An unlikely con man wagers wife, wealth, and sanity in pursuit of an elusive Old Master.

Invited to dinner by the boorish local landowner, Martin Clay, an easily distracted philosopher, and his art-historian wife are asked to assess three dusty paintings blocking the draught from the chimney. But hiding beneath the soot is nothing less-Martin believes-than a lost work by Bruegel. So begins a hilarious trail of lies and concealments, desperate schemes and soaring hopes as Martin, betting all that he owns and much that he doesn't, embarks on a quest to prove his hunch, win his wife...

The National Bestseller

The sudden trace of a disturbing, forgotten aroma compels Stephen Wheatley to return to the site of a dimly remembered but troubling childhood summer in wartime London. As he pieces together his scattered memories, 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, and ferreting out their secrets. But when Keith utters six shocking words, the boy's game of espionage takes a sinister and unintended turn,...

One day, during the British run of Copenhagen, winner of the Tony Award for best play in 1999, Frayn was presented with a curious package from a London housewife that contained a few faded pages of barely legible German. These pages, apparently found concealed beneath some floorboards, seemed to cast a remarkable new light on the mystery at the heart of the play. While Frayn began to lose all sense of certainty, actor David Burke, who played Niels Bohr in the London production and had some experience with documents of this sort, followed the action with particularly close interest....

He knows everything about her before they meet: the make of pen she writes with, her exact height, the various honorary degrees she holds. He knows more about her nine novels and 27 short stories than she does herself. Naturally--he has devoted his life to studying and teaching them, and he reveres them. Also, he is four times as clever as she is.

The Trick of It is a comic and painful voyage of exploration into the creative process and the feelings it arouses in others. The humble academic disciple finds himself admitted to his subject's life, and off to this oldest friend go...

From the bestselling author of Headlong and Spies, "an unconditional triumph" (The Washington Post Book World)

For fifteen years, ever since the taciturn civil servant Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, there have been rumors.

So Brian Jessel, a young member of the Cabinet Office, is diverted from his routine work and asked to prepare an internal report. Slowly, from the archives in the Cabinet Office Registry, Jessel begins to reconstruct Summerchild's last months. It begins to emerge that, at a time when America had just...

Humankind, scientists agree, is a tiny and insignificant anomaly in the vastness of the universe. But what would that universe look like if we were not here to say something about it? In this brilliant, insightful work of philosophy, beloved novelist and playwright Michael Frayn examines the biggest and oldest questions of philosophy, from space and time to relativity and language, and seeks to distinguish our subjective experience from something objectively true and knowable. Underlying all revelations in this wise and affectionately written book is the fundamental question: "If the...

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

Benefactors conjures the world of the suburbs observed through the lens of post-imperialism; "dazzling.. This prismatic work circumscribes the disillusionment of an era" (New York Times); Balmoral dares to imagine what Britain would be like if it had gone through the Russian revolution in 1917; "a sophisticated drollery, an educated amusement" (New Statesman); Wild Honey is a reworking of Checkov's first play (also known as Platonov) and is shot through with farce, feminism and eroticism.

Now You Know: "Frayn's light but serious, marvellous play, about official and unofficial secrets, about idle curiosity and investigative purpose"--Observer

A brilliant exploration of character and conscience from the author of COPENHAGEN, set amid the tensions of 1960s Berlin

In Democracy, Michael Frayn once again creates out of the known events of twentieth-century history a drama of extraordinary urgency and subtlety, reimagining the interactions and motivations of Willy Brandt as he became chancellor of West Germany in 1966 and those of his political circle, including Gunter Guillaume, a functionary who became Brandt's personal assistant-and who was eventually exposed as an East German spy in a discovery that...