Missed last episode...good start but later not very engaged in this. ( )

This is the sequel to The Girl Who Fell From The Sky (also known as Trapeze), which was a literary thriller that told the story of Marian Sutro, a young SOE agent in Nazi-occupied France. This book continues the story, starting with her capture and survival in a German camp. The first part of the story is probably the most fully realised, dealing with her return to England and the difficulties in readjusting to the mundane reality of life at home.

She gets drawn into working as a secret agent, working for both the British and the Russians - this allows Mawer to explore the nuances of the post-war nuclear arms race, while toying with spy thriller genre writing. For me the whole thing worked surprisingly well - if anything this one is better than the first book. ( )

Simon Mawer's 'Tightrope' was quite a disappointment. What initially seemed to be a sort of Alan Furst-type historical fiction of a novel became a 500 page bore of a story. Through a series of flashbacks that extended from the mid-1940s to the present, the heroics and adventures of the heroine are revealed, albeit very, very slowly.

Alas, Mawer's novel has little of the Furst genius. It's somewhat well-written, but the tension is very slow to boil and the story is just not very interesting. ( )

I was given an early review copy of this book to read and review by the publisher. When I received it, I realized that there was a book 1 and this was book 2. I thought it would be a disadvantage to not have read the first book in this two book series, but a lot of Marion Sutro's life during WWII is explained during various points throughout this book. The book begins in 1945 in England. The European war is all but over, and Marion has been sent home to Oxford to resume her life after spending eighteen months in Ravensbruk Concentration Camp. Before that she was held and tortured in a Nazi prison, and before that she was a young, highly trained spy from England who was working with the French resistance. Marion suffers from an extreme case of "shell shock" or what we now call PTSD and finds it difficult making the adjustment. She eventually begins to fit in and hold down a post-war job. The Cold War is just starting and Marion involves herself in the peace movement in England to prevent the widespread threat of the atomic bomb. This is a really well-written espionage book, and illustrates more clearly than most the toll that living the life of a spy has on the people involved. Marion never really discovers her true self again and she feels all but detached from her body, but her extensive training in spy craft allows her to at least have the maintain semblance of normalcy. The book is dark and brooding, as a spy's life so often is. Marion never fully recovers, and her past life and present danger lead her to make some terrible choices. Her resiliency and her skills help her cope with the consequences of those choices. ( )

The Girl who fell from the sky is a very tight and tense book, full of moral peril and youthful emotions. This sequel (what happens to Marian Sutro, SOE spy and concentration camp survivor for the rest of her life) has a different flavour. It's a very clever book - it circles round to the earlier book, but can stand on its own for those coming fresh to the story. It fleshes out the intrigues and betrayals of the second world war, while setting up a new set of ambiguous political situations and moral dilemnas of the cold war. And it begins and ends in the neutral territory of Switzerland. Mawer is stepping on to John Le Carre's turf here, but from a different direction (not least one where a woman is at the centre of things) and this is a very enjoyable and thoughtful book.