Simon Mawer's novels often tread loosely down the genre path of historical fiction, and Trapeze is no exception. It's the story of Marian Sutro, a woman recruited by the British Special Operations Executive to be an agent in occupied France near the end of the Second World War. Sutro is based on the real-life Anne-Marie Walters, whose 1946 memoir, Moondrop to Gascony, chronicled the special role female spies played in the war. With a storytelling flair, Mawer recreates the tension and loneliness of a woman driven by duty and pride into a life where "your cover story would become more real than your true story. The lies would become truths, and truth lies."
The young Sutro is ostensibly recruited because of her native French-speaking skills and mastery of a covert agent's toolbox of Morse code, parachuting, weapons, memorization and endurance. However, it is her childhood friendship with a French scientist that elevates a good spy story into one with overtones of morality and game-changing technology. Before the war, Clément Pelletier did research in France with Niels Bohr and others on an atomic bomb. The British desperately want to extract him from Paris to finalize a working prototype before Hitler does. Clément and Marian had a youthful crush, and her feelings still linger despite the intervening time and war. That romance will determine the success of her real mission--to convince him to leave and bring the war to a rapid close. Mawer's crisp prose, erudite science and subtle bilingual details raise Trapeze above the genre riff-raff. –-Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.