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Newly-wed Viktor and Liesel Landauer are given a piece of land by Liesel’s parents. After a chance meeting with architect Rainer Von Abt, during their honeymoon in Venice, they construct not the solid structure that Liesel’s father suggested, but a house of glass, steel and onyx. The house is the central character of the story; it is the stage over which the other characters pass.

Within its glass walls, we witness the birth of Ottilie and Martin and the development of new relationships.

We understand Viktor’s urge to pursue a more earthy, sexual relationship with his mistress, Kata, and Liesel’s unusual friendship with Hana.

Rich industrialist Viktor is Jewish; Liesel is a gentile. In 1930s Czechoslovakia Viktor has anticipated the Anschluss and, with Liesel and Kata and her child, escapes to Switzerland. Hana and her Jewish husband remain in Czechoslovakia.

We follow the story of the house as it passes into Nazi, then communist hands and with indifference witnesses the dark period of national socialism until the final scene of recognition and redemption.

Like the house, Mawer‘s prose is transparent and uncluttered. This is a historical novel with a difference. It could, so easily, have become yet another holocaust novel but it retains clarity and beauty and succeeds where so many other recent revisits to the period of the mid twentieth century have failed.

Simon Mawer is a British author with strong European links. His website includes some photographs of the Moravian town of Brno. The architect in the novel is modeled after Mies van der Rohe, the house is modeled after the Tugendhadt House in Brno, though Mawer did not visit the Tugendhadt villa until after he had written his novel.

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