Tightrope, by Simon Mawer
The Tightrope, By Simon Mawer tends to be wonderful reading book that is easy to understand. This is why this book Tightrope, By Simon Mawer becomes a preferred book to read. Why don't you really want turned into one of them? You can take pleasure in reviewing Tightrope, By Simon Mawer while doing various other tasks. The presence of the soft documents of this book Tightrope, By Simon Mawer is kind of obtaining experience conveniently. It includes exactly how you ought to save the book Tightrope, By Simon Mawer, not in shelves of course. You could save it in your computer system tool and also gizmo.
Tightrope, by Simon Mawer
PDF Ebook Download : Tightrope, by Simon Mawer
From the author of the best-selling and Booker Prize–shortlisted The Glass Room and TrapezeAn 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 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 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. A novel of divided loyalties and mixed motives, Tightrope is the complex and enigmatic story of a woman whose search for personal identity and fulfillment leads her to shocking choices.
Tightrope, by Simon Mawer- Amazon Sales Rank: #102806 in Books
- Published on: 2015-11-03
- Released on: 2015-11-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x 1.00" w x 5.60" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
Review "The characters in Simon Mawer’s latest spy thriller, Tightrope, 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...Tightrope is full of satisfying twists, and we can’t help cheering for its tough, resourceful heroine…” —The New York Times"Mawer has excelled with another tangled, character-led literary thriller. i is a perfectly poised balancing act." —Minneapolis Star Tribune"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." —Booklist (starred review)"In Marian [Simon Mawer] has created a complex, contradictory heroine, emotionally fragile, endlessly resourceful, and unrepentantly amorous. ...[Tightrope] tells a dramatic story about one woman testing the boundaries of loyalty as one kind of war gives way to a shadowy new one." —Publishers Weekly"Heroine/'traitor' Marian, introduced in Trapeze, is compelling and complicated. ...Excellent for historical thriller readers and those interested in the dawn of the nuclear era." —Library Journal"A fun, intelligent read." —Kirkus Reviews "Tightrope is a beautifully written, artfully considered post-WWII existential spy story." —The Boston Herald/Hollywood & Mine Blog“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.” —The Sunday Times (UK)“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.” —The Guardian (UK)“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.” —The Daily Telegraph (UK)“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.” —The Times (UK)“…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.” —The Sunday Mirror“Marian is at the heart of the novel. …She is a thoroughly and impressively imagined character.” —The Scotsman (UK)“A compelling Cold War story… told by a series of flashbacks… The start’s a slow burn, but Mawer soon grips you with his labyrinthine plot.” —The Tatler (UK)“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.” —The Financial Times (UK)“Tightrope 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.” —The Irish Times
About the Author Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England. His first novel, Chimera, won the McKitterick Prize for first novels in 1989. Mendel’s Dwarf (1997), his first book to be published in the U.S., was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a New York Times Book to Remember for 1998. The Gospel of Judas, The Fall (winner of the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature), and Swimming to Ithacafollowed, as well as The Glass Room, his tenth book and eighth novel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Trapeze (Other Press) was published in 2012.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. If 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:“How did you get to France?”“I jumped.”“Jumped?”“Parachute. I parachuted.”“When was this?”When 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.”“Last year?”Was 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.”“You parachuted into France in the fall of forty-three?” There was incredulity in his tone. “Where was this exactly?”“The southwest. North of Toulouse. I forget the name of the place…’“And who sent you?”“I can’t tell you that.”“Why not?”“Because it’s secret. If you contact British intelligence they’ll confirm my story. Please, do that. Please. I beg you.”“And then you were arrested. Where was that?”“In Paris. Near Paris, not in Paris. At a railway station.”“Name?”She shook her head. “I forget…”
Where to Download Tightrope, by Simon Mawer
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful. "Core" character? By Jill Meyer "Tightrope", by Simon Mawer, is a sequel to his previous novel, "The Girl Who Fell From the Sky". I don't think you have had to have read "Girl" to understand "Tightrope", but you might as well. "Girl" ends where "Tightrope" begins. (Mawer is also the author of "The Glass Room" and other novels.)The main character in "Tightrope" is Marian Sutro, a half-British, half-French, woman who is hired by the British secret service in WW2 and trained as a spy. Her training includes how to kill, how to break into buildings, and how to blow up trains - all worthy things to know when you're going into German-occupied France to cause mischief and mayhem. And Marian Sutro - who had plenty of aliases - did just that and was finally caught by the Germans after she was betrayed by an associate. She spent time in Ravensbruck after having been tortured in Paris. "Tightrope" begins when Marian returns home after escaping from Ravensbruck, to begin her post-war life. The title refers to the high-wire act Marian was forced to walk as the war years turned into the Cold War.But the post-war era was different than the WW2 years. The Allied coalition of the US, Great Britain, and the USSR changed as the fear in the west went from Nazism to Communism. Our "good friend" - the USSR - evolved into our enemy, and the development (and supposed secrecy) of the atomic bomb was kept secret from the Soviets. (Actually, Stalin had known about the bomb as spies from Los Alamos gave information to Soviet agents. But that's a different story and a different book.) Where did Marian Sutro fit in to the new reality in England? She and her brother - an atomic physicist - had "sympathies" for the Soviets and Marian worked at an organisation set up in London to foster "cross cultural" ties between the British and the Soviets in the post-war years.Marian Sutro's story in the late 1940's and early 1950's involved spies and agents for both Soviet and British security agencies. As usual, identities and allegiances were fluid and double/triple spies seemed to be everywhere. Marian enjoyed a healthy love life - perhaps because she was married to maybe the dullest man in Christendom - and her bed partners were also part of her work/spy life. She seemed to me to be a woman with no "core identity"; her many aliases and fractured allegiances seemed to make having a "core" difficult. As a reader, I was never really caught up with Marian Sutro. I found her interesting in a cool, distant way and enjoyed reading about her, but I never really "liked" her. Now, this is not a huge problem for me; I often enjoy reading about characters who are incredibly unlikable but most "unlikable" characters have an interest to them. I just didn't find Marian Sutro terribly interesting. What happened to her, yes, I found interesting, but not the character herself.Author Simon Mawer is an excellent writer and "Tightrope" is a good book. It' not as good as "The Glass Room", but then very few books are as good as "Room". I can advise you to read "Tightrope" as it is well-written. I just wish I cared about Marian Sutro more than I did.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Once a Spy By gerardpeter This is a sequel to The Girl who Fell from the Sky. It can be read as a “stand alone”, but be aware that it reveals a lot of the previous book. So perhaps read that first.Tightrope brings the heroine of Girl, a now broken Marian Sutro, from Ravensbruck concentration camp back to England. Peace comes but Marian finds it impossible to adjust and find a role for herself. Then, enemies become friends, friends become enemies as an iron curtain is drawn across Europe. Spies are in demand. It is in the clandestine and secret of the new espionage that Marian finds purpose. This is the life she had before in occupied France, this is what she was trained for after all.As with Girl, the author sets out themes of trust and betrayal , identity and deception. Who really is Marian?The plot contains real figures from the time, politicians and intelligence officers. The fictional characters have their historical counterparts, too. The plot is plausible and, if not gripping, interesting enough to keep this reader going. The author has researched the period well – details of cars and clothes are correct and add authentic colour – well in the context of post-war England that is principally grey!But. Some of the writing is not that good – “thirst like fear gripped her throat” for example gives an idea of the style where Marian tells us what she is thinking and feeling. These sections reminded me of the repeated tedium of Christine’s diary in Before I Go to Sleep [which I did not like at all – but true most readers did]. The author seemed to struggle to portray Marian's inner soul. The narrative is told from only two points of view – Marian’s and that of Sam, a boy/young man. I did not find either character convincing, still less the relationship between them.The problem, maybe, is that standards in Cold War fiction have been set so high by masters like Le Carre. Against those this was at best, ok. The Girl who Fell from the Sky was complete in herself - she did not need or want a sequel.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful. From falling to balancing on an ever finer wire By Lady Fancifull When I finished Mawer's last book, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, I felt shocked and almost a little bemused by the abrupt ending - though I also reflected that I had no idea what other ending might have been suitable. And I also found it a plus in that book that not every thread had been explained, not every character really revealed and understood.The Girl Who Fell From The Sky was a fictional story, with an initial inspiration coming from the fact that during the Second World War, 39 women had been recruited as agents from England by SOE (Special Operations Executive) to be parachuted into occupied France, to work with the Resistance. What kind of people were these incredibly brave, but also, perhaps unusually addicted to the adrenaline rush, women? Mawer's book centres on Marian Sutro, a naïve and adventurous young English woman with a Swiss French mother, brought up bilingual, recruited as an SOE agent, eagerly learning the arts of duplicity, subterfuge, living dangerously, despite all the undoubted danger Sutro is also, in one sense, living free - escaping convention, escaping her family, her past, her history, inventing new identities - and living with a mission, making a difference.When I realised that Mawer's new book, Tightrope, would continue Sutro's story, but would bring her into the period of the cold war, everything fell into place. And I had even more admiration for Mawer, because nothing about the first book, despite the advantage, now, of hindsight, screamed `sequel'. Sometimes books with sequels planned are highly unsatisfying BECAUSE they seem structured for book 2.Tightrope is quite an uncomfortable book in many ways. How does someone who has lived in such an extraordinary way, with preternaturally sharpened senses, prepared to kill, prepared to lie, cheat, use sex casually and ruthlessly to relieve an overwhelming itch or as another tool of manipulation, then manage to live, after the war, back in suburbia, in a more narrowly confined way? That is Mawer's exploration, and Sutro's challenging journey.Mawer gives us a world with a character who is always going to be, a naturally unreliable narrator. Actually, the reader can probably be a lot more sure of Sutro than anyone else within the book can be!"Did I believe the story she told me? I really don't know. It is perfectly possible to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time - that is one of the brilliant faculties of the human mind. Without it we'd have no war and no religion and precious little else that separates us from the other species."As a cavil, I wasn't completely sure about some of Sutro's sexual encounters, and at times, I was very aware that the writer was male, and wondered how differently a female writer might have explored writing a woman who uses sex without intimacy, in part because of the professional need to hide vulnerability, - which of course includes becoming emotionally intimate - and who also uses sex as an escape from some of the horrors of her past experiences, and as an escape from the humdrum. It wasn't the fact of Sutro's sexuality which I was `unsure' about, or even her degree of distance, but (perhaps inevitably) I was aware of the gender of the writer. The sex scenes take place in many ways quite clinically, from the outside, and were where I could not quite engage with the inner world of what Sutro was feeling - I think a female writer may have given a little more insight into Sutro's emotional responses here.Nonetheless, I found this a completely absorbing, dislocating, sometimes frightening book. The structure is clever, we learn her story backwards and forwards, and it is partly narrated by Sam Wareham, who initially meets Marian when she is 24 and he is 12. Sam is the son of a family friend, and as the story proceeds into the 50s, and he becomes a young man, from time to time his story connects with Marian. The edgy, shifting politics, as the countries who were Allies during the war shift, split, and take up new positions relative to each other, and the very real spectre of a nuclear arms race gallops apace, from the first horrific atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the race for a thermonuclear device, the hydrogen bomb. Sutro is still at the heart of all this, as her brother, and also the man she first fell in love with, as a sheltered teenager before the war, both became physicists, working on nuclear fission and fusion."On the desert island, the device called Ivy Mike detonated. A double flash, the flash of the primary followed microseconds later by the flash of the secondary. The primary was a plutonium bomb of the Nagasaki type, releasing a storm of X-rays that flowed down into the secondary and impacted upon the hydrogen atoms in the vacuum flask so fiercely that they fused into helium and, for a fragment of time, into all the atoms of creation and a few more besides........The island on which the device had been constructed vanished entirely. The thermonuclear age had begun."I was left with perhaps a clearer understanding of why some `real' individuals may have acted in certain ways which seemed incomprehensible or motivated solely by motives of personal gain or a kind of emotional pathology. Without preaching, or indeed special pleading, Mawer makes the reader examine the moral maze of the times.And, for what it's worth, the ending of this book is wonderfully satisfying. Mawer brings in, in both books, the idea of a rather fiendish chess game variant, where you only see your own pieces on your own board, and can't see the moves your opponent is playing - this becomes a kind of metaphor for Marian, as she begins to be drawn into still deadly games in a world ostensibly at peace. And, yes, Mawer too is playing that game, and the end, where he finally shows us the board with all its pieces, the game across two books, is brilliant, and I laughed in delight and admiration.I received this as an advance review copy from the publishers via NetGalley
See all 65 customer reviews... Tightrope, by Simon MawerTightrope, by Simon Mawer PDF
Tightrope, by Simon Mawer iBooks
Tightrope, by Simon Mawer ePub
Tightrope, by Simon Mawer rtf
Tightrope, by Simon Mawer AZW
Tightrope, by Simon Mawer Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar