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.

Swimming to Ithaca

Literature & Fiction

Simon Mawer

Contemporary

Time Warner Books Uk

Page edges tanned Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Girl Who Fell From The Sky

Literary

ABACUS +

Amongst the ancient papyri of the Dead Sea, a remarkable scroll is discovered. Written in the first century AD, it purports to be the true account of the life of Jesus, as told by Youdas the sicarios - Judas Iscariot: the missing Gospel of Judas. If authentic, it will be one of the most incendiary documents in the history of humankind. The task of proving - or disproving - its validity falls to Father Leo Newman, one of the world's leading experts in Koine, the demotic Greek of the Roman Empire, and a man the newspapers like to call a 'renegade priest'. But as Leo absorbs himself in Judas' testimony, the stories of his own life haunt him. The story of his forbidden yet irresistible love for a married woman. The story of his mother's passionate and tragic affair amidst the war-time ruins of Rome. They are stories of love and betrayal that may threaten his faith just as deeply as the Gospel of Judas... With a dramatic narrative that spans from the Europe of the Second World War to Jerusalem two thousand years after Jesus' birth, THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS is a compelling and erudite thriller.

The Gospel Of Judas

The Fall

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.

Genre Fiction

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. Inspired by a real house, an amazing modernist symbol, Simon Mawer has written his best novel yet, a story guaranteed to dazzle and intrigue the reader.

The Glass Room: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

The Glass Room

Marian Sutro has survived Ravensbruck and is back in dreary 1950s London trying to pick up the pieces of her pre-war life.
Returned to an England she barely knows and a post-war world she doesn't understand Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. Family and friends surround her and a young RAF officer attempts to bring her the normalities of love and affection but she is haunted by her experiences and by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war effort helped lead to the development of the Atom Bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie? When a mysterious Russian diplomat 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 to renew the excitement of her double life.
Simon Mawer's sense of time and place is perfect:Tightropeis a compelling novel about identity and deception which constantly surprises the reader.

Tightrope

Ancestry: Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

Chivers Audio Books

Hearing that a childhood friend has died in a tragic climbing accident, Rob Ross rushes to comfort the man's widow and finds himself reliving moments from his past, which was marked by a love triangle and a journey to the Alps. By the author of The Gospel of Judas. 40,000 first printing.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Simon Mawer. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Simon Mawer

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Simon Mawer. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Swimming to Ithaca

Girl Who Fell From The Sky

The Gospel Of Judas

The Fall

The Glass Room: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

The Glass Room

Tightrope

Ancestry: Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

The Fall

The Fall