Simon Mawer

"New York Times best-selling author Simon Mawer's latest novel plunges into the suspenseful world of 1960s Czechoslovakia, revealing the divide between war games played by idealistic young Britons and deadly real-life politics. 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...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room brilliantly evokes six decades of Eastern European history, beginning in 1930s Czechoslovakia. 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.

At the age of 19, fluent-French-speaking Briton Marian Sutro is recruited for service in the Special Operations Executive during World War II, only to find that another secret organization wants her to infiltrate Paris to persuade a research physicist to join the Allied war effort.