Simon Mawer

A new novel from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Glass Room and The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. Ancestry contains stories that are gripping and heart-breaking, from the squalor and vitality of Dickensian London to the excitement of seafaring in the last days of sail and the horror of the trenches of the Crimea.

Rob and Jamie, both top climbers, grew up together but became estranged as they got older. When Jamie dies on a seemingly easy climb in Wales, Rob is grief-stricken, but discovers that their past hides clues to the tragedy.

When a Dead Sea scroll is discovered purporting to be a life of Jesus written by Judas Iscariot, Father Leo Newman is called in to authenticate it. But Leo is haunted by a series of events in his own life, each one threatening his faith as much as the Judas Gospel.

1968, the year of Prague Spring and Cold War winter. English students, Ellie and James, set off to hitch-hike across Europe and decide, on a whim, to visit Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile Sam Wareham, at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with diplomatic cynicism. But with the Red Army amassed on the borders, how will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion?

Returning to an England she barely knows and a post-war world she doesn't understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground her life. But she is haunted by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war helped to develop the Atom Bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie?

Marian Sutro is an outsider: half French, half British, naive yet too clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE to go undercover in wartime France, it seems her hybrid status - and fluent French - will be of service to a greater, more dangerous cause.