Showing results by author "Simon Mawer" in All Categories

In the summer of 1968, the year of Prague Spring with a Cold War winter, Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike set out to hitchhike across Europe, complicating a budding friendship that could be something more. Having reached southern Germany, they decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubcek's 'socialism with a human face' is smiling on the world. 

High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass. This radiant 1930s house, with its unique Glass Room, quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of World War II gather. The house passes from hand to hand, from Czech to Russian, and bears witness to both the best and the worst of the history of Eastern Europe.

Returned to an England she barely knows and a post-war world she doesn't understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground her life. Family and friends surround her and a RAF officer attempts to bring her the normality of love and affection but she is haunted by the guilt of knowing...

The wonderful new novel from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Glass Room is both a gripping adventure story and a moving meditation on patriotism, betrayal and the limits of love. Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, half French, half British, naive yet too...

Simon Mawer's compelling and original novel puts flesh on our ancestors' bones to bring them to life and give them voice. He has created stories that are gripping and heart-breaking, from the squalor and vitality of Dickensian London to the excitement of seafaring in the last days of sail and the horror of the trenches of the Crimea. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit. Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known—the unbreakable bond of family.

The fabulous Chimera - mythic monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent - is more that just an Etruscan bronze discovered by archaeologist David Hewison. It lurks in the background of this novel as a symbol of the man himself: part Italian, part English, an explorer of the past who is haunted by his own past when he parachuted into wartime Italy as an SOE agent.