Oskar Bachmann always imagined that giving his first lecture would be the defining moment of his life.

It was, but not in the way he expected...

Growing up a misfit in Nazi Germany, a victim of his father's beatings, Oskar's love of books is a constant comfort in a world turned upside-down by violence.

As a student, as a pilot in the brutal Luftwaffe during the Second World War, in an unhappy marriage to an English bride, he finds himself returning over and over to the circumstances of his childhood. What was the source and cause of his father's abuse? Could there have been more to it than he had once believed?

Little did Oskar know that his first lecture at the University of Tübingen would ultimately lead to the end of a lifetime of searching... and finally reveal the figure who had been controlling his life from a distance.