The Storyteller unfolds across present-day New Hampshire and the haunting landscape of WWII Europe, binding a contemporary moral quandary to the unerasable past. A grieving young baker, a revered retiree with a lethal secret, a survivor who finally breaks her silence, and a federal investigator converge as personal choices collide with history’s demands. Together they probe the limits of guilt, justice, and forgiveness—and the cost of telling the truth.
Main Characters
Sage Singer
Sage Singer is a 25-year-old baker who hides behind night shifts, a facial scar, and a private burden of guilt after her mother’s death. Her quiet life is upended when Josef Weber, her elderly friend from a grief group, confesses to being a former SS officer and asks her to help him die, thrusting her into a crisis of ethics, identity, and faith. As she reaches out to Leo Stein and finally listens to her grandmother Minka’s testimony, Sage is forced to confront both her Jewish heritage and the moral gray zones of justice and forgiveness. Her choice to kill Josef—believing she is delivering justice—marks a decisive shift from self-protective passivity to fraught agency, even as it complicates her sense of right and wrong. Through her relationships with Minka, Leo, Mary DeAngelis, and Adam, Sage’s journey becomes a reckoning with love, worthiness, and responsibility.
Josef Weber
Josef Weber enters as a kindly, beloved retiree, but he reveals himself as a man living behind an alias and a monstrous past. He tells Sage he is Reiner Hartmann, an SS officer from Auschwitz, and requests forgiveness followed by death—confession as prelude to execution. Skilled at narrative and manipulation, he steers Sage toward the outcome he wants, only for the novel’s final turn to expose him as Franz Hartmann, Reiner’s younger brother, who has worn his brother’s identity and sins for decades. His storyline interrogates self-invention and transferred guilt: is he seeking atonement for his own crimes, for Reiner’s, or for both? His tangled bond with Sage and his historical link to Minka make him both tempter and penitent, using story as a weapon and a plea.
Minka Singer
Minka Singer—Sage’s grandmother—has spent a lifetime sheltering her family from the horrors she survived in the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz. When Sage’s inquiry pries open long-locked doors, Minka first retells her trauma through an allegory about a baker’s daughter named Ania and the monster that stalks her, then offers a searing first-person testimony. She is the novel’s moral center: a witness whose memory cuts through the fog of time to distinguish Reiner from Franz and to name what was done. Her past with both Hartmann brothers, and the murder of her best friend Darija, anchors the book’s most devastating truths. By speaking, Minka reclaims her story, passes on a legacy of remembrance, and becomes the key to unmasking Josef.
Leo Stein
Leo Stein is a Department of Justice attorney whose life’s work is tracking human-rights violators who hope time has erased their crimes. Initially skeptical yet meticulous, he takes Sage’s tip about Josef and pursues it with disciplined care, balancing legal rigor with empathy for survivors like Minka. As the case deepens, Leo’s professional reserve softens into genuine connection, offering Sage an honest, stabilizing presence in contrast to her secret affair with Adam. He embodies the principle that personal forgiveness and public accountability are not the same—and that the law’s pursuit of truth must endure. Through Leo, the novel insists that history’s debts do not expire.
Supporting Characters
Reiner Hartmann
Reiner Hartmann is the older Hartmann brother and the sadistic head of the women’s camp at Auschwitz, the face of cruelty in Minka’s memories and Darija’s murderer. He dominates Franz psychologically, becoming the figure whose brutality Franz later adopts as his own identity in confession. Reiner does not develop or repent; he stands as the stark, unmitigated embodiment of Nazi evil, whose violence echoes across generations.
Mary DeAngelis
Mary DeAngelis, Sage’s employer at Our Daily Bread and a former nun, serves as the novel’s steady moral ballast. She loves Sage fiercely, challenges her poor choices (especially the affair with Adam), and grounds the extraordinary with common-sense wisdom and faith. Mary’s unwavering support helps Sage step into the light of honesty and responsibility.
Adam
Adam is a married funeral director and Sage’s clandestine lover, a relationship that mirrors Sage’s shame and isolation. Charming but evasive, he offers intimacy without commitment, reinforcing Sage’s belief that she deserves to be hidden. Ending the affair becomes a crucial step in Sage’s movement toward self-respect and openness.
Ania
Ania, the heroine of Minka’s embedded tale, is a baker’s daughter whose village is terrorized by an upiór, a monster both feared and desired. Her story reflects Minka’s trauma and the moral ambivalence of surviving under power, transforming myth into a vessel for truth. As allegory, Ania’s choices chart the blurred borders between love, hunger, and complicity.
Minor Characters
- Franz Hartmann: Josef Weber’s true identity—Reiner’s younger brother, an SS officer who beat Minka and stole her story; he later assumes Reiner’s crimes as his own, choreographing his punishment under a false name.
- Pepper and Saffron: Sage’s older sisters, practical and exasperated, representing the ordinary life Sage believes she can’t access after their mother’s death.
- Rocco: The haiku-spouting barista at Our Daily Bread, a gentle, humorous constant who eases Sage’s solitude.
- Grief Group Members (Mrs. Dombrowski, Jocelyn, Stuart): Fellow mourners whose shared loss creates the setting where Sage meets Josef, underscoring the many shapes grief takes.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
The novel’s core relationship binds Sage to Josef: a fragile trust forged in grief becomes a high-stakes pact as Josef asks Sage for both absolution and death. Sage’s compassion collides with her horror; her conversations with Leo and her deepening bond with Minka push her to separate the gentle man she knows from the crimes he claims. Through Leo’s investigation, the personal becomes legal, reframing Sage’s burden as evidence and exposing Josef’s confession as a layered act of manipulation.
The Hartmann brothers’ dynamic casts a long shadow: Reiner’s unrepentant brutality dominates Franz, who later inhabits his brother’s identity as a form of self-condemnation. This transfer of guilt muddies the boundaries between accountability and atonement, leaving Minka’s precise memory as the decisive moral compass. Minka’s relationship with Darija—and Darija’s murder—intensifies the cost of silence and the necessity of naming the perpetrator, while her final testimony reunites survivor and descendant, healing a generational rift.
Around Sage, intimate ties reveal competing moral frameworks. Mary offers clear-eyed love and ethical steadiness, countering the secrecy and self-erasure that define Sage’s affair with Adam. Leo models principled pursuit—patient, humane, and unsparing—suggesting a path where affection and integrity can coexist. Together, these relationships form two constellations: the past’s machinery of terror (Reiner, Franz, Auschwitz) and the present’s imperfect quest for justice (Sage, Minka, Leo, Mary), with Sage standing at the hinge, deciding what it means to live—and act—in the aftermath.