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Sign up todayTrapeze
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Learn moreA propulsive novel of World War II espionage by the author of The Glass Room
Barely out of school and doing her bit for the British war effort, Marian Sutro has one quality that makes her stand out—she is a native French speaker. It is this that attracts the attention of the SOE, the Special Operations Executive, which trains agents to operate in occupied Europe. Drawn into this strange, secret world at the age of nineteen, she finds herself undergoing commando training, attending a “school for spies,” and ultimately, one autumn night, parachuting into France from an Royal Air Force bomber to join the Wordsmith resistance network.
But there’s more to Marian’s mission than meets the eye of her SOE controllers; her mission has been hijacked by another secret organization that wants her to go to Paris and persuade a friend—a research physicist—to join the Allied war effort. The outcome could affect the whole course of the war.
A fascinating blend of fact and fiction, Trapeze is both an old-fashioned adventure story and a modern exploration of a young woman’s growth into adulthood. There is violence, and there is love. There is death and betrayal, deception and revelation. But above all there is Marian Sutro, an ordinary young woman who, like her real-life counterparts in the SOE, did the most extraordinary things at a time when the ordinary was not enough.
Simon Mawer is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of numerous literary awards. English by birth, he has made Italy his home for more than thirty years.
Kate Reading is an Audie Award–winning narrator and has received numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine. She is also a theater actor in the Washington, DC, area and has been a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company since 1987.
Reviews
“Mawer’s wartime textures are extraordinary, and no page ever reeks of the library; his set pieces are so beautiful you want to read them two or three times over. He writes about fear—the way it sometimes nudges up against boredom—and about bravery better than any contemporary novelist I know; such is his precision, he seems more cartographer than novelist at times.”
“The great moments of the book, though—and there are many—are when the ostensible action stirs Mawer to a flight of imagining that channels pure literary adrenaline into making visible and audible, not just the concrete moment, but its bigger implications…This is why Mawer is a genuinely great contemporary writer.”
“Gripping and moving in equal measure…Marian’s story is unforgettable.”
“Where his last Booker-shortlisted novel, The Glass Room, gave an expanisve overview of a whole country over the course of 50 years, Mawer’s latest is a more intense and tightly-focused story. Radiating an atmosphere of tense suspicion and claustrophobia, it is utterly gripping from start to finish.”
“Trapeze is a thoroughly engaging, well-researched novel…rich in historical detail…thoroughly gripping, informative, interesting. Mr. Mawer is a fine researcher and a wonderful storyteller. Incorporating many of the finest elements of spy thrillers and even romance novels, Trapeze is a fascinating tale of and homage to the resistance fighters and members of the SOE.”
“A fascinating WWII novel based in fact…Coming-of-age story meets old-fashioned tale of adventure.”
“Much-lauded British author Mawer vividly describes the deprivations in a war-occupied country and its once-vibrant capital and provides testimony to the courage of countless members of the French Resistance. But this is primarily a masterfully crafted homage to the fifty-three extraordinary women of the French section of the SOE on whose actual exploits the novel is based. With its lyrical yet spare prose and heart-pounding climax, this is a compelling historical thriller of the highest order.”
“A persuasive, exhilarating thriller... [in Paris] any Buchanesque bravado vanishes, with Marian living less by ingenuity than her wits in a dehumanised city...in the end it is...intense exultation and a kind of ambivalent fatalism that impels Marian.”
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