Bøker av Michael Frayn

He knows everything about her before they meet; more about her nine novels that she does herself. He has devoted his life to studying and teaching them and yet he is four times as clever as she is. Now, as she steps off the train in London, something about her in the flesh sets him thinking. Maybe he has a chance to resolve the one remaining mystery at the heart of things. . . Through a series of letters sent by a minor English Literature academic to his old friend in Australia, Frayn combines a vivid and moving study of obsession, with a witty and playful account of what it's like to be on the fringes of the creative process. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Ever since an obscure Civil Servant called Stephen Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, rumours have circulated about a connection with some secret defence project. Now, as a television company reinvestigates the case, the Cabinet Office feels it may be prudent to make a reassessment of its own, in case of any sudden alarm at Number Ten.'A Landing on the Sun is not just a masterly novel in its own right, but a clever debunking of those off-the-peg Whitehall yarns ... Many novelists have tried to take the lid off the arcane world of the Civil Service. Frayn has done it as brilliantly and imaginitively as any of them.' Daily Telegraph'Comedy creeps up on A Landing on the Sun like bindweed, transforming what starts out as a thriller into a small masterpiece of the absurd.' Financial Times

Why not program computers to take over the really dull jobs that human beings have to do - such as praying and behaving morally? At the William Morris Institute of Automation Research they are doing just that to free mankind for the really stimulating and demanding tasks of living today - first and foremost the impending visit of Her Majesty the Queen to open its new wing. . . Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Tin Men, his first novel, is now a modern classic. Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award it explores computers, technology and automation with customary humour and wit.

The Russian Interpreter is a story about Raya, a mercurial Moscow blonde who speaks no English, and the affair she is embarking upon with Gordon Proctor-Gould, a visiting British businessman who speaks no Russian. They need an interpreter; which is how Paul Manning is diverted from writing his thesis at Moscow University to become involved in all the deceptions of love and East-West relations. After the death of Stalin in 1952, the Soviet Union opened its doors to the rest of the world and Michael Frayn was one of the first foreign students to enter the country. Drawing on his experience at Moscow University in the late 1950s, he brilliantly captures a country still recovering from the Second World War, racked with suspicion and intrigue, at once harsh and easy-going, lethargic and labour-intensive. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Bit of a wide boy, Terry. Got a spot of form, eye for the ladies, a real rough diamond some might say. Not without his virtues, though, as his campaign for open government shows. No secrets, that's Terry's secret. Allied to charm, that is, of course. Only one person finds it easy to resist his charm and counter his arguments and that's Hilary - one of the serious and dedicated young Civil Servants working in the Home Office in Westminster, who just happens to know the truth about the case in which Terry is currently interested. She despises him and everything he stands for. But then why is she to be found one evening walking through the back streets behind the Strand, to the run-down block where Terry's pressure group has its headquarters? Now You Know takes on government campaigns, ambitious civil servants and determined pressure groups with Frayn's trade-mark wit. Michael Frayn's other novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize'Good God, thought Oliver, as he saw the smile. She thinks I'm him! And all at once he knew it was so. HewasDr Norman Wilfred.'On the sunlit Greek island of Skios, the Fred Toppler Foundation's annual lecture is to be given by Dr Norman Wilfred, the world-famous authority on the scientific organisation of science. He turns out to be surprisingly young and charming - not at all the intimidating figure they had been expecting. The Foundation's guests are soon eating out of his hand. So, even sooner, is Nikki, the attractive and efficient organiser.Meanwhile, in a remote villa at the other end of the island, Nikki's old school-friend Georgie waits for the notorious chancer she has rashly agreed to go on holiday with, and who has only too characteristically failed to turn up. Trapped in the villa with her, by an unfortunate chain of misadventure, is a balding old gent called Dr Norman Wilfred, who has lost his whereabouts, his luggage, his temper and increasingly all normal sense of reality - everything he possesses apart from the flyblown text of a well-travelled lecture on the scientific organisation of science...And as the time draws ever nearer for one or other Dr Wilfred - or possibly both - to give the eagerly awaited lecture, so Skios - Greece - Europe - career off their appointed track.Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize,Skiosis a story of mislaid identity, misdirected passion and miscalculated consequences. Michael Frayn is also the celebrated author of fifteen plays includingNoises Off,CopenhagenandAfterlife.His other bestsellingnovels includeHeadlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize andSpies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Headlong begins when Martin Clay, a young would-be art historian, believes he has discovered a missing masterpiece. The owner of the painting is oblivious to its potential and asks Martin to help him sell it, leaving Martin with the chance of a lifetime: if he could only separate the painter from its owner, he would be able to perform a great public service, to make his professional reputation, perhaps even rather a lot of money as well. But is the painting really what Martin believes it to be? As Martin is drawn further into this moral and intellectual labyrinth, events start to spiral out of control . . . Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Whitbread Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, Headlong is an ingeniously comic thriller that follows a young philosophy lectuerer's obsessive race through the art world in search of an elusive masterpiece. Michael Frayn's other novels include Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel award, and Skios, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

'An unknown place.' This was what Michael Frayn's children called the shadowy landscape of the past from which their family had emerged. Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, My Father's Fortune sets out to rediscover that lost land before all trace of it finally disappears beyond recall. As Frayn tries to see it through the eyes of his parents and the others who shaped his life, he comes to realise how little he ever knew or understood about them.This is above all the story of his father, the quick-witted boy from a poor and struggling family, who overcame disadvantages and shouldered many burdens to make a go of his life; who found happiness, had it snatched away from him, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again.Father and son were in some ways incredibly alike, in others ridiculously different; and the journey back down the corridors of time is sometimes comic, sometimes painful, as Michael Frayn comes to see how much he has inherited from his father and makes one or two surprising discoveries along the way. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

In mid-career, Michael Frayn took up his old trade of journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the Observer about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe 'not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday', and his accounts became the starting point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later. From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950s, they are glimpses of a world that sometimes seems tantalisingly familiar, sometimes vanished forever. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. "e;All writers of fiction should be required by law to go out and do a bit of reporting from time to time, just to remind them how different the real world in front of their eyes is from the invented world behind them."e; Michael Frayn 'Whether he's on a kibbutz or a bicycle, Frayn makes acute observations and the writing is enchanting.' Conde Nast Traveller

In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackout at night and a single random bombsite. But the two boys start to suspect that all is not what it seems when one day Keith announces a disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family. And when the secret underground world they have dreamed up emerges from the shadows they find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for.'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 ... Frayn's novel excels.' John updike, New Yorker'A beautifully accomplished, richly nostalgic novel about supposed second-world-war espionage seen through the eyes of a young boy.' Sunday Times'Deeply satisfying . . . Frayn has written nothing better.' Independent

First published in 1974 and republished following the success of Frayn's masterly work of philosophy, The Human Touch, Constructions is a dazzling, thought-provoking and fascinating book which explores some of the great problems in philosophy and of everyday life.

A revised edition of Michael Frayn's comedy set in a provincial newspaper office, Alphabetical Order won the Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy when it transferred from the Hampstead Theatre to the West End in 1975.

Stage Directions covers half a lifetime and the whole range of Frayn's theatrical writing, right up to a new piece about his latest play, Afterlife. It is also a reflection on his path into theatre: the 'doubtful beginnings' of his childhood, his subsequent scorn as a young man and, surprisingly late in life, his reluctant conversion. Whatever subjects he tackles, from the exploration of the atomic nucleus to the mechanics of farce, Michael Frayn is never less than fascinating, delightfully funny and charming. This book encapsulates a lifetime's work and is guaranteed to be a firm favourite with his legions of fans around the world.

'Imaginative, funny and dazzlingly clever.' John Carey, Sunday TimesMankind, scientists agree, is a tiny and insignificant anomaly in the impersonal vastness of the universe. But what would that universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would it even be so vast, without the fact of our insignificance to give it scale?This paradox is what Michael Frayn calls 'the world's oldest mystery'. He shows how fleeting and indeterminate our contacts with the world around us are. The world is what we make of it - but what are we?'The breadth of [Frayn's] reading is awesome and he is fearless in interpreting, and in some cases attacking, the philosophical or scientific dogmas of this or that revered savant. Everywhere he is eminently sensible, especially when he is making nonsense of our illusory certainties.' John Banville'Brilliant and engaging ... A dazzling and entertaining dialogue between [Frayn] and the reader.' Patrick Masterson, Irish Times

One of the funniest writers of his generation, Michael Frayn has been writing humorous newspaper columns since 1959, principally for the "Guardian" and "Observer". This volume brings together 110 of his finest and funniest pieces from over the years.

With detailed analysis of the text, discussions on themes, historical backgrounds and author biographies, York Notes offers students the best insight into the world of English Literature.

Frayn's sparkling comedy about a university reunion, currently revived in the West End

"Michael Frayn has the rare ability to construct farcical comedy around philosophical principles and the laughs and the ideas effortlessly intermesh" (Guardian)

"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times)

The story is of one of the most famous investigations ever conducted by science into the mysteries of the world - and its disastrous ending in the even stranger mysteries of the world within.

This is a screenplay about a recently retired insurance manager who is ill. He decides to combat his illness by walking from Land's End to John O'Groats and in doing so becomes a healthier and more aware human being. It is a gentle comedy with serious overtones by the author of "Clockwise".

Three plays by comic dramatist Michael Frayn, compiled as a follow-up edition to "Michael Frayn Plays: One". Included is Frayn's adaptation of Chekhov's first play, here called "Wild Honey". "Balmoral" and "Benefactors" are touched by politics and social indictments of people and systems.

Released to follow on from "Michael Frayn Plays: 2", this anthology contains three of Frayn's plays: "Here"; "Now You Know"; and "La Bele Vivette". The plays explore time and space, official and unofficial secrets, idle curiosity and investigative purpose.

"One of theatre's subtlest, most sophisticated minds" (The Times)