Works by
Simon Mawer
(Writer)
[1948 - ]

Swimming to Ithaca (2006)
As Dee Denham, once a beautiful and beloved wife, the toast of colonial Cyprus, lies dying, her former life seems unimaginably distant. And then out of the blue Dee speaks to her son Thomas, sitting at her bedside: she tells him that her illness is a punishment.
Compelled by a grief he cannot articulate and a confused childhood memory of betrayal, as Thomas begins the process of dismantling his mother's life he finds himself searching for the meaning of her last words. Embarked on a dangerous liaison of his own, he searches through faded photographs and love letters, seeks out survivors and examines his own imperfect remembrance, and suddenly a whole vanished world comes to life. The restless, seductive island of Cyprus at the end of Empire, a place of oleander and carob trees, cocktails at the Harbor Club and adultery in shuttered bedrooms, peopled by ghostly admirers and conspirators, lovers and spies. With gathering momentum Dee's story unfolds, an intimate history of violence and tenderness for which Thomas finds himself quite unprepared, and in the background the distant, ominous roar of approaching disaster.

A vivid, precise evocation of the past and a deft and sensitive examination of the dangerous power of memory, Swimming to Ithaca sets fragile human relationships against the heedless, unstoppable force of history and sheds new light on both.

The Fall (2003)
Against a shifting backdrop of spiky Alpine peaks and the bombed-out London of World War II, a tangled web of relationships and secrets unfolds as a man and two women play out a drama that will cast a shadow across the lives of a future generation. Years later, two young men who have been friends since childhood are snared in a similarly complex, ever-shifting series of love triangles. Simon Mawer's dazzling new tale of passion, fate, and betrayal is written with a narrative power and freshness that propel readers to the novel's startling and wholly satisfying conclusion.

The Gospel of Judas (2000)
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 hoarding 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 origins in 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 he pieces together the story of the scroll, he is simultaneously unraveling his own faith, his own raison d'etre: 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 (Amazon.com)

Mendel's Dwarf (1997)
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.

Chimera (1989)