Abstract
Tightrope (2015), a successful follow-up to The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (2012), earned its author, the contemporary British novelist Simon Mawer, the coveted Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and confirmed his interest in the recent past and the importance he ascribes to the historical as well as physical and geographical settings of his novels. Set in the aftermath of WW2 and the onset of the Cold war, Tightrope charts the path of Marian Sutro, a former SOE agent, as the nuclear age turns into the thermonuclear one.
The aim of the paper is to analyse and interpret Tightrope within the context of Mawer's work and situate it within the framework of contemporary spy fiction. Given the prominent position of space and place within the genre and in Mawer's work, the main literary critical perspective employed is geocriticism.
As the novel's spatial poetics is revealed to be mirroring its protagonists' state of mind, the protagonist, Marian, is seen walking a difficult tightrope between duty and betrayal, balancing personal, national, and global interests.