The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer, Little, Brown, 416pp, £16.99, Week Bookshop £15.29 (incl. p&p). Simon Mawer's "thoughtful seventh novel" follows the fate of a fictional house in Czechoslovakia as it passes from hand to hand, said Hugo Barnacle in the Sunday Times.

A "modernist masterpiece" built in 1930 for a Jewish car manufacturer and his wife, Mawer's house is based on Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat, outside the city of Brno; made of steel, concrete and glass, with white walls, its only embellishment is a wall of onyx in the main room. The setting is "beautifully realised", while the plot, which follows the lives and loves of its owners, and the periods of Nazi and Soviet occupation, is "largely sound and satisfying".

It's better than that, said Jane Shilling in the Daily Telegraph. This is "a fiction of many remarkable qualities, not the least of which is the way that its sensibility appears utterly un-English". Mawer even manages to write about sex "without the traditional British overtone of rueful bathos".

The Glass Room "is a rare thing: popular historical fiction with integrity," said Ian Sansom in the Guardian. "When they make it into a film, which they will, they'll ruin it."

LAST UPDATED 10:04 AM, FEBRUARY 12, 2009