Prague Spring

Simon Mawer Little, Brown €20.30

A Man Booker shortlister for The Glass Room, Mawer returns to its Czech setting for the fraught summer of 1968, when Moscow moved against Dubcek’s liberalisation. Mawer’s historical novel follows a few minor fictional players caught up in this grim pageant: two Oxford students hitching across Europe take a detour to Prague, where a British Embassy official has begun an affair with a radical Czech student. The novel meanders but it catches fire in the last 100 pages.