Simon Mawer

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 to go undercover in wartime France, it seems her hybrid status, and fluent French, will be of service to a greater, more dangerous cause.

For 1,600 years its message lay hidden. When the bound papyrus pages of this lost gospel finally reached scholars who could unlock its meaning, they were astounded. Here was a gospel that had not been seen since the early days of Christianity, and which few experts had even thought existed--a gospel told from the perspective of Judas Iscariot, history's ultimate traitor. And far from being a villain, the Judas that emerges in its pages is a hero.In this radical reinterpretation, Jesus asks Judas to betray him. In contrast to the New Testament Gospels, Judas Iscariot is presented as a role model for all those who wish to be disciples of Jesus. He is the one apostle who truly understands Jesus.This volume is the first publication of the remarkable gospel since it was condemned as heresy by early Church leaders, most notably by St. Irenaeus, in 180. Hidden away in a cavern in Middle Egypt, the codex (or book) containing the gospel was discovered by farmers in the 1970s. In the intervening years the papyrus codex was bought and sold by antiquities traders, hidden away, and carried across three continents, all the while suffering damage that reduced much of it to fragments. In 2001, it finally found its way into the hands of a team of experts who would painstakingly reassemble and restore it.The Gospel of Judas has been translated from its original Coptic in clear prose, and is accompanied by commentary that explains its fascinating history in the context of the early Church, offering a whole new way of understanding the message of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Benedict Lambert is a genius - the top of his class at Oxford and a recipient of prestigious research fellowships as well as the admiration, grudging at times, of his colleagues. There is only one thing Benedict Lambert wants more than anything else in life, and he cannot have it - he wants to be normal. For Benedict Lambert is a dwarf. Ironically, Benedict was born of two average-height parents, neither of whom could trace any genetic abnormalities through their distinguished family trees. He is also the great-great-great-nephew of the reclusive but brilliant Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who pioneered the study of genetics, and who unwittingly set the stage for Benedict to go in search of the gene that causes achondroplasia, or dwarfism. Inured to the world's sidelong stares and ill-disguised revulsion, Ben never expects to find anything approaching reciprocated love, until he meets Jean, a shy and simple woman whose husband is everything Benedict is not - including infertile. This riveting and thought-provoking novel takes us to the brave new world of genetic science through the eyes and heart of a man who knows that his own particular strain of humanity will have no place in it.

"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 more. Having reached Southern Germany, they decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dub̆cek'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 Koneckova, 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 Dub̆cek, and the Red Army is massed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion?"--

Een ontsnapte seriemoordenaar gaat op zoek naar de agente die hem destijds gearresteerd heeft.

As Allied forces close in on Berlin in spring 1945, a solitary figure emerges from the wreckage that is Germany. It is Marian Sutro, whose existence was last known to her British controllers in autumn 1943 in Paris. One of a handful of surviving agents of the Special Operations Executive, she has withstood arrest, interrogation, incarceration, and the horrors of Ravensbrück concentration camp, but at what cost? Returned to an England she barely knows and a postwar world she doesnt understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. Family and friends surround her, but she is haunted by her experiences and by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war effort helped lead to the monstrosities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the mysterious Major Fawley, the man who hijacked her wartime mission to Paris, emerges from the shadows to draw her into the ambiguities and uncertainties of the Cold War, she sees a way to make amends for the past and at the same time to find the identity that has never been hers.

In de jaren dertig laat een autofabrikant in Tsjechoslovakije een villa bouwen in de stijl van het functionalisme met een transparant centrum; het huis zal een grote rol in zijn familie spelen.

On honeymoon in Venice in 1929, Viktor and Liesel Landauer face a new world when they meet brilliant architect Rainer von Abt. Soon, on a hillside near a provincial Czech town, the Landauer House with its celebrated Glass Room will become von Abt's greatest work, a modernist masterpiece in glass and steel, with travertine floors and onyx walls, filled with light and optimism. But while Viktor's beautiful wife is Aryan, he is Jewish, and so when Nazi troops arrive the family must flee. Yet their exile is not the end of the spectacular building. It slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet and finally to the Czechoslovak state, the crystalline perfection of the Glass Room always exerting a gravitational pull on those who know it. It becomes a laboratory, a shelter from the storm of war, and a place where the broken and the ruined find some kind of comfort until, with the collapse of Communism, the Landauers can finally return to where their story began.

The forest of Pinewood is a silent, safe place to be. At least it is until the ground itself rises up and begins to take victims. All former thief Lute wants is to be left alone. His last adventure haunting him, he has taken up residence in a dilapidated log, focusing on carving to drown out the noise of the ghosts in his memory. But when a mysterious customer comes calling about a mirror and Lute’s path crosses that of the young, neglected and highly eccentric fox squirrel Kinder, he finds himself grudgingly sucked into the mystery of the new horror terrorizing Arborand. But neither Kinder nor Lute can prepare themselves for the truth behind the tragedy. Far away in Maplewood, Mariyen, a young seer-in-training, is experiencing terrible nightmares featuring her estranged mother who seems to be harboring a dark secret. All around her is talk of a seasons-old prophecy, a dangerous exile and a squirrel with fur as white as snow, but Mariyen is warned to stay out of it. All she can be certain of is what she feels when she looks out the window to the seemingly innocuous ground. Death comes from below. And it may be coming for all of them if they do not find the means to stop it.