Shortlisted for the inaugural Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction 2010.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.
A young couple in Czechoslovakia build their dream home, an art deco house with a beautiful glass room.
To Viktor this room represents reason…..everything is clean and clear, the room runs with straight lines and yet in this room some of the most irrational arguments take place and some of the most damaging of people are brought together. Nazi Germany is rapidly gaining more power and influence and affecting the lives of all of the characters. A touching and bittersweet story that will grip you from first to last page.
Cool. 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.
Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus and in Malta. He is married with two children and has lived in Italy for over thirty years.
