First published in 1989 Chimera was Simon Mawer's first novel. Mawer is renowned as one of today's most talented writers of historical spy fiction.
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. Yet this is not just a war story. It is within the present, in the complex little world of an archaeological dig in central Italy, that the past is seen to work - the old conflicts of the Hewison family and the tragedies of wartime Italy surfacing in the present to precipitate a disturbing climax.
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. Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague, observes developments in the country with a diplomat's 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, with all its hopes and new ideas; now, nothing seems off-limits behind the Iron Curtain. But the great wheels of politics are grinding in the background; Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubcek, and the Red Army is massing on the borders.
This captivating historical thriller brings back Marian Sutro, ex–special operations agent, and traces her romantic and political exploits in post–World War II London, where the Cold War is about to reshape old loyalties.
As Allied forces close in on Berlin in spring 1945, a solitary figure emerges from the wreckage that is Germany. It is Marian Sutro, whose existence was last known to her British controllers in autumn 1943 in Paris. One of a handful of surviving agents of the Special Operations Executive, she has withstood arrest, interrogation, incarceration, and the horrors of Ravensbrück concentration camp, but at what cost?
Returned to an England she barely knows and a postwar world she doesn’t understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. Family and friends surround her, but she is haunted by her experiences and by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war effort helped lead to the monstrosities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the mysterious Major Fawley, the man who hijacked her wartime mission to Paris, 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 at the same time to find the identity that has never been hers.
A novel of divided loyalties and mixed motives, Tightrope is the complex and enigmatic story of a woman whose search for personal identity and fulfillment leads her to shocking choices.
“Sutro is a singular creation—a fascinating and compelling character and the account of how she becomes caught up in Cold War espionage is enthralling.”—Sunday Mirror (London)
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 that her contribution to the war helped to develop the Atom Bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie?
A propulsive novel of World War II espionage by the author of The Glass Room.
Barely out of school and doing her bit for the British war effort, Marian Sutro has one quality that makes her stand out-she is a native French speaker. It is this that attracts the attention of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, which trains agents to operate in occupied Europe. Drawn into this strange, secret world at the age of nineteen, she finds herself undergoing commando training, attending a "school for spies," and ultimately, one autumn night, parachuting into France from an Royal Air Force bomber to join the Wordsmith resistance network.
But there's more to Marian's mission than meets the eye of her SOE controllers; her mission has been hijacked by another secret organization that wants her to go to Paris and persuade a friend-a research physicist-to join the Allied war effort. The outcome could affect the whole course of the war.
A fascinating blend of fact and fiction, Trapeze is both an old-fashioned adventure story and a modern exploration of a young woman's growth into adulthood. There is violence, and there is love. There is death and betrayal, deception and revelation. But above all there is Marian Sutro, an ordinary young woman who, like her real-life counterparts in the SOE, did the most extraordinary things at a time when the ordinary was not enough.
"A war-torn adventure story that's eerily erotic and tremendously exciting...[A] gorgeous novel."-Washington Post on The Glass Room
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 clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE 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 with an urgent mission...
