Prague Spring

New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Room Simon Mawer returns to Czechoslovakia, this time during the turbulent 1960s, with a suspenseful story of sex, politics, and betrayal.

In the summer of 1968, the year of Prague Spring with a Cold War winter, Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike set out to hitchhike across Europe, complicating a budding friendship that could be something more. Having reached southern Germany, they decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubcek's "socialism with a human face" is smiling on the world.

Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague, observes developments in the country with a diplomat's cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konecková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, with all its hopes and new ideas; now, nothing seems off-limits behind the Iron Curtain. But the great wheels of politics are grinding in the background; Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubcek, and the Red Army is massing on the borders.

This shrewd, engrossing, and sensual novel once again proves Simon Mawer is one of today's most talented writers of historical spy fiction.

Simon Mawer is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel The Glass Room (Other Press), which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His previous novels include The Fall (winner of the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize), The Gospel of Judas, and Mendel's Dwarf (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize). Tightrope (Other Press), his twelfth book and tenth novel, was published in 2015. English by birth, he has made Italy his home for more than thirty years.