Fictionalising totalitarianism

Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room gave Hilary Mantel and J.M. Coetzee some stern competition on the 2009 Booker shortlist. Mawer’s evocation of place stays long in the memory, but his crowning achievement was the description of the glass room itself — a minimalist house, built in the countryside above Prague, through which the savage history of 20th century Europe is told. The book’s flaw was the scale of Mawer’s ambition: trying to tell that exhausting history in just a few hundred pages. It is a strange criticism in this, the era of the literary doorstop, but The Glass Room was nowhere near long enough.

I hoped that Mawer would return to the 20th century’s conflicts, and I’m delighted that he has done. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is a novel about the women of SOE — many of whom became famous, while others did not. It will be published on 3rd May. On the face of it, this book sounds like Charlotte