Simon Mawer – författare

An ''utterly gripping'' tale of love and espionage in Occupied France by the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Glass Room (Daily Mail)Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, brought up on the shores of Lake Geneva and in England, half French, half British, naive yet too clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE, the Special Operations Executive, to go undercover in wartime France, it seems her hybrid status - and fluent French - will be of service to a greater, more dangerous cause.Trained in sabotage, dead-drops, how to perform under interrogation and how to kill, Marian parachutes into south-west France, her official mission to act as a Resistance courier. But her real destination is Paris, where she must seek out family friend Clément Pelletier, once the focus of her adolescent desires. A nuclear physicist engaged in the race for a new and terrifying weapon, he is of urgent significance to her superiors. As she struggles through the strange, lethal landscape of the Occupation towards this reunion, what completes her training is the understanding that war changes everything, and neither love nor fatherland may be trusted.''There are many shades of Graham Greene here... [The Girl Who Fell From the Sky] delivers its story with the same delicate, stropped-razor deadliness that creeps up on you like Harry Lime in the shadows, nastily irresistible'' -Financial Times''Mawer cranks up the tension; as spy stuff this is as good as Le Carré or Eric Ambler, no higher praise possible'' -The Scotsman

Rob and Jamie are great friends from childhood. They have grown up together and become top climbers, but have since become estranged. Rob is nevertheless amazed and grief-stricken when he hears of Jamie''s death after a fall on a relatively easy Welsh rockface. The past, though, hides the secret clues behind the tragedy. Layer by layer Simon Mawer peels back what happened, going not only into the friends'' childhoods but that of their parents - who were also intimate. And there is no escaping that past - vividly imagined scenes in the London of the Blitz reveal how through two generations Rob and Jamie and their respective parents have been addicted - to desire and the heady dangers of climbing. Brilliantly structured as we move from past to present and back again, this novel will make Simon Mawer''s literary reputation.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE''A passionately detailed portrait of individuals struggling to snatch order and happiness from frightening, irrational times'' Sunday Telegraph''Mawer embeds...provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that''s eerily erotic and tremendously exciting....[a] gorgeous novel'' Washington PostCool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure - these are things that happen in the Glass Room.High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor''s lover and her child. But the house''s story is far from over, and as it passes from hand to hand, from Czech to Russian, both the best and the worst of the history of Eastern Europe becomes somehow embodied and perhaps emboldened within the beautiful and austere surfaces and planes so carefully designed, until events become full-circle.The inspiration for the major motion picture The Affair, available on demand.

Like his great-great-great uncle, the early geneticist Gregor Mendel, Dr Benedict Lambert is struggling to unlock the secrets of heredity. But for Benedict the mission is particularly urgent and personal, for his is afflicted by achondroplasia. He is a dwarf. When a chance meeting leads him to the acceptance that he craves, he begins a journey towards correcting the injustice of his own capricious genes, with devastating consequences.As intelligent as it is entertaining, this witty novel is a gripping tale of scientific intrigue and moral uncertainty.

Amongst the ancient papyri of the Dead Sea, a remarkable scroll is discovered. Written in the first century AD, it purports to be the true account of the life of Jesus, as told by Youdas the sicarios - Judas Iscariot: the missing Gospel of Judas. If authentic, it will be one of the most incendiary documents in the history of humankind. The task of proving - or disproving - its validity falls to Father Leo Newman, one of the world''s leading experts in Koine, the demotic Greek of the Roman Empire, and a man the newspapers like to call a ''renegade priest''. But as Leo absorbs himself in Judas'' testimony, the stories of his own life haunt him. The story of his forbidden yet irresistible love for a married woman. The story of his mother''s passionate and tragic affair amidst the war-time ruins of Rome. They are stories of love and betrayal that may threaten his faith just as deeply as the Gospel of Judas...With a dramatic narrative that spans from the Europe of the Second World War to Jerusalem two thousand years after Jesus'' birth, THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS is a compelling and erudite thriller.

On her deathbed, Dee Denham, at one time the toast of colonial Cyprus, tells her son Thomas that her illness is a punishment. Compelled by grief and a confused childhood memory of betrayal, Thomas finds himself searching for the meaning of her last words. He searches through faded photographs and love letters, seeks out survivors and examines his own imperfect recollections. A vanished world comes to life: the restless, seductive island of Cyprus at the end of Empire, a place of oleander and carob trees, cocktails at the Harbour Club and adultery in shuttered bedrooms, peopled by ghostly admirers and conspirators, lovers and spies. Dee''s story, an intimate history of violence and tenderness for which Thomas finds himself quite unprepared, gathers momentum, against, in the background, the ominous roar of approaching disaster.A vivid evocation of the past and a deft examination of the dangerous power of memory, SWIMMING TO ITHACA sets fragile human relationships against the unstoppable force of history and sheds new light on both.

A Knight of the Order of St John, Gerard Paulet is languishing in the Grand Priory of Rome. He is a man who fought alongside the legendary Leone Strozzi, who made extreme sacrifices for his faith, and is the last of a generation able to speak of the great crusades. The young novice tasked with tending to Paulet''s broken body is desperate to hear the tales of the former glories of his hero and his comrades. But what makes a hero? Is it the man who stays true to his vows, even in the face of a woman''s love? Is it the man who resists the politics of others and always chooses the path that is right, despite the consequences? Is it the crusader who saves the most souls? Gerard Paulet has a lot to teach about the nature of heroism, and sometimes it''s nothing like the rumours, and just about a will to survive . . .

''You can''t go and live there,'' a despairing friend remarked, ''it''s not even in Rome.'' And it certainly wasn''t, but still the author and his wife went to Avea, tucked away amongst the woods and gorges of the Lazio countryside.There they found no Colosseum, or Pantheon; there were no Ferraris racing around the Palazzi Navona, Venezia or Farnese. Instead they discovered the true agony and beauty of Italy: the instinctive warmth of the Avea villagers, the camorra, Little Tony - Italy''s answer to Elvis - the elegant and sophisticated Colasanti family and a landlord like no other, Pippo, the self-styled Duca di Avea. This is not a story of the high culture of Italy''s big cities, instead of how two foreigners learned to eat the Italian way, drive the Italian way, survive the Italian way - even to have a child the Italian way - and how in doing it they came to love this hidden corner of the most visited and least understood country in Europe.

Marian Sutro has survived Ravensbruck and is back in dreary 1950s London trying to pick up the pieces of her pre-war life. Returned to an England she barely knows and a post-war world she doesn''t understand Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. Family and friends surround her and a young RAF officer attempts to bring her the normalities of love and affection but she is haunted by her experiences and by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war effort helped lead to the development of the Atom Bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie? When a mysterious Russian diplomat emerges from the shadows to draw her into the ambiguities and uncertainties of the Cold War she sees a way to make amends for the past and to renew the excitement of her double life. Simon Mawer''s sense of time and place is perfect: Tightrope is a compelling novel about identity and deception which constantly surprises the reader.

''Prague Spring is a wonderfully atmospheric portrait of the city as well as a political and historical thriller with dashes of espionage. It is as brilliant as anything he has written, which is saying a lot'' The TimesIt''s the summer of 1968, the year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and Cold War winter. Two English students, Ellie and James, set off to hitch-hike across Europe with no particular aim in mind but a continent, and themselves, to discover. Somewhere in southern Germany they decide, on a whim, to visit Czechoslovakia where Alexander Dubcek''s ''socialism with a human face'' is smiling on the world.Meanwhile Sam Wareham, a first secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with a mixture of diplomatic cynicism and a young man''s passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konecková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. It seems that, for the first time, nothing is off limits behind the Iron Curtain.Yet the wheels of politics are grinding in the background. The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubcek and the Red Army is massed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion?

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION