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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

By: Simon Mawer
Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
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About this listen

The wonderful new novel from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Glass Room is both a gripping adventure story and a moving meditation on patriotism, betrayal and the limits of love.

Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, 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. Trained in sabotage, dead-drops, how to perform under interrogation, and how to kill, Marian parachutes into southwest France with an urgent mission....

©2012 Simon Mawer (P)2012 W F Howes Ltd Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Thought-Provoking

Critic reviews

"The Girl Who Fell from the Sky comes from a long and glorious tradition of spy novels that you just can't put down. It's taut fiction at it's best." (Stylist)
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The fictional character of Marian Sutro is based on several real-life Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents.

Like "Anette", she is given a powder compact by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster before leaving for France, works on the WHEELWRIGHT circuit based on Toulouse, and gets her face on "Wanted" posters. Like "Colette" she has grown up in Geneva, the daughter of a League of Nations diplomat, and falls in love with a fellow agent who is parachuted down with her. Like "Odette" she enlists in the egregiously named FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry). Unlike any of her real-life counterparts she is sent on a highly prejudicial mission which trumps her work for the Maquis: to bring out Clement, a French atomic scientist, a family friend with whom she became infatuated whilst still at convent school.

This is high romance though, not "faction". It tells how a sweet young thing is transformed into a ruthless terrorist and efficient killer, and how she discovers she's both tool and victim of a cause so tremendous and horrifying in its implications as to submerge brotherly love beneath national duty.

There's maybe a bit too much nuclear physics gone-into. Would her brother Ned, working on the British atom bomb project, really have plunged into all that theory to deflect her accusation of having used her as a pawn, indeed as bait? All the reader needs is the realisation which made Prof James Chadwick take to needing sleeping pills: the inevitability of one side or the other developing a bomb to obliterate an entire city in an instant.

This is scant criticism beside the novel's achievement in bringing into sharp focus a once-brilliant and cultured city reduced to a drab world of arrogant, ogling troops, intrusive police and cowed natives. A stifling sense of mounting dread is sustained, worthy of Dickens in "A Tale Of Two Cities": you feel yourself living the fearful, furtive existence of a spy. And, like a rifle bullet, you'll never hear the end coming till it hits you.

A stifling sense of mounting dread

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I have read the Glass Room and enjoyed it immensely. Listening to the audio version of The Girl who Fell from the Sky was a wonderful experience. Not only is the writing superb but Anna Bentinck's reading is one of the best. She perfectly complements the exqusite writing and storyline. Both her French and German accents are flawless. Thank you so much. I cannot recommend this audible book high enough. I didn't want it to end.

A fascinating and inteliigently researched book.

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This was the second novel I'd listened/read by this author and it didn't disappoint. It is a compulsive listen, well narrated and beautifully written - I couldn't stop once I got started.

Well worth a listen

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This is a taut, beautifully written thriller which takes you right into wartime England and France. The pace doesn't falter and I didn't know until the end how it was going to turn out. The reader is brilliant. I've given it 5 stars even though at a pivotal point of the story, the heroine goes to a meeting which she knows (although we don't) will be highly dangerous. She goes anyway, and there is no exploration of why she does this, neither before not after, even though it has dire consequences. It's a jar in an otherwise seamless story. I thought I might have missed a chapter even though I was listening without interruption, but I hadn't. Listen anyway and see what you think - it's still very good and highly recommended.

Highly recommended

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For me this book suffered in comparison to Restless by William Boyd, a story with similar themes (female agent behind enemy lines after training in secret) and even a similar front cover! The narration was fine but the story felt quite conventional and I found myself tuning out on my walks which I never do on really excellent titles. Not bad, just not a 'must listen'.

So-so - listen to 'Restless' instead

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