Simon Mawer’s new novel starts with a cliffhanger: a woman parachutes into occupied France. This is operation Trapeze (Other Press, $15.95) and British Marian, aka Alice, is about to become French Anne-Marie— but will her partners be there to catch her when she falls? Based on the true story of one of the 53 women recruited by Britain’s Special Operations Executive to work undercover with the French Resistance, Mawer’s fiction vividly evokes a time of danger and privations and dramatizes how the war effort commandeered private as well as public lives. It’s also an insightful and fascinating depiction of a woman’s experience in a high-stakes man’s world. As he did so powerfully in Mendel’s Dwarf and The Glass Room, Mawer again keeps multiple tonalities in play, the spy thriller making room for a complicated love story, and the treacheries of wartime espionage leading to the laws of atomic physics—all conveyed in prose that’s as lyrically descriptive as it is cleanly factual.