Prague Spring
A Novel
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Room Simon Mawer returns to Czechoslovakia, this time during the turbulent 1960s, with a suspenseful story that mixes sex, politics, and betrayal.
In the summer of 1968--a year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and 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 Dubček's "socialism with a human face" is smiling on the world.
Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with both a diplomat's cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konečková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. For the first time, nothing seems off limits behind the Iron Curtain. Yet the wheels of politics are grinding in the background. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubček, and the Red Army is amassed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion?
With this shrewd, engrossing, and sensual novel, Simon Mawer cements his status as one of the most talented writers of historical spy fiction today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mawer sets his inconsistent novel in Czechoslovakia (also the setting of The Glass Room), this time during the brutal suppression by Russia of the country's failed 1968 counterrevolution. While backpacking across Europe, Oxford students James Borthwick and Ellie Pike stray across the Iron Curtain and fall into the orbit of Prague-based British diplomat Sam Wareham and Czech student activist Lenka Koneckova. James and Ellie, neither particularly charming and both quite unsettled, spar about sex and champagne socialism; meanwhile, the solid, measured Sam becomes smitten with the secretive Lenka as the Soviet threat intensifies and Czech leader Alexander Dubcek's bold promise of "socialism with a human face" fades. Mawer is marvelous at historical detail, and danger mounts in a way that keeps the pages turning, but though one of the characters falls victim to the violence and disappears, in the end there are no traitors and no real heroes, nor are any moral choices demanded of those who remain. These are love stories, with plenty of sex, set in extreme circumstances. Though the book careens through some awkward dialogue and uneven character development, there are moments of clarity and beauty that readers will savor.
