A Lily of the Field by John Lawton

A Lily of the Field by John Lawton

Spanning the tumultuous years 1934 to 1948, John Lawton's A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two charactersMeret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel's start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of postwar London, following the fascinating parallels of the physicist Szabo and musician Voytek as fate takes each far from home and across the untraditional battlefields of a destructive war to an unexpected intersection at the novel's close. The result, A Lily of the Field, is Lawton's best book yet, an historically accurate and remarkably written novel that explores the diaspora or two Europeans from the rise of Hitler to the post-atomic age.

John Lawton is an ASA advanced swimming teacher and ASA coach. He has been teaching swimming since 1967 and has worked extensively training and supporting primary school teachers.

Lawton has authored and edited numerous ASA teaching publications and written articles for ASA's Swimming Times. He also was heavily involved with the Swim for Life campaign that lobbied the government to ensure that swimming became a compulsory aspect of the primary school curriculum.

Lawton served for 14 years as director of education for ASA, England's national governing body for the sport of swimming. Since 2006, he has run his own sport education consultancy, and he is the editor of a publication aimed at teaching swimming to people with physical and learning disabilities.

He earned an MSc degree from Loughborough University in physical education and sports science.