The South African born writer and Whitbread award winner cannot put a foot wrong. His latest novel is a complex but thoroughly rewarding fictional story based loosely on the real-life relationship between the Jewish Oxford University philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the German aristocrat and Rhodes scholar Adam von Trott who became an unwilling Nazi.

Cartwright gives his protagonists different names but there is no doubt who the cast really are. As in all good novels, liberties are taken with the truth and not all the action is based on historical fact but the moral purpose and the subtle exploration of what motivates men more than justify this tinkering with history.

The past and the present intertwine through the machinations of Conrad Senior, a former student of the guilt-ridden Oxford professor Elya Mendel , who has been entrusted with papers and letters relating to the death of one Axel von Gottberg.

Von Gottberg was executed for his part in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944. Hitler narrowly escaped death when a bomb failed to kill him in the Wolf's Lair, his Eastern command.

The plotters were hunted down and hanged from meat hooks - and their executions filmed.

Sixty years later Senior becomes obsessed with what Mendel's papers reveal but, as he becomes more and more involved with the past, his own relationship with his wife begins to fall apart.

Meanwhile, we learn that the friendship between Mendel and von Gottberg was fatally undermined by a romantic rivalry when two mysterious cousins, Rosamund and Elizabeth, entered their lives in pre-war Jerusalem.

Their friendship was finally destroyed when von Gottberg returned to Germany and Mendel, believing him to be a Nazi, alerted the Allies about his suspicions. When von Gottberg was garroted for his part in the assassination plot, Mendel became tormented that he was somehow responsible for his death.

But Conrad is also a man ill at ease with himself and soon becomes almost irrationally desperate to find the film Hitler made of the appalling executions ... and to understand the motivation behind what is driving him.

The book's unusual start - a sentence of almost 260 words - is just the warm-up for a startling novel that moves from powerful streams of consciousness to stark scenes of brutality and a wonderful evocation of life in 1930s Jerusalem.

Cartwright contrasts beautifully the man of thought and the man of action without making any personal moral judgments on either philosophy. And he takes us to the heart of the dilemma of Germany's upper classes who were left marginalised by the rise of the National Socialists.

This is an intelligent, profound and moving novel which is sure to confirm Cartwright as one of the best writers currently working out of London.

Don't miss it...

(Bloomsbury, paperback, £7.99)