Katharina Blum is pretty, bright, hard-working and at the centre of a big city scandal when, at a carnival party, she falls in love with a young radical on the run from the police. Portrayed by the city`s leading newspaper as a whore, a communist and an atheist, she becomes the target of anonymous phone calls and sexual threats. Her life ruined by the distortions of a corrupt press, she shoots the offending journalist and gives herself up for arrest. Step by step and with an affecting forensic clarity, Katharina`s story is reconstructed for the reader, gradually disclosing and entire panorama of human relationship and motive. The novel is a masterful comment on the law and the press, the labyrinth of social truth and the relentless collision of fact and fiction.