{"product_id":"tightrope-isbn-9781635425062","title":"Tightrope","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrom the author of the best-selling and Booker Prize–shortlisted \u003ci\u003eThe Glass Room\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eTrapeze\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn historical thriller that brings back Marian Sutro, ex-Special Operations agent, and traces her romantic and political exploits in post-World War II London, where the Cold War is about to reshape old loyalties\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs 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 doesn’t 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eA novel of divided loyalties and mixed motives, \u003ci\u003eTightrope\u003c\/i\u003e is the complex and enigmatic story of a woman whose search for personal identity and fulfillment leads her to shocking choices.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e“The characters in Simon Mawer’s latest spy thriller, \u003ci\u003eTightrope\u003c\/i\u003e, set in the gray, exhausted, murky days of post-World War II England, spend a lot of time in tense encounters that pivot on the issue of who knows what, and who’s telling the truth about it...[Mawer] brings a fine sense of story, an intriguing plot and a lovely way with a sentence...\u003ci\u003eTightrope \u003c\/i\u003eis full of satisfying twists, and we can’t help cheering for its tough, resourceful heroine…” \u003ci\u003e—New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mawer has excelled with another tangled, character-led literary thriller...A perfectly poised balancing act.” \u003ci\u003e—Minneapolis Star Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Outstanding...Mawer’s novel offers a meditation on the problem of identity in a world where everything is cover for something else. A spy novel with the psychological richness and complexity of literary fiction.” \u003ci\u003e—Booklist\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In Marian [Simon Mawer] has created a complex, contradictory heroine, emotionally fragile, endlessly resourceful, and unrepentantly amorous...[\u003ci\u003eTightrope\u003c\/i\u003e] tells a dramatic story about one woman testing the boundaries of loyalty as one kind of war gives way to a shadowy new one.”\u003ci\u003e —Publishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Heroine\/'traitor' Marian, introduced in \u003ci\u003eTrapeze\u003c\/i\u003e, is compelling and complicated...Excellent for historical thriller readers and those interested in the dawn of the nuclear era.” \u003ci\u003e—Library Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A fun, intelligent read.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e“Tightrope\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e is a beautifully written, artfully considered post-WWII existential spy story.” \u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Boston Herald\/Hollywood \u0026amp; Mine Blog\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mawer is a skillful writer and this is a sophisticated, deviously constructed story of a woman who finds her true self in the distorting mirrors of the intelligence game.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e (UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mawer’s period detail is perfect, and his prose impeccable. Mawer’s greatest creation is undoubtedly Marian herself...Beautifully inferred and brilliantly imagined…It is difficult to create a character with genuine charisma, but Mawer seems to have managed it with Marian. She is indeed perhaps the closest thing to a female James Bond in English literature.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e (UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mawer captures Marian’s disorientation with affecting conviction. His feeling for time and place remains impressively sharp, from rationing-era London to the ‘strange, febrile vitality’ of post-war Paris. Marian remains a compelling heroine, whose many contradictions are all believable.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Daily Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e (UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mawer sensitively evokes the crushing normality of post war Britain and the struggle of a woman who has lived in high definition to forge a new life in a grey world.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e (UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sutro is a singular creation—a fascinating and compelling character and the account of how she becomes caught up in Cold War espionage is enthralling.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Mirror\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Marian is at the heart of the novel...She is a thoroughly and impressively imagined character.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Scotsman\u003c\/i\u003e (UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A compelling Cold War story...told by a series of flashbacks...start’s a slow burn, but Mawer soon grips you with his labyrinthine plot.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Tatler \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In Marian, Mawer has created an attractively awkward figure—damaged, resilient, self-contained and needing danger in order to become truly herself...It is Mawer’s focus on character as much as on action, and on recognizing the morally complex worlds in which those characters operate, that inescapably calls John le Carré to mind. Comparisons can be invidious though: Mawer is no acolyte and here shows again his own distinctive talent.” —\u003ci\u003eFinancial Times \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eTightrope\u003c\/i\u003e is a nuanced spy novel akin to the best work of John le Carré, in that it bypasses the cloak-and-dagger conventions in pursuit of the noble flaws, foibles and idiosyncrasies that lie at the heart of the most fascinating spies...Mawer delivers an absorbing tale about an extraordinary woman who finds her understanding of duty, patriotism and honour ripped to shreds by epoch-defining circumstances.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Irish Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eTightrope\u003c\/i\u003e is an excellent thriller with superb writing and a captivating sense of history.” \u003ci\u003e—A Writer of History\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eSimon Mawer \u003c\/b\u003ewas born in 1948 in England. His first novel, \u003ci\u003eChimera\u003c\/i\u003e, won the McKitterick Prize for first novels in 1989. \u003ci\u003eMendel’s Dwarf\u003c\/i\u003e (1997), his first book to be published in the U.S., was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003eBook to Remember for 1998. \u003ci\u003eThe Gospel of Judas\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Fall\u003c\/i\u003e (winner of the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature), and \u003ci\u003eSwimming to Ithaca\u003c\/i\u003efollowed, as well as \u003ci\u003eThe Glass Room\u003c\/i\u003e, his tenth book and eighth novel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. \u003ci\u003eTrapeze\u003c\/i\u003e (Other Press) was published in 2012.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eIf she stares out of the window perhaps the questions will stop. There have been so many questions. The American intelligence officer asked her questions, dozens of questions that referred to a time that seemed so distant as to belong to another person in a different world. She had wanted those questions to stop but they kept on mercilessly:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“How did you get to France?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I jumped.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jumped?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Parachute. I parachuted.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“When was this?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen was it? Time was dilated, the whole of her previous life compressed into a few moments, the last year stretching out into decades. “I don’t recall. October, I think. The October moon. Look it up in your calendar.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Last year?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWas it last year? Days, months stumbled through her brain, the units of misery, the texture of her existence, a medium she struggled through, like wading waist-deep through icy water. “The year before. Nineteen forty-three.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You parachuted into France in the \u003ci\u003efall of forty-three\u003c\/i\u003e?” There was incredulity in his tone. “Where was this exactly?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The southwest. North of Toulouse. I forget the name of the place…’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“And who sent you?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I can’t tell you that.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Why not?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Because it’s secret. If you contact British intelligence they’ll confirm my story. Please, do that. Please. I beg you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“And then you were arrested. Where was that?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In Paris. Near Paris, not \u003ci\u003ein\u003c\/i\u003e Paris. At a railway station.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Name?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe shook her head. “I forget…”","brand":"Other Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301866000613,"sku":"NP9781635425062","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781635425062.jpg?v=1767742633","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/tightrope-isbn-9781635425062","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}