Simon Mawer

British novelist and former biology teacher, best known for The Glass Room (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Mendel's Dwarf, whose work often blends science, history, and moral complexity.

This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

  1. 1. Trapeze

    Recruited from a quiet life into Britain’s clandestine war effort, a bilingual young woman undergoes intense training and is parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to serve the Resistance and persuade a brilliant physicist from her past to defect. As she navigates cutouts, safe houses, and coded messages, she confronts betrayal, fear, and moral ambiguity, torn between duty and desire while the ever-present threat of capture hangs over every decision.

    Purchase from Bookshop.org
  2. 2. Tightrope

    After surviving wartime imprisonment, former SOE courier Marian Sutro returns to postwar Britain to find ordinary life impossible. As the Cold War dawns, she is drawn back into clandestine work, entangled with old allies, dubious lovers, and competing intelligence services seeking atomic secrets. Haunted by trauma yet driven by conviction, she walks a perilous line between loyalty and betrayal, autonomy and manipulation, until her choices threaten to destroy the fragile stability she longs to reclaim.