The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Simon Mawer: review Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, a brilliant fictionalisation of the wartime experiences of the inhabitants of an actual Modernist house in Czechoslovakia, was deservedly shortlisted for the Man Booker. His next novel treads the Faulks/Boyd route by focusing on the Special Operations Executive. Marian Sutro is a young WAAF, spirited yet reserved, whose efficiency and bilingualism make her an ideal agent recruit for occupied France. Of the real-life female SOEs, many were captured, tortured and executed. More, incredibly, survived. Mawer pays tribute by mixing up names and genuine incidents to create a persuasive, exhilarating thriller. The composite character of Marian seems closest to a spy with the code name Colette. The book is dedicated to this Genevan-born daughter of a League of Nations diplomat, though Marian's glamour and beauty recall the tragic Violette Szabo. This amalgam of identities is fitting for a woman assuming a field name plus constantly changing aliases. Following training in Scotland, where Marian learns to shoot, to lie, to kill, she is parachuted into south-west France, having neatly disposed of her virginity to fellow agent Benoit beforehand. Her mission is twofold - that of a "regular" SOE moving between safe houses, arranging pickups and agent drops, relishing the relative freedom and abundance of food in the countryside, the air like "cold champagne" after bomb-torn London - and doubly complex. A pre-war proto-romance with nuclear physicist Clément is the pretext for Marian's dispatch to Paris to deliver an encrypted message and get Clément to England. This is the least credible part of the story, simply because sentiment threatens to deflect from the emotional truth that is the book's strength. It is also, conversely and powerfully, where any Buchanesque bravado vanishes, with Marian living less by ingenuity than her wits in a dehumanised city, the sky "like blood and lymph oozing from a wound" as the net closes in. In the end it is no individual but intense exultation and a kind of ambivalent fatalism that impels Marian: "for France, that strange abstraction which means so many things to so many different people." The Girl Who Fell From the Sky Simon Mawer Little, Brown, £16.99, 320pp