kepler, the resilient and resourceful heroine of this complex, Kafkaesque thriller from German author Herrmann (The Sitter), was placed in the Yuri Gagarin Children’s Home in Sassnitz, East Germany. As a youth she was troubled, but now, as an adult, she’s steadily employed as a “cleaner,” a person who cleans up homes that have been the scenes of messy deaths, including murders. During a job, she accepts a letter from a messenger addressed to the deceased woman whose apartment she’s been clearing out. She’s stunned to notice that the sender’s address is the Yuri Gagarin Children’s Home. Judith soon embarks on a quest for answers about her own past, wondering why her absent parents placed her in the home. Her search attracts the attention of former and current agents of the CIA and the BND, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. At stake is a secret film from the Stasi archives naming all of East Germany’s foreign agents, which if released would ruin lives and reputations. Through a large cast of characters and their fluid relationships, Herrmann reveals a world of corruption and double-dealing on both sides of the German divide. (July)