Simon Mawer Bücher

Dr. Benedict Lambert arbeitet als renommierter Genetiker in London und tritt damit in die Fußstapfen seines berühmten Vorfahren Gregor Mendel, dem Begründer der modernen Vererbungslehre. Lambert ist Opfer einer Laune der Natur, einer genetischen Mutation - er ist ein Zwerg. Seine genetischen Forschungen betreibt er mit Engagement, insbesondere versucht er, den Ursachen der Zwergwüchsigkeit auf die Spur zu kommen. Als sein leidenschaftliches, doch kompliziertes Verhältnis zu Jean, einer verheirateten Frau, in die Brüche geht, nimmt sein Leben eine dramatische Wende. Er sinnt auf Rache und ist versucht, seine Wissenschaft dazu zu benutzen. Ein provokanter Wissenschaftsroman, der auf raffinierte Weise die Geschichte Mendels mit der des Benedict Lambert verknüpft.

Paris 1943: Eine mutige junge Frau gerät zwischen die Fronten des Krieges – und findet sich zwischen zwei Männern wiederMarian Sutro ist kein Mädchen wie die anderen. Soeben aus der Schule ins Leben entlassen, kauert die neunzehnjährige Londonerin nun vor der geöffneten Tür eines Flugzeugs der Royal Airforce, unter ihr das besetzte Frankreich, bereit, mit dem Fallschirm ins Ungewisse zu springen. Sie soll ihre Jugendliebe Clément aufsuchen, der in Paris für die Nazis als Wissenschaftler arbeitet. Wird sie ihre Aufgabe erfüllen? Wird sie Clément finden – und was wird dann mit Benoît, ihrem neuen Liebhaber? Ein packender Roman über eine starke junge Frau, die Mut in schwierigen Zeiten beweist, und eine Liebesgeschichte vor der Kulisse des historischen Paris.

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.

Jewish newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer build their dream home, and despite the low hum of the German war machine reverberating through the land, the two look forward to a life of promise. But as war becomes inevitable, their lives are transformed in profound ways.

The past is another country and we are all its exiles. Banished forever, we look back in fascination and wonder at this mysterious land. Who were the people who populated it? Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea... Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city... George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Foot, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms. Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough. They lived, loved, felt joy and fear, and ultimately died. But who were they? And what indissoluble thread binds them together? 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.

As Dee Denham, once a beautiful and beloved wife, the toast of colonial Cyprus, lies dying, her former life seems unimaginably distant. And then out of the blue Dee speaks to her son Thomas, sitting at her bedside: she tells him that her illness is a punishment. Compelled by a grief he cannot articulate and a confused childhood memory of betrayal, as Thomas begins the process of dismantling his mother's life he finds himself searching for the meaning of her last words. Embarked on a dangerous liaison of his own, he searches through faded photographs and love letters, seeks out survivors and examines his own imperfect remembrance, and suddenly a whole 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. With gathering momentum Dee's story unfolds, an intimate history of violence and tenderness for which Thomas finds himself quite unprepared, and in the background the distant, ominous roar of approaching disaster. A vivid, precise evocation of the past and a deft and sensitive examination of the dangerous power of memory, Swimming to Ithaca sets fragile human relationships against the heedless, unstoppable force of history and sheds new light on both

Like his great, great uncle, the early geneticist Gregor Mendel, Dr. Benedict Lambert is struggling to unlock the secrets of heredity. But Benedict's mission is particularly urgent and particularly personal, for he is afflicted with achondroplasia -- he's a dwarf. He's also a man desperate for love. And when he finds it in the form of Jean -- simple and shy -- he stumbles upon an opportunity to correct the injustice of his own capricious genes. As intelligent as it is entertaining, this witty and surprisingly erotic novel reveals the beauty and drama of scientific inquiry as it informs us of the simple passions against which even the most brilliant mind is rendered powerless

New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Room Simon Mawer returns to Czechoslovakia, this time during the turbulent 1960s, with a suspenseful story that mixes sex, politics, and betrayal. In the summer of 1968-a year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and 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 Dubček's "socialism with a human face" is smiling on the world.Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with both a diplomat's cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konečkova, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. For the first time, nothing seems 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 Dubček, and the Red Army is amassed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion?With this shrewd, engrossing, and sensual novel, Simon Mawer cements his status as one of the most talented writers of historical spy fiction today.

Marian Sutro has survived Ravensbruck and is now back in dreary 1950s London trying to pick up the pieces of her pre-war life. De-briefed by the same shadowy branch of the secret service that sent her to Paris to extract a French atomic scientist, Marian is now plunged into the cold war. Simon Mawer's sense of time and place is perfect and this is another compelling novel about identity and deception which constantly surprises the reader.

In writer Simon Mawer's new novel, a banished priest discovers the fifth gospel, and with it, the power to bring down the Christian faith.