The Fall
A Novel
by Simon Mawer

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 400
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0316735590
Publisher: Back Bay Books

I live in Italy, indeed I have lived there for over two decades now, and I'm married with a son and a daughter. I suppose those facts must define me in some way. I love Italy and have written about it directly A Place in Italy, published in UK in 1992, and set two of my novels partly in the country - Chimera, my first novel (1989), and now The Gospel of Judas. Italy has given me, or at least nurtured in me, a strong sense of history: the effect of history on the present and following that, the effect of personal history — memory and experience — in the life of an individual. But I am not a historian by training; I'm a biologist, and have taught biology for thirty years now. It was with the biology of genetics that my last novel Mendel's Dwarf dealt.

Then there is my family. Most of the families I write about are dysfunctional, but my own family is assuredly not. I have a marvellous wife, who holds down a full time job as well as doing all the things that a mother does, and a son who is now working in Germany, and a daughter who does what most daughters of fifteen do. Perhaps the greatest gift that my family, and my wife in particular, have given me is support and security. They have never complained. When so much of a writer's free time is spent sitting in front of a computer keyboard rather than contributing directly to family life, that means a great deal. They've never complained about those lost weekends and they've always followed my writing career with interest and tolerance (especially on the part of my son, who found himself turned into a daughter on the jacket flap of one of my books) and without them I would have written much less. Or much more. Who knows?

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