Simon Mawer Books In Order

The Bitter Cross

It is the 16th century, Northern Europe is reeling under the heresy of Protestantism, Southern Europe and the Mediterranean are reeling under the onslaught of Islam. How should a young Englishman serving as a Knight of Saint John in the fortress island of Malta react to these momentous events?

A Jealous God

From the author of CHIMERA and THE BITTER CROSS, a novel set in England, Cyprus and Israel, in which a woman is compelled to confront her past after a meeting with her estranged stepbrother, and embarks on a journey to discover the reasons behind her father’s death.

Mendel’s Dwarf

Hailed by the New Yorker as ‘furious, tender, and wittily erudite,’ Mendel’s Dwarf is a novel that explores the brave new world of genetic science and the depths of the human heart.

Like his great, great uncle, the early geneticist Gregor Mendel, Dr. Benedict Lambert is struggling to unlock the secrets of heredity. But Benedict’s mission is particularly urgent and particularly personal, for he is afflicted with achondroplasia–he’s a dwarf. He’s also a man desperate for love. And when he finds it in the form of Jean–simple and shy–he stumbles upon an opportunity to correct the injustice of his own capricious genes. As intelligent as it is entertaining, this witty and surprisingly erotic novel reveals the beauty and drama of scientific inquiry as it informs us of the simple passions against which even the most brilliant mind is rendered powerless.

‘Hypersmart and delectably stylish.’ — Esquire

‘Simon Mawer writes beautifully, and the pleasure of his novel comes from the chance to watch him consider the mystery of the world, to report on the clarity with which nature speaks to us.’ —The New York Times Book Review

‘Call it a hybrid, call it a mutation, it’s all grand scientific adventure and a tragic human love story combined, as idiosyncratic and mysterious in its own way as the first gene formed out of cosmic dust.’ —The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Gospel of Judas

In Simon Mawer’s remarkably poised and poignant novel, the small momentis as significant as the large, and ‘the detail dictat es to the whole.’ Biblical scholar Father Leo Newman has spent a lifetime deciphering meaning from evanescent fragments of papyrus; he is much less accustomed to descrying the metamorphosis of a relationship writ large ‘a mysterious thing, much too mysterious for a simple naming’. How unlikely, then, that he should fall in love with Madeleine Brewer, the vibrant but unbalanced wife of a bureaucrat. How unlikely, too, that he should be confronted with an ancient scroll whose details are radically incendiary rather than dustily abstruse: an apparent account of Jesus’ life from Judas’s point of view. But how marvelously likely that Mawer should take these elements and create a haunting narrative of doubt and faith, ‘the thin wash of immediacy’ and memory, passion and the fragile remains of its absence. Madeleine and the Judas scroll thrust themselves, uninvited and unexpected, into Leo’s quiet life in Rome, their very presence a counterpoint to his isolation and vulnerability. Asked by Madeleine to compromise a lifetime, asked by his colleagues to verify or deny the scroll’s authenticity, Leo is a profoundly Prufrockian figure, ‘No Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.’ Does he dare disturb the universe? Mawer skillfully interleaves three narratives: the story of Leo’s German mother’s life in Rome during World War II, a woman who was herself forced to choose between principle and passion; the unsettling story of Leo’s relationship with Madeleine and the scroll; and a circumspect ‘present,’ in which Leo is still ‘a hermit in a cave, a hermit who was ho*arding the few fragments of his faith lest they too be swept away by circumstance.’ The novel represents a solemn quest, striving back toward half forgotten originsin an attempt to bring order to a present and future spinning out of control. Its most poignant irony is that Leo is at once creator and destroyer as hepieces together the story of the scroll, he is simultaneously unraveling his ownfaith, his own raison d’ tre:A dun colored fibrous fragment hung there behind the glass, a fragment of papyrus the color of biscuit, inscribed with the most perfect letters ever man devised, words wrought in the lean and ragged language of the eastern Mediterranean, the workaday language of the streets, the meaning half apprehended, half grasped, half heard through the noise of all that lies between us and them, the shouting, roaring centuries of darkness and enlightenment. How was it possible to communicate to her the pure, organic thrill?The thrill, thanks to Mawer, is ours. Kelly Flynn

The Fall

Rob Dewar is driving home when he hears that his childhood friend Jim Matthewson has fallen to his death in a climbing accident. Rob’s decision to turn his car around and make the journey to comfort Jim’s widow is the beginning of a journey into the past, back to Rob’s youth before he made the pivotal choices that now come back to haunt him. Simon Mawer skillfully unveils the delicate layers of history in the lives of a group of people connected over the years by camaraderie, love, competition, and lust. In the shadow of an old love triangle lies the story of another, and as we follow the characters from London during the Blitz to the mountain ranges of the Alps and back to present day Wales, Mawer reveals how the agonies of the past impinge upon the present. This is an intelligent, thought provoking love story by a brilliant, masterful novelist.

The Glass Room

A New York Times Best Seller Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old world European style in favor of the new and the avant garde. But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Na*zi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor’s Jewish roots draw Na*zi attention, and before the family itself dissolves. As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Na*zi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of The Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began. Brim*ming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure The Glass Room contains it all.

Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics

Considered one of the greatest scientists in history, Gregor Mendel was the first person to map the characteristics of a living thing’s successive generations, thus forming the foundation of modern genetic science. In Gregor Mendel, distinguished novelist and biologist Simon Mawer outlines Mendel s groundbreaking research and traces his intellectual legacy from his discoveries in the mid 19th century to the present.

In an engaging narrative enhanced by beautiful illustrations, Mawer details Mendel s life and work, from his experimentation with garden peas through his subsequent findings about heredity and genetic traits. Mawer also highlights the scientific work built on Mendel s breakthroughs, including the discovery of the DNA molecule by scientists Watson and Crick in the 1950s, the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, and the advances in genetics that continue today.