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 ...

'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 di...

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 th...

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 wi...

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 a...

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 E...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION'Utterly absorbing, cleverly constructed and beautifully written' The Times'Moving and exhilarating' Spectator'Evokes the messiness and fragility of everyday life in the nineteenth century' Daily MailAlmost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of ...

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 ...

'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, Littl...

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...

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 ...

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?