<div>“A master of intellectual mystery masquerading as ripping popular entertainment . . . a gorgeous melancholy that shivers the mind.” —The New York Times Book Review From the author of bestselling Booker Prize finalist Headlong, a mesmerizing novel about secrecy and a child’s game turned deadly earnest. When Stephen Wheatley returns to the site of a dimly remembered but troubling childhood summer in wartime London, we are brought back to a quiet, suburban street where two boys, Keith and his sidekick-Stephen—are engaged in their own version of the war effort: spying on the neighbors, recording their movements, ferreting out their secrets. But then the boys’ game of espionage takes a sinister and unintended turn. A wife’s simple errands and a family’s ordinary rituals—once the focus of childish speculation—become the tragic elements of adult catastrophe. In gripping prose, Spies reaches into the moral confusion of youth to reveal a reality filled with deceptions and betrayals, where the bonds of friendship, marriage, and family are unraveled by cowardice and erotic desire. Michael Frayn powerfully demonstrates that what appears to be happening in front of our eyes often turns out to be something we can’t see at all. “A novel of extraordinary power and wisdom.” —The Baltimore Sun “Bernard Shaw couldn’t do it, Henry James couldn’t do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success.” —John Updike, The New Yorker “Secrets assume an unexpected power and excitement as Frayn reveals that a little of the fascist is buried in every clever child, and that spying can be a soul-destroying game.” —Chicago Sun-Times</div>

Spies

<div>In a brilliant coda to the play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn receives mysterious letters that take him back to the theme of his bestselling novel, Headlong -- human folly, this time his own. Michael Frayn's Copenhagen has established itself as one of the finest pieces of drama to grace the stage in recent years. The subject of the Tony-winning play is the strange visit the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg made to his former mentor, scientist Niels Bohr, in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and the quarrel that ensued. Heisenberg's intentions on that visit, for good or for evil, have long intrigued and baffled historians and scientists. One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, Frayn received a curious package from a suburban housewife, which contained a few faded pages of barely legible German writings. These pages, which she claimed to have found concealed beneath her floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of play. As more material emerged -- specifically notes that appeared to give instructions on how to put up a table-tennis table but perhaps containing important encoded information -- actor David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, began to display extreme, even suspicious interest in Frayn's growing obsession with cracking the riddle of the papers. And Frayn, for his part, lost all sense of certainty. Was he the victim of an elaborate hoax? By turns comic and profound, The Copenhagen Papers explores the conundrum that is always at the heart of Frayn's work -- human gullibility and the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.</div>

Michael Frayn
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Books By Michael Frayn (2 Books)

Spies

The Copenhagen Papers

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