Prague Spring

September 1, 2018
During the calm before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, two European couples in Prague get caught up in the era's false promise of love and freedom.Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike visit Prague on a whim while hitchhiking across Europe. He's a first-year science student from the north of England; she's a strong-willed socialist with a classier background who's studying English in her second year. The other couple consists of Prague-based British diplomat Sam Wareham and local student and part-time journalist Lenka Konecková. Separated from his girlfriend in the diplomatic service, Sam becomes smitten with Lenka and her beauty and youthful spirit. Much of the book tells the story of the twosomes on parallel tracks. For a long stretch, relatively minor concerns such as James' insecurity in his romantic pursuit of Ellie are front and center, with occasional timeouts for brief lessons in Czechoslovak history. But Mawer (Tightrope, 2012, etc.), playing a neat cat-and-mouse game with the reader, gradually turns up the temperature of the novel, shaking us out of our comfort zones with a surge of dark events. Into Sam's reluctant care falls a world-famous Russian pianist who pleads for asylum for himself and his violinist girlfriend. As the Soviet threat intensifies and Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek's bold promise of "socialism with a human face" fades, the characters' personal lives and the past traumas that inform them are put in a new perspective. "What had Lenka and her friends, with their 15 minutes of freedom, imagined would happen?" comments the third-person narrator. "This was reality. The last eight months had been but a dream."Making a strong return to the Eastern European setting of his acclaimed novel The Glass Room (2009), British author Mawer limns the Cold War to affecting and ultimately chilling effect.

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September 15, 2018

British diplomat Sam Wareham, stationed in Prague, is captivated by Czech student Lenka, who, like Lara in Dr. Zhivago, is abused by an influential man. In the West, "just-friends" Oxford students James and Eleanor continue their continental hitchhiking tour into Prague. They arrive on the eve of the Warsaw Pact's 1968 move to crush President Alexander Dubček's "socialism with a human face." Jolted by an attack on Lenka, James and Eleanor lose their adolescent joie de vivre in the blink of an eye. Sam has to shepherd his nationals out of the country and cannot help his adored Lenka either. VERDICT Billed as historical spy fiction, this newest work from Mawer (The Glass Room) succeeds as an infiltration into the nuanced territory of Alan Furst and Joseph Kanon. Though the sensuous attraction of lovers teasing each other could be a distraction, here it is a mirror of the interplay of youthful Czechoslovaks who believe in the burgeoning political springtime yet also fear it.--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2018
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.

September 1, 2018
Following the outstanding Tightrope? (2015), a spy novel as much about the problem of identity as about espionage, Mawer returns to the Cold War and tells another story that sets matters of the heart against the polarizing political realities and ideals of the time. In the summer of 1968, James and Ellie are Oxford students hitchhiking across Europe and tentatively falling for one another; an encounter with a German pianist sends them on a dangerous detour to Prague, where Alexander Dubcek's liberal policies have inspired Czech youth. Meanwhile, in Prague, Sam Wareham, a British diplomat, is falling in love with Czech student Lenka as he attempts to gather intelligence on whether the Russians will really let "Prague Spring" proceed without interference. Mawer brilliantly captures the differing shades of na�vet� and world weariness that characterize the Czech response to the possibility of greater freedom; the students sing "We Shall Overcome" but with "something only Central Europe could manage?a kind of bitter irony. We shall overcome some day, perhaps, but surely not today." That same bitter irony pervades this smart and touching look at the folly and sweetness of the young.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)