The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

By SIMON MAWER

Published by Hachette NZ in TPB on 8 May 2012 / RRP $36.99

The wonderful new novel from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Glass Room.

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.

Trained in sabotage, dead-drops, how to perform under interrogation and how to kill, Marian parachutes into south-west France, her official mission to act as a Resistance courier. But her real destination is Paris, where she must seek out family friend Clément Pelletier, once the focus of her adolescent desires. A nuclear physicist engaged in the race for a new and terrifying weapon, he is of urgent significance to her superiors. As she struggles through the strange, lethal landscape of the Occupation towards this reunion, what completes her training is the understanding that war changes everything, and neither love nor fatherland may be trusted.

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is both a gripping adventure story and a moving meditation on patriotism, betrayal and the limits of love.

About the Author

Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus and in Malta. He has lived with his wife in Italy for more than 20 years, and he teaches at the English School in Rome.

Praise for 'The Glass Room'

‘Simon Mawer’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is a tour de force in precision writing, executed with an architect’s skill and visionary flair.’ – North & South

‘Mawer’s control of his themes of language, desire, memory and the power of place is extraordinary.’ – The Daily Telegraph

‘A thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry.’ – The Guardian