Simon Mawer Livres

Une inoubliable fresque conjugale à travers six décennies d'histoire européenne, finaliste du Booker Prize et élu meilleur livre de l'année par The Observer et The Financial Times. À la fin des années 1920 en Tchécoslovaquie, Liesel tombe amoureuse de Viktor Landauer, héritier d'une famille juive riche. Les jeunes amoureux, immergés dans la haute société des années folles, aspirent à une maison moderne. À Venise, ils rencontrent Rainer von Abt, un architecte influencé par Loos, Mondrian et Le Corbusier, qui conçoit pour eux un palais de verre, une œuvre d'art axée sur la transparence et la lumière. Ce projet représente un acte de foi dans un avenir où l'art, la science et la démocratie triompheront des ténèbres. Cependant, leurs espoirs, comme ceux de toute une société, sont rapidement confrontés aux défis de la vie conjugale et aux bouleversements historiques, notamment l'occupation nazie et soviétique de l'Europe centrale. À travers les péripéties d'un couple, de leur famille et de leur maison, l'auteur dresse un tableau fascinant de six décennies d'histoire européenne. Alliant l'intime et le collectif avec une maîtrise inégalée, il propose un grand roman d'amour et une réflexion profonde sur le destin des individus pris dans la tourmente des temps.

1941. Elevée à Genève et parfaitement bilingue, Marian Sutro, révoltée par la situation en Europe occupée, est la recrue idéale pour les services secrets anglais. Après quelques hésitations, la jeune fille accepte de tout quitter et de disparaître dans la clandestinité. Durant son entraînement en Angleterre, elle rencontre Benoît, un résistant français au charme duquel elle n'est pas insensible, qui va l'accompagner dans sa mission. Parachutée dans le sud-ouest de la France, Marian rejoint la Résistance avec pour objectif de gagner Paris afin de convaincre son amour d'adolescence, Clément Pelletier, un physicien dont les travaux sont d'une importance cruciale pour la suite du conflit, de venir en Angleterre. Commence alors un long périple dans une France désolée, où de nombreux dangers la guettent. C'est également le début d'un dilemme amoureux entre Benoît, le compagnon des jours difficiles, et Clément, qu'elle n'a jamais réussi à oublier. Simon Mawer rend ici un brillant hommage aux trente-neuf femmes qui, entre 1941 et 1944, ont été parachutées en France par les services secrets anglais. Entre violence et amour, passion et trahison, La Fille qui tombe du ciel est aussi le magnifique portrait d'une femme ordinaire confrontée à des situations extraordinaires.

It is the 16th century, Northern Europe is reeling under the heresy of Protestantism, Southern Europe and the Mediterranean are reeling under the onslaught of Islam. How should a young Englishman serving as a Knight of Saint John in the fortress island of Malta react to these momentous events?

Bored by her marriage with Eric, ambivalent about her children, and ridden with guilt about her aged mother, Helen Harding is at an age when memory begins its slow and pernicious invasion of the present.Unexpectedly she meets up with her estranged stepbrother Michael and finds herself precipitated back into a past that has long been shut away - a childhood haunted by the mythic figure of her father, who died in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and a womanhood dominated by her conflicting love for Michael himself and her father's brutal, disturbing friend Dennis Killin.Helen's quest for the jealous god of the past is set against a shifting backdrop of England, Cyprus, and Israel. With sensitivity and perception the novel explores a woman's life and the forces that act upon it. Who is the father of Helen's daughter? What was her own mother's relationship with Killin? And above all, what really happened to her father in those tormented days when the British Mandate in Palestine drew to a bloody close?

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.

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

Considered one of the greatest scientists in history, Gregor Mendel was the first person to map the characteristics of a living thing’s successive generations, thus forming the foundation of modern genetic science. In Gregor Mendel , distinguished novelist and biologist Simon Mawer outlines Mendel’s groundbreaking research and traces his intellectual legacy from his discoveries in the mid-19th century to the present.In an engaging narrative enhanced by beautiful illustrations, Mawer details Mendel’s life and work, from his experimentation with garden peas through his subsequent findings about heredity and genetic traits. Mawer also highlights the scientific work built on Mendel’s breakthroughs, including the discovery of the DNA molecule by scientists Watson and Crick in the 1950s, the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, and the advances in genetics that continue today.

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

The gripping new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of The Glass Room and The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.

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.

An historical thriller featuring Marian Sutro, an ex-Special Operations agent, explores her romantic and political adventures in post-World War II London, as the Cold War begins to reshape loyalties. In spring 1945, as Allied forces approach Berlin, Marian emerges from the devastation of Germany, having last been known to her British handlers in autumn 1943 in Paris. A survivor of the Special Operations Executive, she has endured arrest, interrogation, and the horrors of Ravensbrück concentration camp, but at a significant personal cost. Returning to an unfamiliar England and a confusing postwar world, Marian seeks to ground her life amidst family and friends, yet she is haunted by her past and the guilt of her role in the war, which contributed to the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When Major Fawley, who disrupted her wartime mission, reappears, he entangles her in the complexities of the Cold War. This presents Marian with a chance to atone for her past while seeking her true identity. The narrative unfolds as a tale of divided loyalties and mixed motives, revealing a woman's quest for personal fulfillment that leads to shocking decisions.

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.

A diplomat's daughter, Marian Sutro is an outsider - half French, half British. When she is recruited by SOE, her hybrid status and fluent French will be of service for her to go undercover in wartime France on a dangerous cause. Trained in sabotage, dead-drops, how to perform under interrogation and how to kill, Marian parachutes into south-west France - officially as a Resistance courier. But her real destination is Paris, where she must find Clement Pelletier, a family friend, once the focus of her adolescent desires. A nuclear physicist, Pelletier is engaged in the race for a new and terrifying weapon and of urgent significance to her superiors. Marian struggles towards this reunion, understanding that war changes everything, and neither love nor fatherland may be trusted.

Tři oblíbené tituly Simona Mawera v dárkovém boxu! Pražské jaro, Skleněný pokoj, Mendelův trpaslík. Tři romány bestsellerového autora, jejichž děj se inspirován českými a moravskými reáliemi. V Pražském jaru se Mawer vrací do Československa šedesátých let s příběhem o sexu, politice a zradě. Dva studenti Oxfordu, James a Eleanor, se rozhodnou stopovat Evropou a jejich přátelství se komplikuje. Po příjezdu do jižního Německa se rozhodnou navštívit Československo, kde Dubčekův „socialismus s lidskou tváří“ láká k objevování. Mezitím britský diplomat Sam Wareham sleduje vývoj v zemi s cynismem a vášní, zatímco se zaplétá do života české studentky Lenky. Politické napětí narůstá, když sovětský vůdce Brežněv vyvíjí nátlak na Dubčeka. Skleněný pokoj je román inspirovaný skutečným osudem vily Tugendhat, odrážející tragédii českého národa. Vila, postavená pro židovsko-křesťanský pár, vyzařuje krásu a majestátnost, dokud nenastoupí nacisté a manželé musí odejít. Vila mění majitele, od českých po nacistické a sovětské, až se vrátí do státního vlastnictví. Mendelův trpaslík sleduje příběh vědce Benedicta Lamberta, který se zabývá genetickou poruchou, jež ho osobně zasahuje. S humorem a sebeironií se potýká s etickými otázkami manipulace s životy a osobním štěstím. Paralela s jeho vzdáleným příbuzným, Gregorem Mendel, dodává příběhu další rozměr.